Justified True Belief

(P1) God is the greatest conceivable being. + Whatever else God is, he is the greatest thing there could be. That claim is the floor, and the case built on it is a detective's case rather than a proof: two pictures of God, weighed by which one better accounts for a God who is love. (1) "God" names the best that anything could possibly be. - Anselm, the eleventh-century monk who ended up as archbishop of Canterbury, gave the idea the phrase everyone still uses: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" (Proslogion 2). Not the most impressive thing on the shelf, but the best that anything could possibly be. - Think of the difference this way. The fastest runner at your school is fast, and next year somebody faster may transfer in. The fastest a human body could ever run is a different sort of claim altogether, and only that second one is a ceiling. - The method has a name worth knowing, perfect being theology: you work out what God is like by asking, over and over, what it would be better to be. If it is better to know than to be ignorant, then God knows. If it is better to keep a promise than to break one, then God keeps his. - That sentence of Anselm's is also the opening move of the ontological argument, the attempt to reason from what God is to whether God exists at all, and its modern form is called modal, the philosopher's word for talk about what could have been otherwise and what could not. (2) Both Testaments already talk about God this way. - "To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One" (Isaiah 40:25). The question is rhetorical, and the answer it expects is nobody. - "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable" (Psalm 145:3). Unsearchable is not a compliment about size. It says that people have gone looking for the bottom of the measure and have not found it. - The biblical writers never put God at the top of a list of impressive beings, the way you might rank mountains. They put him in a class by himself, which is the same move the philosophers make in a different vocabulary. (3) Jews, Christians and Muslims have all reasoned this way. - Avicenna, the great Persian philosopher of the Islamic east, Anselm in Normandy, and Maimonides, the Jewish sage of medieval Egypt, all worked this method and came out in very different places with it. That is what a shared method looks like: the tool does not decide the answer. - Of course, a premise only Christians accept would settle nothing in a conversation with somebody who is not a Christian. This one is not that kind of premise, which is precisely why it can carry weight in a disagreement about the Trinity. Therefore, the question is not whether God happens to have some admirable qualities but what a being would have to be like to be as great as anything could be. See also: NT / Moral and Rational: Modal Ontological (Maximal Greatness)

(P2) Love is a perfection. + Love is not a bonus feature on God's greatness. It belongs on the short list of qualities that make a being greater for having them. (1) A perfection is a quality it is better to have than to lack. - Knowledge is a perfection and ignorance is not. Power is one, and weakness plainly is not. Justice, mercy, faithfulness and wisdom all belong on the list, and they belong there for the same reason: whoever has them is greater for having them. - Try running the test the other way and listen to how it sounds. "God would be greater if he knew a little less." The sentence falls apart in your mouth before you reach the end of it. - What the test asks is not what a culture happens to admire this decade. It asks what it would be better to be, which is a different question, and sometimes a more uncomfortable one. (2) Nobody ranks a loveless being above a loving one. - Imagine two beings alike in every single respect except one. The first loves and the second does not. Which of them is greater? Almost everybody answers before they have finished hearing the question. - One famous holdout stands the other way, and it is worth naming. Aristotle's first mover is thought thinking itself, a mind whose only object is its own thinking; it moves the world by being desired and desires nothing outside itself (Metaphysics XII). Hardly anyone since has read that as an improvement on a God who loves. - This is not a Christian premise smuggled into a Christian argument. Jews and Muslims, who hold that God is one and who reject the Trinity outright, affirm it as loudly as Christians do. The Qur'an names God al-Wadud, the Loving. - Israel's own word for it is hesed, God's covenant loyalty: a steadfast love that keeps its promises even when the other party has broken every one of his. "His steadfast love endures forever" comes back like a drumbeat in all twenty-six verses of Psalm 136. (3) Scripture says God is love, not merely that he is loving. - "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8, and again at 4:16). John does not write that God is loving, the way he might write that God is patient. - That construction turns up elsewhere in the same circle of writings. The letter says "God is light" (1 John 1:5), and John's Gospel records Jesus saying "God is spirit" (John 4:24). It is the form a writer reaches for when he means to say what something is, never merely how it behaves. - The difference is the one between "she is kind" and "she is kindness itself." The second sentence is not simply a warmer compliment. It is a claim about what the woman is made of. Therefore, a being who did not love would fall short of being the greatest conceivable being, and would not be God.

