Justified True Belief

(●) Two philosophical repairs of the Trinity, relative identity and constitution, are neither needed nor sound. + When a critic says the doctrine of the Trinity contradicts itself, two rescues are usually on the table. One rebuilds the logic of identity, so that being the same God and being the same person can come apart. The other keeps ordinary logic and reworks the metaphysics instead, on the pattern of a single lump of matter that is at the same time two different things. Neither is needed and neither works, for one reason: the contradiction they were built to remove was never in the doctrine. What is still owed is an account of what the one God is, such that he is three persons, and that is work for a model rather than for a mended logic. Who holds what, on the two repairs: - Support: Peter van Inwagen, who gives relative identity its leading trinitarian defense, on a logic P. T. Geach began in 1962; and Jeffrey Brower with Michael Rea, who built the constitution model out of Aristotle's analysis of matter and form. - Oppose: William Lane Craig, who argues that neither repair is needed and neither works. The argument that follows refutes both.

(P1) The New Testament calls a person God to ascribe deity, not to assert identity. + Three short sentences are supposed to sink the doctrine: the Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son. Both repairs begin by reading the first two as equations, and that is where they go wrong. (1) The word "is" does more than one job. - Sometimes it announces that two names have landed on one thing. "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" tells you there was one man wearing two labels. Philosophers call that the is of identity. - Sometimes it does something quieter. "Jones is tall" hands Jones no second name; it tells you what he is like. Say the same of Smith and you have not turned Jones into Smith, only said that two men are tall. That is the is of predication: attributing something to a subject. - None of this is a technicality invented for the dispute. "Peter is human" and "John is human" are both true, and in two thousand years nobody has concluded that Peter is John. If "is God" works the way "is human" works, the first two sentences collide with nothing at all. (2) The New Testament sentences behave like predications, not like equations. - Start with the fact that identity runs in both directions. If Twain is Clemens then Clemens is Twain, and either sentence does the job. Now notice what the New Testament writers do. They say readily that the Son is God, and not one of them turns it around to write that God is the Son, which an equation would have made just as easy. - Then there is John, who calls the Father "the only true God" (John 17:3) and Jesus "the true God" (1 John 5:20). Read those as equations and they contradict each other outright, and the man who wrote both apparently noticed nothing. • Commentators divide over whether "the true God" in 1 John 5:20 points to Jesus or back to the Father, and the point survives either way. On the first reading two equations sit side by side and nobody blushes; on the second, the writer never wrote it at all. - Identity is also transitive, the rule everyone met in school algebra: if a equals b and b equals c, then a equals c. So if the first two sentences are equations, the Father is the Son, in exactly one step. No writer in the New Testament takes that step, or shows the faintest sign of noticing it was available. • Silence proves little when the occasion to speak is rare. This one was not: several writers, two generations of letters and Gospels, and a relation between Father and Son that comes up on nearly every page. (3) Modern identity is a tool the apostles never had. - Identity as philosophers handle it now, with formal rules about what may be swapped in for what without changing a sentence's truth, belongs to modern logic. Paul and John did not have it, and cannot be held to consequences they had no way of drawing. - Think of it this way. Nobody reads a medieval land grant as though it were drafted under modern contract law, then convicts the drafter of an error he had no way to commit. Importing the tool and charging the writer with what it implies is a reading mistake, not a discovery. - What follows is modest. The three sentences generate no contradiction, and they do not say what makes God one, a question still waiting (P5). Therefore, the collision both repairs exist to prevent was never in the sentences they protect.

