The Trinity and God’s Omni-Attributes
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ON THE TRINITY
Is Trinity Monotheism Orthodox?
Dear Dr. Craig,
I’ve been listening to your Defenders podcast since it restarted in December of ’09 and have greatly benefited from the content. I’d like to thank you for your continuous love for God and His truths; your work is a real blessing. Recently, in your Defenders class, you have been discussing the doctrine of the Trinity. The most recent two podcasts have been on an attempt to understand the relationship between the diverse members of the Trinity and their unity. You have been forming and defending the model that is in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview in chapter 29 in your podcasts where you use the analogy of Cerberus in Greek mythology.
My question has to do with your model of the Trinity and a recent article that I’ve read which disagrees with your formulation. In Thomas Flint and Michael Rea’s The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, specifically in chapter 18, Michael Rea argues against your formulation starting on page 415. He labels the model you are defending a part-whole Trinitarianism. He writes, “… Moreland and Craig want to preserve the view that God is divine while denying that that God is a fourth divine thing on a par with the persons. Thus, they distinguish two kinds of divinity: the full divine nature, which is possessed by God and implies tri-unity; and a derivative divine nature, possessed by each person.”
Rea then objects by raising two problems, which he thinks are “devastating” to your model. First he argues that you are unable to affirm the opening line of the Nicene Creed. Rae writes, “… Moreland and Craig cannot affirm the opening line of the Nicene Creed: ‘We believe in one God, the Father, almighty.’ For, on their view, God is a fundamentally different thing from the Father” (p. 416).
Second, Rea argues that the model you defend cannot affirm the crucial homoousion clause in the same creed “unless they reject the idea that there is exactly one divine nature.” Rea unpacks this when he writes, “… the only viable interpretations of the creedal claim that the Son is homoousion with the Father have it that the Son is either numerically the same substance as the Father or of the same nature as the Father. (Natures were also referred to as ‘substances’; hence, being consubstantial with something might just mean having the same nature.) The former, of course, they reject. The latter they accept; but in accepting it, they posit, effectively, two divine natures, one ‘genuine’, possessed only by God; the other derivative, but still divine, possessed by the two persons. Of course, they could deny that the derivative nature is a divine nature. But in so doing, they seem to strip the persons of their divinity, which would conflict with other parts of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds. If all this is right, then, part-whole Trinitarianism is in serious trouble …” (p. 416).
I’m curious how you would respond to Michael Rea as I value both of your contributions to theology in particular, and the advancement of the kingdom of God in general. I’m not sure if you have interacted with Rea on these points before, but I’d love to hear a response to these objections. Thanks again for all that you do.
Jeff
United States
Dr. Craig’s Response
Thank you, Jeff, for drawing my attention to these criticisms! Are they as devastating as Michael thinks?
(1) Does the opening line of the Creed affirm that God just is the Father? I think Michael fails to take into account the New Testament background of the phrase “We believe in one God, the Father, almighty.” The creedal context of that phrase is:
We believe in one God, the Father, almighty …;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God …;
And in the Holy Spirit.
The confession is drawn from 1 Cor. 8:6: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” The creed lifts Paul’s key phrase “one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ” and then tacks on for Trinitarian purposes the terse mention of the Holy Spirit. As Murray Harris explains in his fine book Jesus as God,11 the reason one finds relatively few references in the New Testament to Jesus as ho theos (God) is because that term was reserved for the Father. When the New Testament writers use the word “God,” they are typically referring to the Father. Since the New Testament writers didn’t believe that Jesus was the Father, they had to find other expressions to indicate His deity, such as ho kyrios (Lord). The creed follows this idiom. So when it refers to “one God, the Father,” that needn’t be taken to mean that the Father is the whole of who God is. To talk of ho theos is just to talk about the Father. Thus, when Jesus is confessed to be “the Son of God,” this is taken to mean “begotten from the Father.”
INSIGHT
Note these valuable distinctions and emphases in Dr. Craig’s answer. They will shape not only our theology of the Trinity but our relationship with the Trinity. For example, if the Father is the whole of who God is, think of the implications of that for not only personal interaction with the members of the Trinity but for understanding God’s actions in His world. For more on this, see Fred Sanders’ book The Deep Things of God.
