Our Debt to the Heretics
In our exploration of Christian heresies, we see much of the problem stems from the effort to square Jesus’s life and ministry with the oneness of God. In other words, how can there be only one God, as the Old Testament affirms, then how does Jesus fit into that equation? The heretic, whatever his motivation, usually winds up denying some aspect of Jesus in order to ‘fit’ Him into their view of God’s oneness, usually either by denying His humanity or His divinity.
The early Church in contending with these heresies, developed the doctrine of the Trinity and for this we owe the heretics a debt. For our final installment, let us look at the Church father’s response but first we must take a slight step back.
THE ONENESS OF GOD
The Oneness of God is a central tenant of the three great Abrahamic Religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is “one”, (Deut 6:4), a unity in Himself. Philosophically speaking, God is understood as ‘Simple’ (i.e. Divine Simplicity) in that He possesses no parts, “simplicity is a denial that God is a composite of form and matter, essence and existence, substance and accident, genus and species, potency and act.”[1] As Aquinas argued, following Averroes[2], Divine Simplicity was essential for proper philosophical Theology.[3] If God were not simple, then it would mean He was made up of a composite of parts. In other words, He would be composed of something else. That would mean he would be reliant on something other than himself (over and above) to be held together, i.e. His being could not be self-caused because as a composite, being would be causally preeminent to the maintenance of His composition. In other words, a composite needs a power outside itself to maintain its cohesion as an entity, thus an Omnipotent Creator can have no parts. These divine attributes are not qualities such as the ones you or I possess, qualities that come in either greater or lesser degrees, or can be acquired, learned, or completely missing[4]. No, when we refer to attributes of God, it is to refer to them analogically.
For example, Christians hold that God is a Person, by which we don’t mean he’s a human but just infinitely greater. That’s the childlike image of a man with a white beard sitting on a throne in the sky. No, what we mean is a human is a person. He or she has personhood. What personhood is a question for a different time, however[5], we know that humans possess something that all other creatures in the world lack, personhood. So, if we possess personhood, then God, who is infinitely greater, cannot be less than a person and must at least possess personhood. That is what we mean by God is a person.
In the same way, power is not the same as power which I may acquire or lose, or squander, but rather, it something God is in which our closest analogy is power. The power of a 9.0 earthquake is massive, about equivalent to 25,000 nuclear bombs . While God can cause an earthquake, that doesn’t mean God has to muster up 25,000 nuclear bombs worth of power. If He were to will for there to be an earthquake, while of infinite power, just is. Such that His shaking of the earth and His will that you should step on that Lego piece to learn humility are the same level of power.
Power is one of the seven divine attributes of Allah , according to Averroes, who also showed that His possession of different attributes is consistent with Tawhid, the ‘oneness of God’ . Thus, any attribute of God is not so much something he possesses but simply is. Furthermore, these attributes are not parts or a compound of properties, but rather God’s actions observed from the limited, human perspective, who ascribe to them certain analogous terms to describe what is in reality a oneness. Thus, when we observe his power, His oneness is such that it is also Good, Beautiful, Wise, or what have you. Each one not equal, as separate qualities, but one and the same thing, differentiated only in our inadequacy to grasp the totality of God, or the totality of his action in relation to the situation in which we observed it.
So if we agree that the human intellect cannot fully grasp the oneness of God, i.e. while we can say that Beauty and Wisdom are both attributes of God, and can understand that they in turn must be in some way ultimately undifferentiated such that they are different descriptors of the same thing, two terms with different senses with the same reference, if you will, we have to admit that it remains ungraspable to our human intellect. We can say it, we just can’t understand it. It is a mystery.
TRINITY
Which brings us to Jesus Christ. The issue is that the Messiah promised by God to which Christianity attests was fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth must by necessity have been divine. The question is, can the oneness of God be such that Jesus could in fact be divine without conflicting with the oneness of God? How can there can be one God in three Persons?
Christians do not hold that Jesus, as the Son of God is the same as God the Father, only seen from a different perspective. Jesus is not a trick of the light. The Trinity is not an M.C. Escher painting where a 2D representation of a 3D environment allowing for visual paradoxes. He is not an analog of God. Rather, we hold that he is God Incarnate, who at the same time, is a distinct Person. So, while God is One, he is also Three. How can this be? How can there be parts of God?
