Biblical & Theological Issues

by Steven B. Cowan

The doctrine of the trinity (DOT) is an essential doctrine of the Christian faith. That is, it is among those doctrines that define the very essence of Christianity; a doctrine that must be believed for one to legitimately call himself a Christian. The DOT, of course, is the biblical teaching that there is one and only one being who is God, but that this God exists eternally in three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The biblical support for this doctrine is very strong and clear. First, the bible teaches that there is only one God (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 44:6; John 17:3; 1 Tim. 2:5). Second, there are three distinct persons who are called God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1:2; Heb. 1:8; Matt. 1:23; Phil. 2:6; Acts 5:3-4; 1 Cor. 2:10-11). Third, the three divine persons are coequal and coeternal (Ps. 90:2; Isa. 9:6; John 1:1; 5:16-19; Phil. 2:6-7; Col. 2:9; Matt. 3:16-17; 28:18-20). It is from these three biblical facts that the church has derived the doctrine that there is one God who exists in three distinct Persons.¹

However, this key Christian doctrine is attacked as being absurd or contradictory. Jehovah’s Witnesses claim the following: “Many sincere believers have found [the trinity] to be confusing, contrary to normal reason, unlike anything in their experience. How, they ask, could the Father be God, Jesus be God, and the Holy Spirit be God, yet there be not three Gods but only one God?”² The Muslim Qur’an, in Sura 4:171, admonishes,

O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers. And do not say, “Three”; desist – it is better for you. Indeed, Allah is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And sufficient is Allah as Disposer of affairs.

One Muslim writer asks, “How can God be one and three at the same time? It is absurd, rationally impossible, and mathematically wrong. Unity and Diversity cannot gather together.”³ Atheists and agnostics are another class of skeptics on the trinity. Michael Martin charges the DOT with logical incoherence:

In simple terms the incoherence can be understood as follows: There are three divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Yet these three divine persons are supposed to be distinct from one another: the Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit. However, there is exactly one God.⁴

Is the DOT contradictory? If it is, then the doctrine is in trouble. For contradictions are necessarily false. And if the DOT is necessarily false, then Christianity is false. In this article, I am going to respond to this challenge. I don’t pretend to understand the mystery of the trinity fully. It is ultimately incomprehensible. Nevertheless, I do believe and will attempt to show that it is not contradictory. There are models, or possible ways of understanding aspects of the DOT that demonstrate its logical coherence.

The Razor’s Edge of Orthodoxy
As we get started, let me make clear what this doctrine has traditionally asserted and what it has not asserted.⁵ Many Christians have a confused understanding of this most central of Christian doctrines. The DOT is not. . .

1. There is one God and there are three gods
   Nor. . .
   2. God is one person and yet three persons.

Both of these assertions are contradictions! They are clearly absurd and false. And this is not what Christians have historically affirmed about the DOT. When the church fathers were formulating the DOT and trying to make sense of the biblical data, one of their foremost goals was to avoid contradiction. So, attempting to be faithful to the Bible as well as the canons of logic, they characterized the Trinity as follows:

God is one in essence or being, three in person. There is one and only one being called “God,” and yet (mysteriously) within the being of this one God are three persons. God is not one and three in the same sense or the same way. He is not one being and three beings. He is not one person and three persons. Rather, He is one in one sense—his being—but three in another sense—his persons.

But having said all this, we are still not out of the woods. What exactly is this distinction between being and personhood, and can it really be the case that one being can be three persons all at once? To see the difficulty, consider that Christians want to say these three things:

1. The Father is God.
2. The Son is God.
3. The Spirit is God.

The question we have to ask here is what is meant by the word “is” in these sentences? Philosophers and grammarians typically distinguish between the “is of identity” and the “is of predication.” In the is of identity, the word “is” is used to make the assertion that the thing before the “is” is the same thing as the thing after the “is,” as in, for example,

Mohammad Ali is the greatest boxer.

The author of Hamlet is Shakespeare.

Here, it is claimed that Muhammad Ali is numerically identical to—the same thing as—the greatest boxer, and that the author of Hamlet is numerically identical to Shakespeare.

In the is of predication, what comes after the “is” attributes some property or characteristic to the thing before the “is,” as in, for example,

John is human.

