I have seen a lot of posts on Facebook disputing the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, both of which are part of the doctrines of the Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant and Reformed churches. To me both doctrines are essential for the Church to continue to preach and can also be central to faith and science conversations. What I see online is a minority of voices of opposition reiterating things first written about 300 years ago by those classed as Liberal Protestants and subsequently answer by theologians across the denominational spectrum.
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The Trinity and the deity of Jesus is a dividing line between Christian and non-Christian for me. You have disconnected yourself from the Church if you deny either and you certainly disconnect yourself from Jesus if you deny His divinity.
Vinnie
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How does the concept of divine trinity inform science conversations? I can see how one might take observations about the physical world and work it into a religious narrative but the reverse direction gets pretty tricky.
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Thank you Vinnie
My own science -faith reflections are strongly Trinity focussed.
You can also see on the website what I have written on the divine -human union in Christ and details of my book Cosmic Franciscans that expands on what is on the website.
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Who says it should?
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You might find this book interesting
As discussed here:
Jesus most certainly identified Himself in the highest possible terms. This is in Paul (our earliest Christian documents) and all four Gospels.
I would push back on this part of your writing.
In further respect of creation, there appears to be a tension between God as lover wanting creation to have love and another aspect of typical traditional and medieval theology that God is “impassable” and cannot suffer. Scotus seems to want to say that God is impassable and needs no-one. Jurgen Moltmann is critical of such views of God. It is part of Christian faith that the Incarnate Word dwells in Jesus the man and in the fact of Jesus suffering does not the Word in conscious union also share in that suffering? Furthermore if the Holy Spirit as St Paul says “groans” within us then does not God have the fullest knowledge of human suffering and indeed all creation’s suffering? Is God really “unfeeling” or is our idea of fellow –feeling and suffering with us a step too far in theology? I rather think that Scotus is wrong and that God in the fullness of the divine nature knows and in some way shares the suffering of all creation that is made free and subject to hurt.
It’s not a step too far in theology, it’s a leap off a cliff. I’m in the immutable/impassable/changeless/simple group. God is pure actuality and this is foundational to theism in my view. Once you lose this God is stripped of that which makes Him God. Of course terms have to be defined:
Impassable is a metaphysical term, not a psychological one. It certainly doesn’t mean God is cold or calloused. But to deny it is to make God vulnerable to external forces. Love often involves passion in humans. It is an emotional state that fluctuates and can suffer. When applied to God in the classical sense, love means to will the good of another.
Thinking God needs to suffer to truly love (to will the absolute good of all creation) is an anthropomorphism that projects human limitations onto the divine. God perfectly wills the good of all creation. His love is constant, always active and unfailing.
As far as God suffering, I tend to go with the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) and communicatio idiomatum and the four boundaries. Also, I think I would push back with the hypostatic union.
Jesus is one divine person with two distinct natures. His divine nature is impassable. The human nature absolutely suffered and felt the depths of our darkest horrors. But the divine nature is already omniscient and knows all things. God didn’t learn something new.
It may initially seem like it creates some solidarity to imagine God actually suffering with us, but that is bad news for theism as it makes Him a victim of the universe like us and introduces a potentiality which topples the foundation. In my mind, this is the marvel superhero god or primitive Mesopotamian deity who parades the animals in front of Adam looking for a suitable mate for him, not the ground of all being itself—pure actuality devoid of potentiality.
The groaning spirit is best understood as analogical language or as the effects of God acting in us. Scripture uses a lot of anthropomorphic language in describing God but it also has passages indicating God is beyond them.
Vinnie
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if we think of God as Trinity we can think of how the love within the Trinity as the basis for Creation and the freedom given to evolution, with interactions between the Word and Spirit with cosmic matter with the divine intent for the future of all life.
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The origin might be 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism but many of the modern voices could well be Muslim. These appear to be their main talking points now.
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The Trinity is a theological concept with no scientific content or relevance. It is primarily involved in salvation and God’s forgiveness which, again has no scientific content.
Richard
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That is pretty much what I’ve read in discussions about the Trinity and the observable world. John Polkinghorne and others have written on the topic which, to me, largely describes compatibalism rather than a deducible, firm connection, e.g. trying to understand current scientific details in light of theological viewpoints. That is distinct from attempts at ‘proving the Trinity from science’ or ‘predicting what science should uncover based on Trinitarian theology’.
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Without the trinity of the laws of thought we cannot Identify, distinguish, and exclude. The trinity is the light that makes science possible.
Whether we ‘should’ just ignore that fact and just shut up and calculate is a conscious personal choice.
Dear Vinnie
I would defend the idea of God sharing our suffering like this:
If my mind was completely joined to your mind I would personally experience what you suffer when you suffer. It seems to me that the unity of Jesus human nature to the Infinite Word of God must have had that kind of union of God’s essence and intellect with Jesus 'human mind. The same can be said for the Spirit , who living in us, knows our thoughts. God’s essence does not suffer but God’s total knowledge of us in all our thought does in some way experience what happens to us in an internal as well as external way.
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Certainly not me, but it was mentioned in the starting post of this thread.
Fair enough. I took your question to imply that, if the Trinity is relevant to a faith-and-science conversation, it ought somehow to generate or inform scientific conclusions. I don’t see why that follows. Science may tell us something about the physical world without telling us whether Christ is divine or God is triune; and belief that God is triune need not tell us how any particular physical process works. The two can still be part of the same conversation without either being derivable from the other.
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No problem! I agree.
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I appreciate the notion that God’s essence doesn’t suffer. It shows you definitely understand the stakes. I notice you also said “in some way” so maybe I can express it in a language you would agree with that would avoid the flaws in understanding God as suffering that ultimately undercut theism itself.