(P3) Love gives itself away to another. + Love has a direction built into it. It moves toward somebody who is not the lover. (1) Love has a second party built into it. - You love someone. The grammar leaves a slot open at the end, and the sentence means nothing at all until somebody has been put in it. - Think of a man who keeps a photograph in his wallet, the way people did before phones. It is never a photograph of himself. Love points away from the one doing the loving, and it does that so reliably that we notice at once when it does not. - That pointing away is not a limitation on love. It is the very thing that separates love from every other warm feeling a man can have about his own situation. (2) We measure love by what it hands over. - "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). The measure is what gets handed over. - "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son" (John 3:16). The verb that follows "loved" is "gave," and that pairing is not the accident of one famous verse. It is the shape the New Testament reaches for whenever it wants to show love rather than define it. - Giving needs somebody on the other end. A wrapped present sitting on the doorstep of a house nobody lives in is not a small gift or a poor gift. It is not a gift at all. (3) A being who loved only himself would be missing what makes love love. - Grant the honest exception first, because there is one. There is a healthy self-regard, and Jesus takes it for granted when he tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31). Nobody is being asked to despise himself. - But a man whose love stops at himself and goes no further is the standard picture of a defect. We have words for that man, and not one of them is a compliment. - Notice too that nobody has ever been moved by the story of a man who loved himself completely. The stories that move people are the ones where somebody hands something over. (4) Being ready to love is not the same as loving somebody. - Two different things wear the same word. There is a standing readiness to love, which a man keeps whether or not anybody is in the room with him, and there is love actually given to somebody. Both are real. Only one of them is what perfect love asks of God. - A country doctor snowed in for a week, with the roads shut and nobody able to reach him, is still a healer, and nobody holds the empty waiting room against him. A doctor who could clear the road any morning he liked, and never does, is a different case entirely. - So the claim is narrower than a claim about lovers in general. What perfect love asks of God is not a readiness he might never use, but love actually given to somebody who is not himself. Therefore, perfect love requires somebody to be loved who is not the lover, and God is never in the position of having nobody.

(P4) God's love does not depend on creation. + Loving belongs to what God is. Creating is something God chose, and the gap between those two decides whom God was loving before there was anybody to make. (1) God did not have to make anything. - Creation is free. Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology have all insisted on it, and for the same reason: the alternative empties the word "gift" of its meaning. - "You created all things, and by your will they existed and were created" (Revelation 4:11). By your will, notice, and not by your nature. "Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases" (Psalm 115:3). - Think of the difference between a man who hands you a birthday present and a man who hands you the fifty dollars he owed you. From across the room the two transactions look identical. Only one of them is generosity. (2) Loving is not optional for God in the way creating is. - Suppose God could have been unloving and simply happened not to be. Then love is a policy God adopted rather than a description of God, and "God is love" (P2) turns out to be an overstatement. - Philosophers mark this difference with two words worth learning. An essential property is one a thing cannot lose and still be itself: a triangle cannot shed its three sides and go on being a triangle. A contingent property is one it could have lacked: your shirt could have been green instead of blue and it would still be your shirt. • Creating is contingent for God. Loving is essential. That one difference is the hinge everything else turns on. (3) There are ways things could have gone with a loving God and no creatures. - Philosophers call a complete way things could have gone a possible world. It is not a planet out past Neptune. It is a whole scenario, the way "the meeting could have been cancelled" describes a scenario rather than a place. - Since creating was optional, there is a scenario in which God exists and nothing else does. Since loving is not optional, God is perfectly loving in that scenario too. - Picture an album holding one photograph of every way things could have turned out. God is in every picture. Creatures are missing from some of them, and the love is in all of them. (4) Time makes the same point with no philosophy at all. - Set the scenarios aside for a moment and just look at the clock. On the standard cosmological picture the universe is somewhere around fourteen billion years old, and persons turned up very late in it, which makes it plausible that created persons have not always existed. - If God's love needed a creature to land on, then before there were creatures God was not yet loving another. Something would have switched on in God at some point that had not been running before. - A man who becomes generous at forty was not generous at thirty. Say the same about God and you have said that God improved. Therefore, whoever it is that God has always loved, it is not a creature.

(IC) Therefore, God eternally loves another within himself. + The beloved cannot be a creature (P4), and cannot be the lover himself (P3). That leaves one place for him to be. (1) The beloved is someone within God. - Rule out those two candidates and exactly one position is left standing. The one God loves is inside God, and has been for as long as God has been, which is to say always. - No fourth candidate is waiting in the wings, because Scripture leaves two categories and no third: "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). • Anything neither God nor made by God would be a second uncreated being standing alongside him, which is the one thing monotheism will not say. • And a God who leaned on such a being for his own perfection would not be the greatest there could be (P1). - This is not a dodge. It is the move a detective makes when two alibis check out: the evidence now points at whoever is left standing, however unexpected he turns out to be. (2) "Within God" names a person, not a part or a faculty. - Not a mood, not an attribute, not a capacity lying dormant. Someone: a who rather than a what, loved and loving in return. - Jesus says it to the Father in as many words: "you loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24), and "the glory that I had with you before the world existed" (John 17:5). Before the world existed there was already a you and a me. - Paul's habit of speech points the same way. "His beloved Son" (Colossians 1:13) is, word for word in the Greek, the Son of his love. The love is not something the Father took up toward the Son at some point along the way. It is what the Son is named by. (3) More than one is not yet three. - The reasoning arrives at more than one and stops there. Whether God is two or three or more is not a question that love, on its own, can answer. - Three is a number that comes from the New Testament (C), and nothing so far has been carrying it. Therefore, the love that makes God perfect is love between persons inside God.

