A difficult but fundamental concept within Christianity, the Trinity is the belief that God is three separate persons but that he is still one God. However, this is a minority view, since other contemporary writers reject arguments in favor of the Trinity doctrine a priori. For example, Brian Leftow questions this when asking why perfect love should stop at three instead of four or more. The doctrine of the Nondenominational Church near Summerville SC, which includes the belief in the Trinity, is also part of a larger theological project. In the early Christian era of the Hebrew tradition, there was a plurality of divine, semi-divine and supernatural beings, which must be reconciled with Hebrew monotheism.
Some of these beings, such as Yahweh's group of seraphim and cherubs, are indigenous; others were absorbed into Hellenistic religious culture. For the sake of an orderly theological monotheism, these beings must be defined in relation to God. Some were absorbed by the Divinity considering them aspects, powers or components of the one God, others were degraded to the status of angelic or demonic, and yet others were discarded as mere hypostatizations of facons de parler theological. The doctrine of the Trinity emerged as part of that process of theological cleansing that, from the Judeo-Christian point of view, aimed to draw a brilliant line between the one God and everything else.
Western theology, on the other hand, favors a “narrow and flat Trinity” and, in the first centuries of the Christian era, tended to ultra-modern Christologies such as Apollinarianism, the doctrine that, crudely, Jesus was a man in whom the Logos occupied the place normally occupied by a rational human soul, and monophytism, according to which Christ had only one nature, and that divine. If the characteristic Trinitarian heresy in the East was Arianism, the characteristic Western heresies belong to a family of heterodox viewpoints known generically as monarchianism, a term coined by Tertullian to designate the doctrines of the strict Trinity by virtue of their emphasis on the unity of God as the sole ruler or source of Being, including, above all, modalism (a, k, a. Sabelianism), the doctrine that the persons of the Trinity are simply “modes, aspects, or offices of the one God.”Regarding this last question, Nicea opened the debate on the “theology of the Trinity”, understood as the exploration of relationships between people, the “immanent Trinity”, as opposed to the “economic Trinity”, that is, the Trinity understood in terms of the different roles of people in their worldly activities, in creation, redemption and sanctification. Nicea refuted the claim of homoousios by pointing out that the Son was “begotten”, not made, which indicates that, as indicated in a parallel formula then in force, “he came out of the Father's ousia.
In addition, in Constantinople it was declared that the Holy Spirit had the same type of ontological status as the Son. Thus, in the 4th century, at the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, and thanks to the work of the Cappadocians, the program of Trinitarian theology was established and the limits were set of orthodoxy. Christians claim to be monotheistic and yet, given the doctrine of the Trinity, they hold that there are three beings who are completely divine, namely, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The first enigma of the Trinity is to explain how we can attribute full divinity to the Persons of the Trinity without compromising monotheism or undermining statements about the distinction of Trinitarian persons.
Orthodox stories about the Trinity oscillate with concern between sabelism, which interprets Trinitarian people as mere phases, aspects, or offices of a single God, and tritheism, according to which people They are three gods. Tritheism is unacceptable, since it is incompatible with the historical Christian commitment to monotheism inherited from the Hebrew tradition. The fundamental problem of Trinitarian orthodoxy is to develop a doctrine of the Trinity that fits into the space between Sabelianism (or other versions of monarchianism) and tritheism. For social Trinitarians, in particular, the problem has been to articulate a narrative of the Trinity that affirms the individuality of people and their mutual relationships without falling into tritheism.
According to Latin Trinitarians, God, the Trinity, is an individual and not a community of individuals who share the same divine nature, and each person of the Trinidad is that individual. However, given this account, the trick is to block the inferences from the attribution of properties characteristic of a Trinitarian person to the attribution of those properties to other people. In addition, since it is maintained that people cannot be individualized by their worldly activities, Latin Trinidadians, whose project is to explain the distinctions between people, must develop a description of the intrtrinitarian relationships that distinguish them, a project that is, at best, speculative. This constitutes a difficulty for Social Trinitarians, in particular, to the extent that they understand Trinitarian people as distinct centers of conscience and will whose projects may be incompatible.