Having complete knowledge of something, or even knowing it more intimately than we do, does not mean God experiences it as we do. God perfectly understands our reality without being degraded or subject to it. Whereas you can sometimes legitimately say to another human, you are not in my shoes so you cannot understand my pain, you simply cannot say this to God. He has perfect knowledge and did not come to learn of pain and suffering via the incarnation. That leads to a host of problems.
If our two human minds were melded together you are probably correct. But the divine mind is radically different than the human mind. God doesn’t learn or receive information. He knows creation entirely by knowing Himself as the active and sustaining cause of it. God and the Holy Spirit doesn’t tune in to see how things are going and get updates. In essence, God doesn’t need a DVR. He is never going to miss his favorite shows. The alternative is the God who had to ask Adam where he was in the garden. This would be a very primitive and anthropomorphic portrait. God creates from nothing every instant and actively sustains the entire universe including our very existence and our acts of thinking. He knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. This is where God as pure act and the stronger version of the Cosmological argument comes in (hierarchical or sustaining version). If God has potentiality then God has contingency like everything else and is no longer “God” proper in my mind.
The hypostatic union is a union in the Person of the Son. Jesus took on an added nature. The Thomist tradition would see any change here as a Cambridge or relational change. For example, a pole does not change if you stand on the left or right of it. But your relationship to it does. We often imagine Jesus lowering Himself and becoming Human. Scripture uses this language as well. In reality, we know Jesus never ceased being fully God and the change actually went the other way. A human being was united to the eternal, changeless Word. That is what it means to me to say God became man. Jesus didn’t mutate, lose His powers or any of that (all heresies I’m pretty sure). A human nature was anchored to the Word and any changes that occur, occur solely in that human nature.
God did not need an incarnation to understand us. The incarnation is so we can know God more clearly.
Vinnie
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I strongly recommend Richard Bauckham’s little book on Christology, God Crucified. It kind of settles the question by (re)framing the questions on deity into Jewish categories as opposed to Greek categories.
Rather than starting with the “omnis” (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternality; and let’s face it, if these are the foundational criteria, then Jesus is already disqualified for not being omnipresent on earth (and, arguably, omniscient)), he points to three Jewish relational categories:
- God relates to Creation and all humans as Creator.
- God relates to Creation and all humans as ultimate Ruler.
- God relates to Israel as the faithful Covenant Keeper.
Jesus is clearly presented as fulfilling all these criteria, and early (i.e., not requiring an “evolution towards understanding of being deity”—whether functionally or ontologically (a question that is rendered irrelevant by these Jewish categories)). We don’t require a “late date for the Gospel of John” (which is only late-dated because the perspective that the idea of Jesus being deity evolved over time—completely circular).
We especially see this in Ephesians 1, Colossians 1, Philippians 2, and Revelation. Even if Ephesians and Revelation as discounted as “late” (again, partly relying on circular argumentation), Colossians and Philippians are not.
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That was one of the points of Brant Pitre’s book I referenced above. To treat the Goepels in light their 1st century Jewish context. Jesus is presented as divine in all four. John simply reframes the material but has the same message. Bart Ehrman even changed his mind on this. He still waffles and thinks Jesus never claimed divinity but he admits now, after teaching contrary for decades I’m guessing, on the narrative level, Jesus is portrayed as God in all four gospels. Paul also considered Jesus Creator.
Bauckham accepts Greek Trinitarian language as Biblical in the sense that it accurately transposes the ideas into another conceptual framework. This reframing is no more inappropriate than the other of John reframing the ministry of Jesus. It hardly needs to be said that first century Galilean Jews were not educated Greek philosophers. In fact, most of them couldn’t even understand our Greek Gospels because they spoke Aramaic.
Jesus was more or less rejected by Judaism and Christianity became largely dominated by Gentiles right after the apostolic era. I’d guess there are only a few—IF ANY AT ALL— early patristic authors that were ethnically Jewish. Orthodox Christianity was defined, defended and argued primarily by Greek speaking Gentiles from the 2nd century on. Our creeds and Orthdoxy tend to be steeped in Greek language and concepts as well.
I used to think the idea of the Trinity had to evolve. This is incorrect. Its basis was there from the beginning out of the mouth of Jesus. All four Gospels, Paul and other epistles present Jesus in terms reserved for God alone in a 1st century Jewish context. Later Greek Christians in the second century only transposed what was already there into their own philosophical language.
John is not really dated late by most scholars. Church tradition says it was the last to be written. (Muratorian Fragment , Irenaeus, Clement of A, Eusebius, Epiphanius etc.). 90-100 CE is pretty standard.
Vinnie
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Yeah, I think 90-100 CE is unnecessarily late.
And I don’t have a problem with the Greek-based formulations; I just have a problem with defending them as “definitive for Christianity” (as if Jesus and his disciples hadn’t quite “gotten there yet”).
I think they were legitimate answers to the questions of the time—which implies that the questions aren’t necessarily timeless and universal. They’re contextual. Which then implies that we might sometimes be answering questions people aren’t asking, or demand that people ask “the right questions” so we can answer those questions instead of other questions.
I’m not saying, though, “discard the Creeds.” They are flags planted to demarcate battles won, and they are retrievable as needed.
To clarify my post , the reason the deity of Christ and the Trinity is important is because it’s about the way we think about God as God interacts with the Cosmos. If we have a God who is Trinity we see those interactions on the basis of the divine love within the Trinity, and those interactions include the Pre-incarnate Word (revealed more fully in Christ and the Spirit in conjunction that is leading evolution and the cosmos to a divinely intended future.
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