(P2) Identity is absolute, never relative to a kind. + The first repair keeps the identity reading and changes what identity is, so that two things can be the same God without being the same person. (1) Relative identity says that sameness is never a complete thought. - On this proposal you may never simply ask whether one thing is the same as another. You have to ask "the same what?", and the answer may change with the question: one for one sort of thing, two for another, and neither answer overrules the other. That is relative identity. • Philosophers write it with letters standing in for sorts of thing, the way x stands in for a number in algebra: two things may be "the same F" and yet "different Gs." Fill in the letters and it takes shapes like this: these are the same lump of clay, but not the same statue. - Applied to the doctrine it gives a clean-looking result. The Father and the Son are the same God and different persons, with no contradiction, because "same" was never doing the single absolute job the objection assumed. - This is no dodge. It comes from philosophers of the first rank, it has a full formal treatment, and it was applied to the doctrine out of loyalty rather than impatience. It has earned a real answer. (2) Every ordinary example of the relation turns out to be something else. - Take the first example usually offered. "The couch is the same color as the chair." That is no identity statement, and you can see as much by walking into the room: two pieces of furniture sharing one property, and nobody in the history of living rooms has counted one chair. - The other stock case is the Lord Mayor, said to be the same person as the schoolboy Johnny though not the same official. Take the tenses seriously and the puzzle evaporates. One man was a schoolboy and is now the Lord Mayor. The office changed. The man did not. - Its leading defender grants the pattern: outside the doctrine of the Trinity there is no agreed example where sameness of this kind resists an ordinary explanation. Of course something can be real and still be rare. But before the textbook is rewritten around a disease with exactly one patient, you would want it to turn up somewhere else. (3) Things that differ in any way at all are two things. - Two things count as one only if everything true of the one is true of the other: same weight, same history, same debts, same handwriting. Where something is true of one and not the other, philosophers call the two discernible, a formal way of saying you can tell them apart. - Hold the proposal against that. If the Father is the same God as the Son but a different person, something is true of the Father and not of the Son. They differ. And things that differ are two, whatever sort you count them under. - One reply is left, and it is expensive. Perhaps the difference is itself only relative to a sort. Take that road and the persons stop really differing, and real distinctness is the one thing the doctrine cannot give up. - Think of it this way. One car cannot be the same car as another and yet a different vehicle. Different plates mean two cars, and re-sorting the paperwork will not fuse them into one machine in the driveway. Therefore, sameness does not vary with the kind of thing being counted, and the first repair has nothing to repair with.

(P3) The divine essence is not a material the three persons are made of. + The second repair leaves logic alone and works on the metaphysics instead, the question of what sorts of things there are and how they are put together. Its model is a block of marble. (1) One block of stone can be a statue and a column at once. - Picture the porch of a Greek temple where the roof rests not on plain columns but on carved women, each figure holding up her share of the stonework. Each figure is a statue. Each figure is also a column. One block, and two things truly said of it. - Philosophers call this the problem of material constitution, meaning the puzzle of how a thing and the stuff it is made of can be one object and two at the same time. The statue and the column differ in what they could survive. Reshape the marble and the statue is gone, while a column may still be standing. - The proposal carries all of that over to God, and its name says what it is after. Numerical sameness without identity means counting as one without being identical. - In the transfer, the divine essence, meaning what God is, the one nature all three persons share, takes the place of the marble. Whatever makes each person that particular person takes the place of the carving. The three then come out as one God the way the statue and the column come out as one object. • The technical name for that pairing is hylomorphic, from the Greek words for matter and shape: any account that treats a thing as material organized by a form. The classroom case is a bronze bell, bronze for the matter and bell-shape for the form. (2) In the analogy, what makes the two count as one is shared stuff. - Ask why anyone says there is one object on that porch, and the answer comes back embarrassingly physical. There is one hunk of marble standing there and you could put it on a scale. Take the marble away and the reason for counting one goes with it. - Now move the model to God. The divine essence quietly becomes a kind of material, an immaterial stuff the persons are made out of and are one by sharing. An immaterial thing makes perfectly good sense, and Christians have always believed in one. An immaterial quantity, portioned out three ways, is a phrase still looking for a meaning. - When the church at Nicaea said the Son is homoousios with the Father, "of one substance," the point was that the two are one being, sharing one and the same nature. It was not saying that God is a spiritual material served in three helpings. (3) The defenders of Nicaea refused the material reading of their own word. - The charge is not new, as it happens. Athanasius and Basil both report an earlier round of it. Paul of Samosata, condemned at Antioch some sixty years before Nicaea, argued that calling the Son homoousios with the Father made the divine being a stuff parceled out among them. - Basil rejected the charge with heat (Epistle 52.1), and Athanasius said that the whole trick of Paul's argument lay in taking the word in a bodily sense (De synodis 45). - The direction the analogy pulls is the direction those men refused to go, and they refused because they judged a divided divine substance the one thing that would sink the doctrine. Therefore, whatever makes the three persons one God, it is not a quantity of divine material they are all made of.