Swinburne, a social Trinitarian, attempts to avoid this difficulty by suggesting that the Father, by virtue of his character as the Source of Trinitarian Persons, has the authority to “establish the rules to avoid unresolvable conflicts between Trinitarian Persons” (Swinburne, pp. However, if we assume that a Trinitarian person's preferences take precedence so that other people voluntarily submit to him as a matter of policy, then it's hard to avoid the suspicion that some people in the Trinity are “more equal” than others (the heresy of subordinationism). Even if Social Trinitarians avoid subordinationism, the descending account of the Trinity, according to which the defining characteristic of the Father is that of being the source of Trinitarian persons, has theological ramifications that, in the end, gave rise to the defining controversy between Eastern and Western churches regarding the Filioque clause. The original version of the Creed formulated by the councils of Nicea and Constantinople states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (ek tou Patros ek poreuomenon). The Filioque clause, which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (ex Patri Filioque procedit), which appeared for the first time in the profession of faith formulated at the Council of Toledo in 589, spread throughout Gaul and eventually became a norm in the West, was categorically rejected by the Eastern churches for undermining the doctrine that the Father was the Source of the Trinitarian Persons and the personality of the Holy Spirit. Photius, the ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople who initiated the Phocian schism between East and West, argues in The Mystogy of the Holy Spirit that the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Son and the Father implies that the Father is not up to the task of generating Trinitarian persons.
Either the Father can do the work on his own or he can't. If he can, then the Son's participation in the generation of the Holy Spirit is superfluous and, therefore, there is no reason to accept the Filioque clause. If it can't, then it's a theological failure, which is absurd. Photios, which represents the Eastern tradition, assumes a descending account of the Trinity according to which the characteristic hypostatic property of the Father is his role as the Source of the other Trinitarian Persons.
In addition, it assumes that all the properties of Trinitarian persons are such that they are either generic properties of divinity, so they are shared by all people, or hypostatic properties possessed only by the people they characterize. It follows from these assumptions that the Filioque Clause must be rejected. Photios and other Eastern theologians were also concerned that the Western account of the Trinity would undermine the personal character of the Holy Spirit. According to a metaphor, widely used in the West, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are analogous to the Lover, the Beloved and the Love between them.
Love is not the type of thing that can have psychological properties or be considered a person, so Eastern theologians accused that the “flat Trinitarian image that dominated Western Trinitarian theology, in which the Holy Spirit was understood as a relationship or mediator between the Father and the Son, undermined the personality of the Holy Spirit”. But this does not seem to be a coherent position. If the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are different centers of consciousness, the kind of beings to which one can reasonably appeal for mercy, and the Trinity is a divine society, as the Social Trinitarians suggest, it would seem that the Trinity itself could not be personal in a solid sense. After invoking the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the invocation of the Trinity seems superfluous, as if I had to ask permission from each of my neighbors to build a fence on the adjoining property lines and then bring them together to ask for their permission as a group.
The doctrine of the Trinity, as noted above, is motivated by the Christian conviction that Jesus was, in a certain sense, divine. However, Jesus was born, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he did not understand Chinese; he believed that David was the author of all the psalms. These properties are apparently incompatible with divinity and, in fact, it seems that there are many predicates that are true about Jesus and that, apparently, could not be true for God and vice versa. To avoid the migration of Jesus' predicates to other Persons of the Trinity, we need to create enough logical space between Persons to block inferences between statements about Jesus and statements about the Father, so that, in general, “Jesus Fs” does not imply “God the Father Fs”, where “x Fs” says that x has a property, is a certain type of thing or performs a certain type of action.
