Justified True Belief

(●) Trinity Monotheism holds that the one God is the Trinity itself, with the three persons divine but not three Gods. + Count the Gods and the answer is one, the Trinity. Count the persons and the answer is three, each of them fully divine. Holding both at once takes a distinction most people have never had to make, between being divine and being a God, and the whole dispute turns on whether that distinction is honest. On one side stand the views that let the three persons come out as three Gods. On the other stand the views that keep one God by making the persons something less than fully divine. The middle position keeps each person wholly God without making any of them the whole of God, and the objection that will not go away is that "divine but not a God" quietly demotes somebody. Who holds what, on Trinity Monotheism: - Support: J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, who have the fullest version and accept the label Brian Leftow coined for it. Hilary of Poitiers is the nearest patristic ally. - Oppose: Leftow himself, whose dilemma sets the problem, and Daniel Howard-Snyder, who presses it hardest. Toledo, the Athanasian Creed, and Lateran IV read the other way. The argument that follows defends it.

(P1) To be a God is to have the whole divine nature. + Trinity Monotheism is a critic's name for a family of views on which the one God is the whole Trinity, while the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each divine without being three Gods. Everything in the dispute turns on how Gods get counted. (1) A nature is what a thing is. - Ask "what is it?" about anything at your feet and the answer names a nature: a cat, a maple, a human being. A nature is the what of a thing, the kind it belongs to, and anything that has that nature is an instance of it, one more thing of that kind. - Three cats asleep on a windowsill are three instances of the feline nature. Count the instances and you have counted the cats. Nobody adds a fourth for felinity itself. - The divine nature is that same idea applied to God: what it is to be God, everything God is essentially and could not fail to be. (2) Gods are counted by instances of the divine nature. - What makes something a God, rather than a mighty creature or a personified attribute, is having the divine nature. Israel marked that line by what stands on either side of it: the one who made all things and rules all things over here, everything he made over there, and worship going only to the first. - So the question "how many Gods?" has a definite method behind it. You count the things that have the divine nature, and Israel's confession comes back with one: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). A pantheon is what you get when the count comes back with a list. - Think of a rancher asked how many horses he owns. He counts the animals that have the equine nature. He does not count hooves, and he does not add the herd itself as one more horse on top of the horses in it. Three in the paddock are three because each of the three is a whole horse. (3) A nature is had whole or not at all. - Nothing is a fraction of a cat. A thing is an instance of a nature or it is not, and something carrying many feline features while lacking what the nature requires is a different thing altogether, however feline it looks. - A stuffed cat in a museum case has the fur, the whiskers, and the skeleton. It is still not a cat, because being alive belongs to what a cat is. One missing element, and the count of cats in that room is zero. - Hence the word "whole." To be a God is not to have some divine features. It is to have everything that belongs to the divine nature, with nothing left out. Therefore, how many Gods there are is settled by how many things have the whole divine nature, and by nothing else.

(P2) Being triune belongs to the whole divine nature. + Triune means three-in-one: one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Being triune is part of what God is, not something that merely happens to be true of him. (1) God is three persons essentially, not by accident. - Some truths about a thing could have been otherwise, like the color of your hair, and some could not, like your being a human being at all. Philosophers call the second kind essential: they belong to the nature, and the thing would not be what it is without them. - Scripture never presents the three as a stage God passed through or a team he assembled. The Word was with God "in the beginning" (John 1:1), the Son had glory with the Father "before the world existed" (John 17:5), and the Spirit is "the eternal Spirit" (Hebrews 9:14). There was never a God who was not Father, Son, and Spirit. - Being married is not part of what it is to be a man, and a bachelor is as much a man as a husband is. Being triune is not like that for God. There is no solitary version of him who later took on company. (2) The New Testament puts all three inside the one divine name. - "Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19). One name, singular, with three inside it. The three are not added to the one God from outside; they are what the one God is. - Paul's benediction has the same shape in three clauses: the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14). The count of three holds steady across writers who were not copying one another. - Say the word "triangle" and you have said three sides. Nobody who understood the word would ask whether a triangle might have managed with two. The one name at Matthew 28:19 works that way: say "God" as the New Testament says it and you have named three. (3) The nature of the one God includes his threeness. - Call water clear, wet, and drinkable and you have said three true things without saying what water is. Two hydrogens bound to one oxygen: that is the structure, and the structure belongs to the nature. - The same goes for God. If he is essentially triune, a complete account of what he is has to mention it, and an account that leaves it out has described a solitary deity, which is something God is not. - "Divine nature" gets used in two senses, and the difference matters enough to name out loud. • The shorter sense is the list of attributes the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have in common: all-powerful, all-knowing, and the rest. That list is true. It is also not the whole of what God is, because being triune is not on it. • The longer sense is everything God is essentially, threeness included. Counting Gods uses the longer sense from start to finish, and the shorter list comes back later under its own name, the divine perfections (P4, D3). Therefore, whatever has the whole divine nature is triune.