(2) Being homoousion (consubstantial) with the Father is then not problematic because the Father isn’t taken to be the whole being God is. The Father and the Son share the same derivative nature (as Michael puts it; I’m not altogether happy with this way of making the distinction). We shouldn’t think of the divine persons as instances of God’s nature, lest we have a quaternity instead of a Trinity. There is just one being which is the Triune God. The Father, Son, and Spirit share the same essential properties that make them count as divine, like omnipotence, omniscience, moral perfection, necessity, etc. It is misleading to contrast the persons’ nature with the “genuine” nature of God, as though their divinity were somehow second-rate or counterfeit. A cat’s skeleton and DNA are fully and genuinely feline even if they are not themselves cats, that is, instances of the cat nature. Similarly, the Father, Son, and Spirit are genuinely divine, though they are not each a Trinity, that is, an instance of God’s nature.
Does Infinite Personhood Imply Pantheism?
Dear Dr. Craig,
My name is Nathan. I am 17 and live in Birmingham, United Kingdom. After reading Spinoza’s Ethics, I am now in a philosophical conflict between what seems to be rational in pantheism and my religious views of Calvinism. I was wondering if you could help.
My question is regarding whether the concept of an “infinite person” makes sense if you believe in the theist conception of God. As God is infinitely powerful, wise, and loving, if an infinite person as a concept makes no logical sense, then neither does the idea of God.
First, we must identify what it means to be a person. A person is to be a particular person, distinct from others and with our own boundaries. The interaction between two people is only possible due to them having their own border, for otherwise they would not be a distinct person. Thus, we arrive at our first premise: “Personhood is finite.”
If personhood is finite then it follows, “Infinite beings are not persons.”
Then we come to the idea of God. God is by definition an infinite being. This entails He has no boundaries, and He is not distinct from other beings. Therefore, “God is infinite, and thus is not a person.”
We can summarize the argument as the following:
1) Personhood is finite
2) Infinite beings are not persons
3) God is infinite, and thus is not a person
This argument does not have implications for a pantheist, for it shows that if God is infinite, He is not distinct from anything. However, a monotheist will have to reject this argument, for they believe that one can have a personal relationship with God, which is only possible if He is a distinct being from the believer. Therefore, my question Dr. Craig is how would you respond to this pantheistic argument?
Nathan
United Kingdom
Dr. Craig’s Response
I was intrigued by your question, Nathan, because it mirrors so closely the argument of three theologians that I criticize in my article “Pantheists In Spite of Themselves?”12 in which I argue that these theologians, in endorsing your sort of argument, are implicitly embracing pantheism! The article appears on our site, and I’d commend it to you.
The problem with the argument, it seems to me, is that the first premise is false. The justification given for the first premise is that persons have “borders” or “boundaries” and are, therefore, finite. The assumption is that anything that is bounded is finite. That is demonstrably false. The natural number series 0, 1, 2, 3, … is bounded by 0 but is not, therefore, finite. To give a physical example, a wall of bricks with an infinite number of bricks in it may stretch to infinity to one’s right but may have a front edge and be, say, only three bricks in height. Persons have “boundaries” in a metaphorical sense: you are not I. God is not Gordon Brown. But the fact that two persons are distinct doesn’t imply that one of them can’t be infinite. Of course, God’s infinity isn’t really a quantitative concept but has reference to His superlative attributes. But then there’s no reason to think that one person could not be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally perfect, eternal, etc., and the other limited in these same respects. None of those attributes excludes the existence of a distinct person who has limited knowledge, goodness, power, etc.
INSIGHT
Note the important distinction between infinity as a qualitative concept vs. infinity as a reference to God’s superlative attributes.
By the way, why not explore Wesleyan theology as an alternative to Calvinism? That’s a far better alternative than Spinozism!
Trinity and Incarnation
Dr. Craig,
First let me start by saying that your Defenders class has become part of my daily routine. I use part of my lunch hour (about 45 minutes) to listen on my iPod and take notes.