Fido is loyal.

In these statements, the predicates are not numerically identical to their subjects, but simply describe or modify their subjects in some way. Now let us suppose that the “is” in our three statements about God is the “is of identity.” In that case, we could easily argue that there is no contradiction in these claims. To see this, consider these two statements:

Cassius Clay is the greatest boxer.

Muhammed Ali is the greatest boxer.

Is there a contradiction here? Of course not. The reason, we all know, is because Cassius Clay is Muhammad Ali. So, using the “is of identity,” we understand that there is no contradiction because we understand that these “two” persons are really one and the same person. But, now let’s apply this to the Trinity. Recall our three Trinitarian claims:

1. The Father is God.
2. The Son is God.
3. The Spirit is God.

If we understand the “is” here as the “is of identity,” then we may avoid contradiction, but only at the cost saying that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one and the same person! But, that is not the doctrine of the trinity, but a heresy known as Modalism. This heresy, held today by groups like Oneness Pentecostals, holds that there is one God and one Person who is God, but this one divine Person manifests himself differently at different times and places. At one time, he manifests himself as the Father, at another time as the Son, and so on. This is not what the Bible teaches about God. The Father, Son, and Spirit are three distinct persons. So, the “is of identity” seems to pose problems for the DOT.

Suppose, then, that we use the “is of predication” to understand our three Trinitarian claims. This would allow us to avoid contradiction, too. Consider these statements:

Matt is human.

Mark is human.

Luke is human.

There is no contradiction here because we understand the word “human” to be a property or quality that can be attributed to more than one individual simultaneously. Matt, Mark, and Luke are three distinct things that all share the characteristic of being human. Now applying this to the DOT, we can say that the phrase “is God” in our three trinitarian sentences is predicating or attributing to the three persons of the trinity a characteristic or quality, so that we mean something like this:

(1’) The Father is divine.

(2’) The Son is divine.

(3’) The Holy Spirit is divine.

Well, this does avoid contradiction, but apparently only at the cost of saying that there are three different gods!—just like Matt, Mark, and Luke are three human beings. This, too, is a heresy; it’s tritheism, and not what the Bible teaches or what Christians want to affirm.

Where does this leave us? Well, it shows us that avoiding heresy with this doctrine is very tricky! Some might say impossible. In church history, Christians have developed two broad approaches to trying to solve this problem. First, there is Social Trinitarianism , which emphasizes the plurality of God while attempting to avoid tritheism. Second, there is what is called Latin Trinitarianism (from the early Latin Fathers who defended this view), which emphasizes the unity of God while attempting to avoid Modalism. Unfortunately, most Social Trinitarian models fail to avoid tritheism; they wind up in one way or another having to say that there are three distinct gods. And most Latin Trinitarian models fall victim to modalism, in one way or another distorting the distinctions between the three persons.

Nonetheless, there have been some accounts of the trinity in recent days that are more promising than earlier models. Indeed, I want to share with you two particular models, one a social trinity model and one a Latin model, that seem to accomplish what Christians through the ages have wanted—a way of picturing or conceptualizing the trinity that shows there can be one being who is three persons—and without falling into modalism or tritheism.

Craig and Moreland’s Trinity Monotheism
William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland have defended a version of Social Trinitarianism that they call “Trinity Monotheism.”⁶ The essence of their view is to understand the persons of the trinity as existing in some sort of part-whole relation, in which it is the being of the trinity as a whole that is properly called God; that is, only the whole trinity exemplifies the entire divine nature. So, when we say, “The Trinity is God” we are using the “is of identity,” making an identity statement. However, when we say, “The Father is God” or “The Son is God,” what we say is true, but we are not using the is of identity, but the is of predication, saying something like “The Father is divine” as suggested earlier.

When you think about it, this seems to match very well some of the other language we use when talking about God. For example, we believe that God is necessarily triune—it is an essential property of God that he is triune. But we would never say that the Father is triune or the Son is triune. This means, then, that the trinity as a whole has a least one property that each of the three persons does not have. Moreover, Christians admit that the Father is not the whole Godhead; neither is the Son the whole Godhead. For the same reason we also believe that the three persons are distinct in some way—the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Holy Spirit, etc; otherwise we are back into modalism.