(P3) Neither the Father nor the Son nor the Spirit is triune. + No one of the three persons is himself Father, Son, and Spirit. Every side in the debate grants it, and the reasons are short. (1) Each of the three is one person. - The Father sends; he is not three who send. The Son prays to the Father and not to himself (Mark 14:36). The Spirit says "I" and "me" (Acts 13:2). Each of them is a single who. - At the Jordan all three are present at once: one voice from heaven, one man standing in the water, one Spirit descending (Luke 3:21-22). Nobody at the river met three Fathers. (2) The church has never confessed a triune Father. - The Athanasian Creed, the most exacting of the old summaries, says "there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost." It calls each of them God. It never calls any one of them the Trinity. - No party in the ancient disputes held that the Father is himself three persons. Even the modalists, who taught that the three are one person in three roles, collapsed the three rather than multiplying them: on their account the Father is the Son by being the very same person, not by containing three. - Try the other way and watch where it goes. A Father who was himself Father, Son, and Spirit would need a Trinity inside each of those three, and another inside each of those, on and on without end. - A member of a trio is not a trio, and anyone who has ever sung in one knows it. Therefore, each of the three lacks a property that the whole divine nature includes (P2).

(C1) Therefore, there is exactly one God, the triune God. + The core runs as a modus tollens, the form that denies a consequence in order to deny what would have produced it: if it had rained, the driveway would be wet; the driveway is dry; so it did not rain. Here the consequence denied is being triune. (1) No one of the three persons is a second instance of the divine nature. - If the Father had the whole divine nature, he would be triune (P1, P2). He is not (P3). So he does not have it whole, and the same three steps run again for the Son and for the Spirit. - Each of the three lacks one thing the whole nature includes, and a nature is had whole or not at all (P1). So the three are not three Gods, and no one of them is a God standing beside the triune God. Count the instances and you get one, not four. - The three cats on the windowsill were three instances because each of them had the whole feline nature. Three persons who each lack something the divine nature includes are not three instances of anything. - None of this has to be certain past all doubt. A deductive argument succeeds when each premise is more plausible than its denial, and the denials here are the strange ones: that Gods get counted some other way, or that the Father is himself a Trinity. (2) Three further claims stand behind the words "exactly one." - That there is at least one God comes from the arguments that begin with the world itself and reason back to a maker. - That he is Father, Son, and Spirit rests on the New Testament evidence for three who are each God. - That there is at most one is what Israel confessed and Isaiah pressed: "besides me there is no god" (Isaiah 44:6). - Take away any one of those and P1 through P3 will not deliver "exactly one" on their own. Nobody should pretend otherwise. - What the premises add is the piece the other three leave open, and it happens to be the piece the whole quarrel has always been about. Three persons who are each fully God look like three more candidates for the count. They are not candidates, so the count does not move. (3) "The Father is God" is not an equation. - The little word "is" does two different jobs. In "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" it equates: two names, one man. In "Belshazzar is King" it hands over a title, and a title can be shared. - "The triune God is God" is the first kind of sentence, an identity statement. "The Father is God" is the second kind. - In Daniel 5 Belshazzar rules Babylon and offers Daniel the post of "third ruler in the kingdom" (Daniel 5:16, 29). Third, not second, because Belshazzar was himself the second. His father Nabonidus was king too, and the Nabonidus Chronicle has that king away at Tema in the Arabian desert year after year while the king's son held Babylon. - So "Belshazzar is king" was true, and it never once meant he was the only king. The sentence hands a man a title. It does not equate him with the throne. (4) The count says nothing yet about whether the persons are divine. - Counting is all P1 through P3 have done. They have not said whether the Father is divine, or divine in full, and that is the next question (P4, P5). It is also the question the objections press hardest. - Nothing so far demotes anyone. Something that is not a second instance of the divine nature may still be everything God is except the count, and whether the three are that is what P4 and P5 settle. Therefore, the number of Gods is one, and the one is the triune God.