(P4) Each divine person has a first-person perspective no other can occupy. + The constitution model draws its force from a statue and a column being alike in everything that shows. In one respect the three persons cannot be alike. (1) Some knowledge cannot be had from the outside. - A man is pushing his cart through a supermarket when he notices a trail of spilled sugar down the aisle. Somebody has a torn bag. He follows the trail, meaning to catch the man and tell him, and it goes on: round the end of the aisle, past the freezers, round again. Then he looks into his own cart and understands that the shopper he has been chasing is himself. - Nothing new arrived on the list of facts about the man with the torn bag. He could have recited every one and come no closer to what he learned in the second he looked into his cart. - Philosophers call this the essential indexical: knowledge carried by words like "I," "here," and "now," which no description can replace however complete. My knowledge that I am the one making the mess is mine, and nobody else can have it. (2) The Father knows that the Son dies on the cross, not that he himself does. - Read that slowly, because it is easy to hear as a limit on God's knowledge and it is not one. To be omniscient, to know everything there is to know, is to know every truth, and "I am dying on the cross" was never a truth about the Father. There is nothing for him to fail to know. - What the sentence marks is a standpoint rather than a gap. There are three of them in God: three first-person perspectives that no description replaces and no one else can occupy. - None of this is speculation laid on top of the Gospels. It is what the Gospels show. The Son prays in Gethsemane and the Father does not. The Son is sent and the Father sends. The Son cries out to a Father who has not himself been forsaken (Mark 15:34). (3) Mutual indwelling does not dissolve the difference. - The tradition has a word for how close the three are. Perichoresis means the mutual indwelling of the persons: complete harmony of will and action, mutual love, and full knowledge of one another. - Take that at its very highest and the standpoints are still three, because perfect knowledge of another person is still knowledge of another person. A husband who knows his wife better than she knows herself has never had her toothache. (4) One block of marble cannot be three different figures. - Go back to the porch. The model persuades because the statue and the column share every property that shows: same weight, same chips along the base, same color in the same light. They differ only in what each could survive. - The persons are not alike in that way, and not remotely. The Son became incarnate, taking on a human life, and the Father did not. The Son was crucified and the Father was not. Those are differences not in what each could survive but in what is true of each. - One block might be a statue and a column at once. It cannot be the Winged Victory and the David and the Venus de Milo. Three genuinely different figures take three blocks, and a model that makes the persons that different has delivered three of something rather than one. Therefore, three exclusive standpoints stand within God, and no model that unifies by shared qualities can hold them together.

(C1) Therefore, the Trinity needs neither relative identity nor numerical sameness without identity. + Neither repair is needed, and the reason is simple: the contradiction they were built to fix was never in the doctrine to begin with. The four premises behind that verdict work like the links of a chain, and if every link holds the conclusion cannot slip out. (1) What makes the repairs look necessary is a reading the text does not require. - Both start from the same thought, that "the Father is God" and "the Son is God" put two names on one thing. From there each goes looking for a logic, or a metaphysics, in which two such sentences can stand quietly beside "the Father is not the Son." - Grant that starting thought and the repairs become more than understandable. They become urgent. Decline it, which is where the writers' own usage points (P1), and the urgency drains out of both. - One question does survive, and it is a fair one. If no one person is the whole of God, what makes God one? A rule for counting is simply the wrong shape of answer to a question like that (P5). (2) Neither repair survives inspection on its own terms. - Relative identity has no agreed instance anywhere outside the doctrine it was built to protect, and it runs aground on the plainest fact there is about identity, that things which differ are two (P2). - Numerical sameness without identity turns the divine essence into a spiritual material, exactly the reading the defenders of Nicaea refused (P3). And it draws its plausibility from two carvings alike in everything that shows, while each person holds a standpoint the others cannot occupy (P4). (3) Declining a repair is not declining the doctrine. - Take the machinery away and everything the creeds require is still standing: one God, three persons, each person fully God, the three genuinely distinct and not three Gods. - Machinery is not doctrine. A doctrine is a claim about God; machinery is a proposal about how to talk about him. Pulling down the scaffolding a builder put up does not pull down the wall he raised behind it. (4) The philosophers behind both proposals deserve better than dismissal. - Both came from believers doing hard technical work in defense of a doctrine they hold, and both have left the discussion sharper than they found it. The objection is to the machinery and never to the motive. - The two failures also share one diagnosis. Each tries to secure the oneness of God by adjusting a relation among the persons (P5). (5) Each premise has one bar to clear. - The bar is not certainty, which is just as well, since almost nothing in metaphysics clears that one. A premise earns its place by being more plausible than its denial, and that is the whole of what (P1 through P4) have to manage. - So weigh the denials for yourself. Is it likelier that the New Testament writers were writing equations and never noticed the contradiction sitting in front of them? That two things can differ and still be one? That God is a quantity of spiritual material? That the Father, from the inside, is the one dying on the cross? Every one of those has to be the better bet before the conclusion fails. Therefore, the doctrine can be stated, and defended against the charge of contradiction, in the ordinary logic everybody already uses.