The problem with monarchical stories, which make the Trinity “too tight”, is that they erase the logical space between Persons that would block such inferences. Since monarchists cannot use Trinitarian doctrine to block these inferences, they use Christology to do the job, either adopting very high or very low Christologies. The gap has to open somewhere and, if there is not enough logical space to separate it between the First and Second Person of the Trinity, it has to go between the Second Person, the divine Logos that from the beginning is with God and is God, and whatever the subject of Jesus preaches. One way to do this is through a very high Christology, according to which the problematic predicates of Jesus are not literally true about Christ, the divine Logos, but are true for something else: the human body that he animates, a mere appearance or an impostor. To see how this works, let's consider apolarism, an ultra-high Christology rejected at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, in which the Christological doctrine was formulated.
According to this heterodox view, the historical Jesus was a human being who had the Logos connected to the place that a rational human soul would normally occupy. Christ is the Logos and, to the extent that we attribute predications of Jesus such as “___ suffered under Pontius Pilate”, ___ was crucified, ___ died and “___ was buried”, that is nothing more than a facon de parler. Strictly speaking, these predicates are not true of Christ, but only of the body that he used for a time to carry out his worldly operations. Consequently, they are not transmitted to the Logos or to other persons of the Trinity, so there is no problem.
However, we can ask ourselves if, once the Trinitarian theologians of the Church evade the problem of the predicate of Jesus passing the ball to Christologists, there is any reason to worry about modalism or other strict trinitarian doctrines that minimize logical space between people. As we have seen, historically, the reason for rejecting Sabelianism was the concern that it would not leave enough space to open a gap between the Father and the Son that would block the inferences of “Jesus Fs” to “God the Father Fs”.However, if we can devise a theological account that blocks such inferences Christologically, opening the gap between the bearer of the predicates of Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity, for example, distinguishing between the divine and human natures of Christ or between Christ as human and Christ as God, then there is no particular reason to worry about space between Trinitarian people, so it may be that sabelism is a more attractive proposition than it was initially intended to be. Gregory's proposal has not received widespread attention. The idea that the expression “is in (must be interpreted)” as designating relative identity relationships has been widely debated, and Peter Geach and, more recently, Peter Van Inwagen have proposed solutions to the Trinitarian riddle that makes this movement possible.
Many philosophers are attracted to anti-realism, but accepting it as part of a solution to the Trinity problem is disastrous. Well, it is clear that orthodoxy will not allow us to say that the very existence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit depends on theory. Nor will it allow us to say that the distinction between divine Persons is in any way relative to our way of thinking or theorizing. The latter seems to be a way of modalism.
However, it's hard to see how it could be otherwise if Geach's theory of relative identity is true. Well, what else could it mean to say that there's simply no fact about whether the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same thing to each other, the same as God, or, in fact, the same as Baal? Michael Rae, “Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity”, Philosophia Christi, vol. The problem posed by material composition and other identity puzzles, including the Ship of Theseus and the problem of the divided self, which appears in discussions about personal identity, is that there are many cases in which we mean that objects x and y are the same, but in which the relationship between x and y is such that it violates the formal features of identity, either because it is one, many rather than one, one, or because it is not a relationship of unrestricted indiscernability. And this is precisely the problem posed by the doctrine of the Trinity. The moral of this story should perhaps be that “identity, as Frege noted in his famous quote, “raises challenging questions that are not quite easy to answer (Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference”).
In spite of everything, critics have ridiculed the Trinity doctrine as an excellent example of the absurdity of Christian doctrine, as did the late Bishop Pike when he suggested that the Trinity was “a kind of committee on God and the Trinity, talking about the Trinity is no worse than a lot of non-theological discourse about the identities of non-divine persons and common material objects”. Christadelphians believe that God is an indivisible unit, not three distinct persons that exist in one. God. They deny the divinity of Jesus, believing that he is completely human and separate from God.
They do not believe that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, but merely a force, the invisible power of God.