(P4) Whatever has the divine perfections is fully divine. + The divine perfections are the attributes that make God God and belong to no creature: all-power, all-knowledge, moral perfection, eternity, necessary existence, and existing from himself. To bear them is to be fully divine, whether or not the bearer is a God. (1) "A God" is a counting word and "divine" is a describing word. - "A God" picks out an instance of the divine nature, a thing you can number (P1). "Divine" says what something is like, that it has the character of deity. - Ordinary language keeps the two apart for other natures. Hand a vet a bone and she will tell you it is feline without pausing to wonder whether it purrs. A cat's skeleton is feline and so is its DNA. Neither of them is a cat, and there is nothing downgraded about their felinity: a feline skeleton is not a slightly-cat skeleton. (2) There is more than one way to be divine. - Think of the word "royal." The crown is royal, the seal is royal, the signature is royal, and none of the three is the king. Nobody calls the seal a lesser monarch. It carries the king's own authority, in full, without being a second king. - One way to be divine is to be a God, to have the whole divine nature (P1). The other is to bear the divine perfections without being the whole. • Philosophers say a term is predicable of a thing when it can be truly said of it. "Feline" is predicable of a cat and of its skeleton; "a cat" is predicable only of the cat. "Divine" behaves like "feline," not like "a cat." - Two published accounts explain how something that is not a God can bear the perfections. They agree that it can, and they differ only on why (D13). • On the compositional account, "divine" is truly said of whatever is a God or is a distinctive part of a God, where "part" means nothing separable and nothing cut off (D4). • On the attributive account, being divine is bearing the attributes nothing but God can bear, with no talk of parts at all. (3) Nothing outside God can bear the perfections. - Take the words one at a time. Omnipotence and omniscience are all-power and all-knowledge. Moral perfection is goodness with nothing lacking in it. Necessary existence means he could not have failed to exist. Aseity means existing from oneself, depending on nothing and nobody else for it. Add eternity, and that is the list. - Scripture ties every item on that list to God alone. He "does not faint or grow weary" and his understanding "is unsearchable" (Isaiah 40:28); he is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Psalm 90:2); he "alone has immortality" (1 Timothy 6:16); from him and through him and to him are all things (Romans 11:36). - So this is no loophole a mighty angel could slip through. Think of a watermark only the mint can lay into paper. A note that carries it came from the mint, because there is nowhere else it could have come from. (4) Not being a God is not being less divine. - "Not a God" is a verdict about counting. "Less than fully divine" is a verdict about degree, and the two come apart. The skeleton is not a lesser cat. It is not a cat at all, and it is wholly feline. - What would genuinely demote a person is a missing perfection: being less than all-powerful, or having begun, or existing by another's permission. That is what Arius, the fourth-century priest whose teaching the church condemned at Nicaea in 325, said about the Son. None of it is said here of any person of the Trinity. Therefore, anything that bears the divine perfections is fully divine, whether or not it is an instance of the divine nature.