(P5) The oneness of God is something God is, not a way of counting. + Both repairs locate the unity of God in a relation among the persons. Monotheism was never a claim about a relation. (1) A relation among three things presupposes three things. - Relative identity has the persons standing in a sameness relation tagged to a sort of thing. Constitution has them standing in a sharing relation to one essence. Either way the unity is something holding between the persons rather than something true of God. - Set that beside the Shema, the confession Israel was told to repeat at home and on the road, lying down and rising up. "The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4-7) is not advice about how to count correctly. It is a claim about who exists, made against neighbors who had many gods, and it would have been just as false if the many had been cleverly re-sorted into one. - Paul picks up that same confession and puts Jesus inside it: for us there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is not proposing a better way of counting. He is saying who is there. - Think of it this way. A fleet is not a ship. However tightly you specify the relations among three vessels, and however faithfully they hold formation across the Atlantic, what is out there on the water is three hulls. (2) A doctrine should not be pinned to the outcome of an unsettled puzzle. - Whether a statue and its marble are one thing or two is still argued over, and one line of attack on the constitution model is worth watching. Walk into a gallery holding three statues and count the material objects in the room. Three, obviously. And not three by luck, the way there happen to be three chairs around a kitchen table. It is hard to see how three statues could ever have added up to two objects. - That is where the pressure comes from. If one object per statue is not a happy accident about our world but something that could not have been otherwise, then "two individuals, one material object" is not merely false. It is impossible, and the constitution model needs it to be possible. - Nothing about the Trinity turns on how that quarrel comes out, and nothing about it should. Tying the doctrine to one solution makes it hostage to an argument in general metaphysics that has nothing to do with God. - You would not want the deed to your house to depend on how a boundary dispute two streets over gets settled. (3) What the one God is remains to be said. - Declining the two repairs answers the charge of contradiction, and that is all it does. It does not say what the one God is, such that there are three persons each fully God. - That calls for a positive account rather than a device, and there are serious ones on offer. One holds that the Trinity as a whole is the single instance of the divine nature, so that the persons are divine without each one being a God. Another holds that God is one spiritual substance bearing three complete sets of rational faculties: a single soul with three centers of self-consciousness. - Neither is settled and neither is quick. What matters is the shape of the answer. It has to be a description of what God is, rather than an adjustment to the rules for counting him. Therefore, whatever secures the oneness of God, it is a fact about the being that God is.

(C2) Therefore, the doctrine needs a model of God, not a repaired logic. + The work still owed is not a repair to the logic. It is a description of God: an account of what the one God is, such that he is three persons. (1) Only the second of the two questions is still open. - The first question is whether the doctrine contradicts itself. It does not, because the sentences that were supposed to contradict each other were never equations (P1). - The second question is what the one God is, that he should be three persons. That one is open, and it is the good kind of open, the kind with candidate answers on the table and real arguments running between them. - Both proposals tried to answer the second question with a repair to the first, and that is why neither delivered what it promised. (2) Nothing new has to be invented. - No new logic is required, and no spiritual material is required. The ordinary meaning of "is," the ordinary rules of identity, and the ordinary way of counting beings all stay exactly where they were. - What Christians confess is what they have always confessed, and it goes into a sentence a child can repeat at the kitchen table: there is one God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are each fully God, and they are not each other. (3) A model of the Trinity is still owed. - That debt is better stated than hidden. Every serious model on offer pays a price somewhere, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. - What can be said without hedging is narrower, and it is still worth a great deal. The charge that the doctrine is incoherent has not been made out, and it took no new logic to say so. Therefore, the work ahead is to describe the God who is one and three, and that work can go forward in the same logic everything else in the world is described in.