So, the trinity as a whole alone exemplifies the divine nature, and the persons of the trinity are divine insofar as they are “parts” of the Trinity. Craig and Moreland provide an analogy to help to get the idea. We say that a cat is feline. But we may also rightly say that a cat’s DNA is feline, and so is a cat’s skeleton. But a cat’s DNA is not a cat, neither is a cat’s skeleton a cat. Hence, the persons of the trinity can be said to be divine in the same way that a cat’s skeleton is feline.

So far so good, you might say, but there is still a serious worry. If we conceive the trinity as a part-whole relation like this, then in what way are the person’s of the trinity parts of the very same being? The DOT is that there is one being which exists in three persons. But, if the three persons of the trinity are indeed distinct persons, with their own centers of consciousness, their own wills, etc., then doesn’t this part-whole idea take us right back to tritheism?

Maybe not. Our confusions over this issue usually arise because in our experience we associate one being or one soul with one person. That is, each of us has a soul (understanding a soul as an immaterial substance). And associated with that one soul that we have is one set of rational faculties—i.e., one person. Yet it does not seem at all implausible to conceive of a soul (one immaterial substance) that has three sets of rational faculties, even though such a thing clearly lies outside of our experience.

Perhaps another illustration will help. Think about the possibility that animals have souls, albeit souls of a different kind than ours, souls with less complex faculties and capacities. Indeed, if you believe (as I’m sure you do), that animals have emotions and can see and perceive things like colors and smells, then you have a very strong reason to believe that animals do have souls, because emotions and sensory perceptions are mental properties that can only be had by immaterial souls. So, let us suppose that the dog Fido has a soul. How many persons is Fido?—None. Now I have a soul, too. How many persons am I?—One. Well, if we can have souls that are no persons, and souls that are one person, why can’t there be a soul with more than one person? I can’t see why not. So we have a social trinitarian model that seems to avoid tritheism.

Rea and Brower’s Constitutional View
Christian philosophers Michael Rea and Jeffrey Brower have recently offered another account of the trinity that is more in line with the Latin approach.⁸ To understand their view, we have to get clear on a couple of things. First, we need an understanding of Aristotle’s view of accidental sameness. To understand this concept, we need to back up and understand the problem that Aristotle’s view is designed to solve: it’s called the problem of material constitution.

Consider a bronze statue of the Greek goddess Athena. The statue is made out of a lump of bronze. Now think about that statue of Athena made out of a lump of bronze—picture it in your mind. Now count it—how many material objects are there when you consider the statue? It seems pretty clear that there is only one material object, the statue, right? But not so fast. If you think about it very carefully, you might come to think that there are actually two objects there occupying the same space—the statue and the lump of bronze that it’s made of. Why might we think so? Because the statue and the lump of bronze have different properties. For example, the lump of bronze can survive the process of being melted down and recast while the statue cannot. So, the lump has a property the statue lacks. In logic there’s a law called Leibniz’s law of identity. The law says that for any entities a and b, if a and b are identical, then for any property P, a has P if and only if b has P. In other words, if “two” things are really identical and really only one thing (like Cassius Clay and Mohammad Ali), they will have all their properties in common. If they differ at all in their properties, they cannot be identical. But, again, the lump of bronze has a property the statue does not. So, they cannot be identical. This indicates that when you count how many things there are when you’re looking at the statue of Athena, you should count two, not one. This seems very strange, of course.

Aristotle, however, may have a way out of this problem. He believed that all material objects (cats, dogs, tables, & chairs) were a composition of matter and form —what he called a “hylomorphic compound.” Forms are complex universals (organized collections of properties). The matter of a thing is not an individual thing, but is what combines with forms to make individual things. What is the statue of Athena on this view? It’s a hylomorphic compound of bronze (matter) and the form “Athena-ness.”

Now also consider the fact that the lump out of which Athena is made could have been made into a different object (a statue of Caesar or a bronze urn). In which case, the same lump could have taken on different forms. And consider that there are lots of other common objects that might be subject to the problem of material constitution. A hand can be made into a fist—so the same matter can have the form “hand” and the form “fist.”