While listening to the Doctrine of Christ series, which I’ve completed by the way, only one question had me on the edge of my seat and I was burning hoping someone in the class would ask! You were giving a plausible theory on how to reconcile the fact that the Trinity consists of 3 persons, yet Jesus, to qualify as fully God and fully human, might pose the problem of adding a “4th” person to the Godhead. You then went on to discuss that it was possible that all the attributes of the Logos were kept in the subconscious of Jesus’ mind. What about the attribute of omnipresence? Omnipresence doesn’t have the quality of being conscious or unconscious no more than my hair color being so whether I recognize it or not.
So in short, how to you reconcile the divine attribute of omnipresence in the Logos and the limited physical body of Jesus?
Aaron
Dr. Craig,
Thank you for your ministry. Your work and your example are a real inspiration.
I’ve been studying the Trinity, and I have a question about how the Trinity and the Incarnation relate to each other. As I understand it, in the Incarnation a human nature was added to and united with the eternal divine nature of the Son. As I understand the Trinity, the divine nature is one, a unity in which the three divine persons subsist. So the question is, if the divine nature of the Son is conjoined to a human nature, doesn’t that affect the divine nature of the Father and the Spirit as well, since they share the same, undivided divine nature with the Son? I struggle to understand how the union of two natures in Christ is “compartmentalized” in the Son, without in some way “adulterating” the divine nature in the other two persons. True, the Person of Christ is distinct from the Father and Spirit, but all three share in the one divine nature, which now seems to include the human nature of Christ.
I hope this question is clear. Trying to understand the Trinity can be confusing at times. Thank you for any help you can provide on this issue.
Clark
Bronx
Dr. Craig’s Response
As both of you discern, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are closely connected in very interesting ways. Let’s take your question first, Clark. Yes, God’s nature is one both in the sense that there is an essence of God comprised of certain properties which all of the members of the Trinity share, such as aseity, necessity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, etc., and in the sense that there is just one concrete entity that is God.13 I think that the persons of the Trinity, who are distinct from one another, also have contingent properties that are not shared by all three persons. For example, only the Son has the property of having a human as well as a divine nature.
Now, your question is how the Son can assume a human nature without the nature of the other two persons being affected. I take it that you think that if the Son is incarnate, then it follows that the Father and the Spirit must become incarnate, too, since they all share the same nature. The mistaken assumption behind your question, I think, is that it is the nature rather than the person of the Son that becomes incarnate. The doctrine of the Incarnation is not that the Son’s divine nature somehow took on a human nature. Rather the claim is that the Second Person of the Trinity, who has a divine nature, took on in addition to His divine nature a human nature as well. So you shouldn’t think of the Incarnation in terms of two natures somehow blending together; indeed, the classical formulation is that the natures remain unchanged and distinct in the Incarnation. They are united only in the sense that there is one person who comes to have them both.
So it’s quite mistaken to say that “the one divine nature … now seems to include the human nature of Christ.” Au contraire, the natures remain distinct even for the Son. This is evident in the fact that the Son’s having a human nature is a contingent fact about Him; in possible worlds in which God refrains from creation altogether, the Second Person of the Trinity has no human nature. So His humanity cannot be part of His divine nature or essence.
Since neither the Father nor the Spirit took on a human body, they do not have human natures in addition to the divine nature. Only the Son assumed flesh and so took on a human nature.
INSIGHT
Note the important distinction between nature and person with respect to which becomes incarnate. This allows us not only to better understand the omnipresence of the Logos during His “state of humiliation” but it also allows us to appreciate how the Son genuinely and consciously experienced His earthly life.
Now, in answer to your question, Aaron, my goal was to find a biblically faithful and logically coherent account of the Incarnation that ascribes to Christ two complete natures, human and divine, but does not postulate two persons in Christ, a human person and a divine person (a heresy known as Nestorianism). I do this by postulating that the soul of Jesus of Nazareth was the divine Logos. In order to make such an account biblically adequate, I differentiate in a theologically significant way between Jesus’ conscious life and His subconscious during His earthly sojourn (His so-called state of humiliation).
Now, you want to know how such an account deals with the omnipresence of the Logos during His state of humiliation. If you’ll listen to the Defenders podcasts on the doctrine of God, you’ll find that when it comes to omnipresence, I take this attribute to mean not that God is spread out like ether throughout space but that He is cognizant of and causally active at every point in space. That can still hold for the Logos during His state of humiliation. It just wasn’t part of Jesus’ conscious life.