(P5) If God is one person, his love for another depends on creation. + Set the two pictures of God side by side: one person, or more than one. The question is which of them better accounts for a God who is love. (1) On a one-person God, loving another is something that started. - Before creation there was God and nobody else. Whatever love that God has for another began when the world did, because until then there was nothing for it to reach. - That does not make such a God unloving. It makes his love for another contingent (P4): a fact about him that could have failed to be true, and that was not always true. - Picture two houses on the same street. One has had people in it for as long as anyone can remember, talking to each other in the kitchen. The other stood empty until a family moved in last spring. Both are homes now. Only one of them has always been a home. (2) Strip away creation and that God has only himself left to love. - This follows from the position rather than being pinned on it. If God is essentially loving, and the only others there could ever be are creatures, and creatures were made freely, then the love belonging to God essentially is love of himself. Love of anybody else came later. - Imagine writing the biography of such a God. Every chapter before creation has exactly one character in it, and the only love there is to report is his own for himself. Take the word love the ordinary way (P3), and that is the one kind of love nobody admires in anybody else. - Say it as fairly as it can be said. Unitarian monotheists, meaning those who hold that the one God is also one single person, are not cold people, and their devotion is real. The question is not about them at all. It is about what their doctrine says was going on in God before there was anybody else. - One serious way out remains, and it is the strongest reply anyone has offered. Call that essential love a readiness that never had to be exercised, and the awkwardness seems to dissolve. Then the question comes back from the other side. God could have made somebody to love at any moment he liked. If he never did, in what sense was he not missing something? (3) On the Christian picture, "God is love" describes what God has always been. - Father, Son and Spirit give themselves to one another, with no beginning to it and nothing outside God prompting it. Creation adds recipients. It does not add the loving. - When John writes that God is love, the sentence is then a description of God rather than a report of a policy adopted somewhere along the way. - Compare saying that a river is wet with saying that a river got wet. Only one of those sentences is telling you what a river is. Therefore, on one picture God's love for another is something that began, and on the other it never did.

(C) Therefore, more than one person in God is more plausible than a solitary God. + A God who is more than one person accounts better for perfect love than a God who is only one. That is the whole of it, and it is a smaller thing than it sounds. (1) The claim is plausibility, not proof. - Christians did not arrive at the Trinity by philosophy. They hold it because of what the New Testament says about the Father, the Son and the Spirit. The philosophical case comes second, and never as the reason for believing it. - The charge it answers is that three persons in God is an awkward complication which a cleaner monotheism avoids. The complication earns its keep. - Explanations get judged the way a mechanic's diagnosis gets judged: by how much of the trouble one account covers, and by how few extra parts it has to invent. A single loose belt that explains the noise, the smell and the warning light beats three unrelated faults. Judged that way, the trinitarian picture does better on three counts. • It makes "God is love" true of God as he is rather than as he became. • It leaves creation free, so the world stays a gift rather than an overflow God could not help. • It invents no machinery for the occasion, since Christians already held the doctrine on other grounds. (2) The number three comes from the text, not from love. - Every step so far would be satisfied by two, a Lover and a Beloved, with nothing further required. Joined to the New Testament's count, the reasoning supports the Trinity. On its own it supports plurality and no more. - The count sits in ordinary church business rather than in speculation: one name belonging to three at baptism (Matthew 28:19), a blessing at the close of a letter that names three (2 Corinthians 13:14), gifts and service and activity distributed among three (1 Corinthians 12:4-6). It never wobbles there, and it is never argued for from love. (3) What does follow is a God who never needed us. - If God's love was already full before there was a world, then creation was not a remedy for loneliness. Nothing was missing that we arrived to supply. - "Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:24-25). A God with a need would be a God whose love for us was partly about him. - "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). The order in that sentence is the practical payoff. His love came first, and ours is the echo of it. (4) What would defeat this. - If love is not a perfection, P2 fails and nothing else matters. - If a disposition to love is all that perfection requires, P3 fails. A disposition is a standing readiness to act, the way sugar stays soluble in a sealed jar that no water will ever reach, and on that view a God alone forever would lack nothing. That is the strongest objection in the literature. - If God could not have refrained from creating, then creatures are available as the eternal beloved, and the beloved need not be inside God at all. Therefore, the God who is love is plausibly not alone, and the Trinity, whose count comes from the text, is more plausible than any doctrine that leaves God by himself. See also: PT / The Trinity: One God in Three Persons