With all this in mind, Aristotle introduced the concept of “accidental sameness,” a concept that allows us to count only one material object, while denying that the two entities in question are numerically identical (in accordance with Leibniz’s Law). In other words, because material objects like the statue of Athena and the lump of bronze are hylomorphic compounds, we can say that the lump and the statue are the same material object, but they are not numerically identical (since they differ in properties). That is, there is only one material object, but two distinct things that are simultaneously constituted by that one material object.

Aristotle’s solution to the problem of material constitution has the effect of distinguishing a third sense of the term “is.” Remember from earlier that we spoke of the “is of predication” and the “is of identity,” as in the following statements:

Moses is red-headed.
Moses is the man who led Israel out of Egypt.

However, Aristotle (and Rea and Brower following him) says that we also need the “is of constitution” (or numerical sameness without identity). Here’s an example of a sentence using the “is of constitution:”

Athena is bronze.

This sentence is not simply predicating an accidental or essential property of Athena, but is telling us what matter constitutes the form “Athena.”

Now Rea and Brower apply this to the DOT by way of analogy. God and the trinity are not, of course, material objects. But, according to them, the divine essence (an immaterial substance) plays the same role for God as matter does for material objects, and the persons of the trinity are distinct forms that are simultaneously constituted by the divine essence. So, in the sentences

The Father is God

The Son is God

The Spirit is God

the “is” is to be understood neither as the “is of identity” nor the “is of predication,” but as the “is of constitution.” This way the alleged contradiction is solved. We have one being, one immaterial substance, which simultaneously constitutes three distinct persons in the same way that the one material object constitutes both the lump of bronze and the statue of Athena. So, we appear to have a Latin Trinitarian model that avoids modalism.

Trinitarian Heresies

Modalism (a.k.a. Sabellianism)
The three Persons of the Trinity are seen as different “modes” of the Godhead. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct individual persons, but are merely different manifestations of a single divine Person.

Tritheism
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are understood as three independent divine beings or gods. A form of polytheism.

Arianism
The preexistent Christ/Son is not God, but was the first and greatest of God’s creatures.

Docetism
Jesus Christ was a purely divine being who only had the “appearance” of being human.

Ebionitism
A Jewish sect that accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but regarded Him as purely human.

Adoptionism
Jesus was born merely human, but was later “adopted” by God – either at his baptism or at his resurrection –in such as way as to become divine, though in a lesser sense than the Father who alone is fully God.

Conclusion
As we have seen, a common objection to the DOT is that it is contradictory or logically incoherent. This objection is often motivated by the difficulties we have seen in trying to elaborate on what exactly Christians mean when they say the God is one being in three Persons. Yet, we have also seen that there are some plausible and defensible models—of both Social Trinitarian and Latin Trinitarian types—that demonstrate the logical coherence of the DOT. There is, therefore, no reason to believe that the doctrine of the trinity is contradictory.

Steven B. Cowan (Ph.D., Arkansas) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Apologetics at Southeastern Bible College in Birmingham, Alabama, and the editor of Areopagus Journal.

notes
¹For a further elaboration and defense of the biblical case for the trinity, see, James R. White, The Forgotten Trinity (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998); Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Bible Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervam, 1994), 226-39; and Ron Rhodes, “Defending the Deity of Christ and the Trinity against Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Areopagus Journal 5:4 (2005): 23-28.
²The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, “Should You Believe in the Trinity?” (internet article accessed at http:// www.watchtower.org/e/ti/index.htm).
³Shabir Ahmad Usmani, The Noble Qur’an: Tafseer-eUsmani (New Delhi: Idara Isha’at-e-diniyat, 1990), 1:ii.
⁴Michael Martin, “Review of Hugo Meynell’s Is Christianity True?” (internet article accessed at the Secular Web: http:// www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/meynell. html).
⁵Much of the content of this section is inspired by Thomas D. Senor, “The Incarnation and the Trinity,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 253-56.
⁶See J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity, 2003), 589-95.
⁷For the case that mental properties are not physical but necessarily immaterial, see James S. Spiegel, “A Philosophical Case for Mind-Body Dualism,” Areopagus Journal 8:6 (2008): 14-20.
⁸Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea, “Material Constitution and the Trinity,” Faith and Philosophy 22:1 (2005): 57-76.

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 11 No. 1 – Questions on the Divine Attributes)