That idea that God is Love itself is central to Christianity and surely it can be said that if God is all loving, then all that he does is with love? If so, all that he does, every act of power, every judgment pronounced, every wrong condemned, must be with love? And with love, then that love must be infinite, and if done with infinite love, then every act is at its core an act of love? That being the case, an act of divine wisdom may equally be an act of divine love. Therefore, we cannot separate an act of wisdom from an act of love. They are both one and the same act, just from a different perspective. In the same way, all his acts embody the same divine attributes, which we would agree are one and the same attribute, just from varying perspectives.
On the other hand, if God loves all that is good, then his love is caused by his knowledge of the good. Therefore, there is a relation between God as loving and God as knowing as well as a real distinction between, 1) His love due to his knowledge and, 2) His knowledge itself, while at the same time, there is no distinction between God Himself and, 1) His Love, and 2) His Knowledge.[6]
The point is, there can be unity in his actions while differentiation is the acts themselves. God is greater than us. We can not grasp Him. Our limited minds cannot contain Him. How then can we say that He cannot be Three Persons in one? If God is Love, mustn’t there be a beloved?
If, as Averroes argued, God must have Speech, to whom does he talk? To himself? Why must Himself be the same Person? Cannot God contain multitudes? God is a Trinity because Jesus is divine, and there can’t be multiplicity in God, therefore God and Jesus are one God. Jesus also said he’d send the Holy Spirit, he refers to it in personal terms and seems to have the powers of God, so it must be God, too.
In other words, the orthodox position is to take what we know, through the Church’s experience with and in Jesus and extrapolates from there to the Trinity. The heretical mistake is to take what we think about God and try to fit in what we know about Jesus (or whatever part of Scripture is in contention) in an effort to make it fit into our thoughts about God. I can’t put it better than Pope Benedict can, so I’ll let him have the last word;
“The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God, out of an attempt by philosophical thinking to figure out what the fount of all being was like; it developed out of the effort to digest historical experiences. The biblical faith was concerned at first—in the Old Covenant—with God, who was encountered as the Father of Israel, the Father of the peoples, the Creator of the world and its Lord. In the formative period of the New Testament comes a completely unexpected event in which God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side: in Jesus Christ one meets a man who at the same time knows and professes himself to be the Son of God. One finds God in the shape of the ambassador who is completely God, not some kind of intermediary being, yet with us says to God “Father”. The result is a curious paradox: on the one hand, this man calls God his Father and speaks to him intimately as to a person facing him; if this is not to be a piece of empty theatricality but truth, which alone befits God, then Christ must be someone other than this Father to whom he speaks and to whom we speak. But, on the other hand, he is himself the real proximity of God coming to meet us, God’s mediation to us, and that precisely because he himself is God as man, in human form and nature, God-with-us (“Emmanuel”). His mediation would indeed basically cancel itself out and become a separation instead of a mediation if he were someone other than God, if he were an intermediate being. He would then be guiding us, not toward God, but away from him. It thus turns out that as mediator he is God himself and “man himself”—both with equal reality and totality. But this means that God meets me here, not as Father, but as Son and as my brother, whereby—both incomprehensibly and quite comprehensibly—a duality appears in God: God as “I” and “You” in one. This new experience of God is followed finally by a third, the experience of the Spirit, the presence of God in us, in our innermost being. And again it turns out that this “Spirit” is not simply identical either with the Father or the Son, nor is he yet a third thing erected between God and us; it is the manner in which God gives himself to us, in which he enters into us, so that he is in man yet, in the midst of this “indwelling”, is infinitely above him.”[7]
[1] Leithart, Peter, “What Sorts of Parts Is God Without?” https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-sorts-of-parts-is-god-without/
[2] Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (referred to as Averroes by the West), whom Aquinas referred to Averroes as ‘The Commenter’), Pieper, Josef, Richard. Winston, and Clara. Winston. Guide to Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius Press, 1991
[3] Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I.3, Weigel, Peter J. Aquinas on simplicity : an investigation into the foundations of his philosophical theology. Oxford New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
[4] For a good overview of Divine Simplicity view, see Davies, Brian ‘Simplicity’ in Taliaferro, Charles., and Chad V. Meister. The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology. Cambridge University Press, 2010. pp. 31-45.
Stump, E., 2003, “Aquinas on Being, Goodness, and Divine Simplicity,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 30: Die Logik des Transzendentalen (Festschrift fur Jan A. Aertsen zum 65. Geburtstag), M. Pickave (ed.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 212–225
For the best counterarguments, see Plantinga, Alvin 1980, Does God Have a Nature?, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.
Swinburne, Richard, 1994, The Christian God Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.