I suspect your difficulty is that you’re thinking of the Incarnation as the Logos’ somehow shrinking Himself down to the size of a human body. But then you’re making the same mistake as Clark: thinking of the Incarnation as something the divine nature does rather than something a divine person does. The Logos takes on a human body as His own; but He does not cease to be cognizant of and causally active at every point in space.
The Trinity and God’s Omni-Attributes
Dear Dr. Craig,
I have been diligently listening to your podcasts. You are doing an amazing work for the kingdom. I am keeping you in my prayers for wisdom, purity, and strength. You mentioned the Trinity may be explained by three personalities in one being, kind of like a multiple personality disorder, but in this case, it would be very ordered. I found that very helpful.
The question is if each personality is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent that would mean that three different persons would have these properties. But these properties are things only one person can have, necessarily so. That is one of the arguments given to why there can only be one God.
I look forward to reading, or hearing your response.
Under His Mercy,
Khaldoun
Dr. Craig’s Response
It’s great to hear from a philosophy colleague, Khaldoun! Thank you for your prayers! I trust you’re doing well.
It doesn’t seem to me that either omnipresence or omniscience presents even a prima facie problem for a plurality of persons in the Godhead. Omnipresence is, in God’s case, the property of transcending space (i.e., existing but not existing in space) but being cognizant of and causally active at every point in space. There’s just no apparent reason why several persons could not be omnipresent in this sense. So I see no argument for monotheism based on the attribute of omnipresence (any more than timelessness).
The property of omniscience is the property of knowing that p, for any true proposition p, and not believing not –p, or, in other words, the property of knowing only and all true propositions. Again, this definition seems to pose no difficulty for a plurality of omniscient persons. It would occasion difficulty only if you held that there are purely private propositions, like “I am J. P. Moreland,” which could not be truly believed by anyone other than J. P. Moreland. If you held to that, you would have to hold, not merely that there can be only one omniscient person, but that if such a person exists, there are no other persons at all! For if Jones, say, existed, God could not Himself know “I am Jones” (only Jones knows that!) and so He would not be omniscient after all. But virtually all philosophers hold that the propositional content of sentences containing what are called personal indexical terms (like “I,” “you,” “we,” etc., is universally accessible. When I say, “I’m hungry,” and you say to me, “You’re hungry,” we express the same proposition, namely, that Bill Craig is hungry, from our different standpoints. If this is correct, then there is no difficulty with the three Trinitarian persons’ each having complete propositional knowledge.
Rather, the only possible difficulty is occasioned by omnipotence. Philosophers like Richard Swinburne have, indeed, argued for monotheism on the grounds that there cannot be a plurality of omnipotent beings because they could come into conflict with each other and so would limit each other’s power. But suppose that it is logically impossible for the persons to come into conflict because they are essentially harmonious and so always will the same thing. Then the argument would fall to the ground. And it is part of the classical doctrine of the Trinity that the persons of the Godhead all share the same knowledge, love, and volition, making conflict impossible.
INSIGHT
Note how this concept of “essentially harmonious” is crucial for understanding how the attribute of omnipotence is shared by the persons of the Godhead.
A better argument for there being at most one omnipotent God is that any other being that exists must be within the power of God to create or not. But then the existence of that being depends asymmetrically upon God. So God has power over it, while it lacks this power over God. So there can be at most one omnipotent God.
This conclusion will, however, be welcomed by the Trinitarian theist, since he believes that there is in fact only one God! Perhaps we should say that omnipotence is, like necessity and timelessness, primarily a property of the Godhead and only derivatively of its members. So while there can be at most one omnipotent God, there is no problem with that God’s being tri-personal.
11. Murray J. Harris, Jesus as God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992). This has now been reprinted by Wipf and Stock (2008).
12. William Lane Craig, “Pantheists in Spite of Themselves? Pannenberg, Clayton, and Shults on Divine Infinity,” American Theological Inquiry 5:1 (2012): 3–23.
13. For more on this, see “In What Sense Is God a ‘Simple Being’?” below regarding individual natures, pages 172–74.