(P5) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit each have the divine perfections. + Scripture gives each of the three what belongs to God alone. The deity of the Son and of the Spirit has a long case of its own, and the narrower claim is this one: each bears the perfections entire, and not a share of them. (1) The Son bears the perfections. - All things were made through him (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16), and a maker of all things is not among the things made. He upholds the universe by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). - He searches minds and hearts, which the LORD had claimed as his own prerogative (Revelation 2:23; Jeremiah 17:10). He is "the first and the last, and the living one" (Revelation 1:17-18), which is the formula Isaiah reserves for the LORD (Isaiah 44:6). - The Father addresses him as "God" and hands him the psalm about the Lord who laid the foundations of the earth (Hebrews 1:8-10). - Heaven gives him the worship Israel gave to God alone, to "him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb" in one breath (Revelation 5:13). Worship was the practical test of deity in Israel, and here it is being passed. (2) The Spirit bears the perfections. - He searches "the depths of God," and nothing short of omniscience can do that (1 Corinthians 2:10-11). There is nowhere to go from his presence (Psalm 139:7). He is the eternal Spirit (Hebrews 9:14), and lying to him is lying to God (Acts 5:3-4). - Personhood and deity arrive together here. A Spirit who searches, knows, and can be lied to is a someone, and a someone with those attributes is God. (3) The Father bears the perfections no differently. - Nobody disputes the Father's deity; he is the one person whose deity every party to the argument grants. What is worth noticing is the way he has it: fully, and not as the whole of God, since the whole is triune and he is not (P3). - Whatever gets said about how the Son and the Spirit are divine has to be said about the Father in the very same words. There is no first class and second class here, because there is no person of whom the perfections are truer than they are of the other two. (4) The perfections are borne whole, not divided three ways. - Each person is all-powerful, and there is no such thing as a third of all-power. Three people can split a cake. They cannot split "everything." Three who are each omniscient are not three thirds of knowledge. - Here is an honest edge, and it is the one place where the two accounts of divinity (P4) say different things. • On the compositional account, the perfections that involve knowing, willing, and being good belong to each person because each person is a knower and a willer. Necessity, aseity, and eternity belong to the persons because the whole God has them, the way a part can have a property in virtue of the whole it belongs to. • On the attributive account, each person simply bears all of them directly. • Either way each person has them all, and neither account makes any person begin, borrow, or depend on another person for them (D6). Therefore, each of the three bears everything by which deity is marked off from creation.

(C2) Therefore, each person is wholly God without being the whole of God. + Each person is wholly God, and no person is the whole of God. Critics and defenders alike have converged on that formula, and both halves of it follow from the premises. (1) "Wholly God" follows from P4 and P5. - Each of the three bears the perfections. Whatever bears them is divine. So each of the three is divine, and divine without remainder: not partly divine, not divine by courtesy, not divine in some junior grade. - "The Father is God," "the Son is God," and "the Spirit is God" are all true, and true the way "Belshazzar is King" is true (C1). - When Thomas says "my Lord and my God" to one person standing in front of him (John 20:28), he is not overstating. (2) "Not the whole of God" follows from P1 through P3. - No person is the sole instance of the divine nature. The sole instance is the triune God (C1), so the one God is not the Father alone, nor the Son alone, nor the Spirit alone. - The distinction is not a modern invention. Hilary of Poitiers, writing in the fourth century, said that each divine person is in the Unity, "yet no person is the one God" (On the Trinity 7.2). Being wholly God and being the whole of God had been pulled apart while men who sat at Nicaea were still alive. (3) Two accounts of why the persons are divine stay open. - On the compositional account, the persons are divine as distinctive parts of the one God, where "part" carries no division and no separability. God is one individual made up of individuals rather than a collection of them: a wall, not a pile of stones. - On the attributive account, the persons are divine because each bears the properties unique to God, and no talk of parts is needed at all. - William Lane Craig, whose version of the view this is, judges either account tenable and leaves the choice open. What the persons are to the one God is a further question, and it gets answered by a model of God rather than by a count. (4) Counting Gods is not the same work as describing God's inner life. - The count shows how "one God" and "three who are each God" can both be true: one instance of the nature, three bearers of the perfections. It does not say what the one God is, such that he can be three persons. - Craig's answer to that further question, a single soul with three complete sets of rational faculties, is a separate step and stands or falls on its own (D13). - Craig himself came to prefer the name Tripersonal Monotheism for his version, on the ground that "the Trinity" can name the group of the three, while God is an individual rather than a group (D7). The count survives the rename. - The doctrine does not rest on the theory in any case. If the theory failed tomorrow, the two biblical claims, one God and three who are each God, would stand exactly where they stood. What the theory shows is that they can be held together without contradiction and without demoting anyone. Therefore, there is one God; the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are each wholly God; and no one of them is the whole of God.