Defending Christian Doctrine
Bulletin Roundtable
Bulletin Roundtable
In this Bulletin Roundtable, our contributors were asked to briefly explain and defend a Christian doctrine.
Paul Copan
The Trinity
Even in ancient times, pre-Socratic philosophers wrestled with the question of the one and the many. Is ultimately reality an unchanging oneness, as Parmenides maintained? Or is it a matter of a fluctuating multiplicity, as Heraclitus argued? The late theologian Colin Gunton emphasized that unless a third way exists, settling for either sole alternative—(a) the unchanging one or (b) the changing, disparate many—leads to self-contradiction and a collapsing in on itself of either alternative.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity steps into this gap, proving to be a powerful, rich, and robust resolution to this ancient conundrum. In it we see both unity and community, oneness and differentiation. This doctrine affirms unity, plurality, and relationality. Relationship does not begin with creatures made by God. Within the Godhead is found a mutually-indwelling community of persons, existing from eternity in deep, loving relationship.
What’s more, the doctrine of the Trinity is both coherent and fruitful.
The Coherence of the Doctrine
The doctrine of the Trinity is coherent and not self-contradictory, contrary to what Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the early Bostonian Unitarians have claimed. We have three divine persons in one indivisible being or substance—not three separate beings. Consider the mythological example of Cerberus as a helpful analogy: three centers of awareness within one canine being. There is unbreakable unity as well as distinction within that unity. By contrast, common analogies like the three states of water, the three parts of an egg, the three parts of a clover, and so on, prove to be false and problematic.
In the doctrine of the Trinity, we have a spiritual or soulish substance that possesses within it three personal centers of awareness and volition. We have three persons, one being, one divine nature, and oneness in purpose and activity. In the words of Jesus, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him…. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:23, 26). Each of the three persons of the Trinity—though possessing distinct wills—is engaged in unified activity in the process of salvation and the ongoing spiritual vitality of the believer; one will is ultimately expressed. For example, the divine persons of the Trinity are involved in creation (Genesis 1:1-2; John 1:1-3) as well as in the very bodily resurrection of Jesus from the grave (John 10:17; Acts 2:32; Romans 1:4).
As we’ve noted, the doctrine of the Trinity affirms one being, three persons. Think of three corners of an equilateral triangle. At each corner we find a balance of characteristics—oneness, threeness, and equality:
· Oneness avoids tritheism or polytheism.
· Threeness avoids modalism (one divine person manifested in different modes).
· Equality avoids subordinationism (each person of the Trinity is equally worthy of worship and adoration).
The Fruitfulness of Trinitarian Doctrine
The fruitfulness and relevance of the Trinity can be affirmed or applied in many ways. I present three of them here.[1]
The public square: Many Westerners assume God is a single, unitary Person—a Cosmic Monarch who rules and commands—rather than seeing him first as an intrinsically relational, loving, triune God who desires friendship with humans. This intrinsically relational God better helps ground human dignity, human rights, and the need for community and cooperation with one another in this world.
Interreligious dialogue: The relational triune God serves as a richer foundation for relational virtues such as compassion, kindness, love, and generosity. This is quite unlike most Eastern philosophies and religions, in which the Ultimate Reality is impersonal or non-existent while these personal virtues are nevertheless strongly affirmed.
Feminist philosophy and theology: A traditional feminist objection to the biblical God has to do with the perception of a powerful, hierarchical, “male” deity. Of course, God is a sexless being (cf. Gen. 1:26-28). Yes, God reveals himself as a personal Father (emphasizing both authority and intimacy), but this God has mother-like qualities (Dt. 32:18; Isa. 42:4; Ps. 131:2; Hos. 13:8). If we begin with the deeply interpersonal relationality of the triune God, we find that many of the concerns raised by feminist thought are diminished or fall away altogether.
Philosopher William James called “the problem of the One and the Many” philosophy’s most central problem. In the Trinity, we can evade the impasse of an ultimate reality that is either many and changing (no unity) or one and unchanging (no plurality). In the triune God, unity and plurality come together and find their foundation. We live not in a multi-verse but a uni-verse sustained and held together by the triune God.[2]
Notes
[1] Some of the material in this second section is adapted from chapter 7 of Paul Copan, Loving Wisdom: A Guide to Philosophy and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
[2] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Paul M. Gould
Creation
What is the doctrine of creation? Simply stated, it is the view that everything that exists and is not God is created by God. This means that the most fundamental distinction in all reality is that between Creator and creature. Everything that exists falls into one of these two fundamental categories; there is no third thing that is not God and is not created by God.
Three important features of the Christian doctrine of creation are as follows. First, God creates ex nihilo, or “out of nothing.” To state this in terms of Aristotle’s four causes, while God is the efficient, formal, and final cause of creation, there is no material cause. God doesn’t create the universe out of some pre-existing divine stuff or some pre-existing material stuff. God speaks the universe into being out of nothing. Second, God’s creation of the universe is good. We read seven times in Genesis chapter one the phrase “it is good” or “it is very good.” Finally, creation is free. God didn’t have to create. He has no needs. He is free to create and he is free not to create. Why then did God create? One venerable answer is that the goodness and love of the Triune God “bubbles over” into creation; in creating, God is spreading his joy and delight.
There are several implications to the fact that creation is ex nihilo, good, and free. First, it reminds us that being finite, limited, contingent, and embodied are good things! We don’t have to be super Christians to be faithful; it is good enough just to be the creatures we are—the ordinary extraordinary embodied, material-spiritual creatures of God. Second, as divine image-bearers, humans have an ethical responsibility to steward God’s good creation. We receive all things from God as gift and we return all things to God as gift. This is God’s cosmic temple. We represent and steward it as his vice-regents. Finally, since all is gift, we ought to practice the discipline of gratitude. Spend time—leisure time—in God’s good world. Look around. Notice that leaf, this blade of grass, that fish, and that squirrel, the red rock, the translucent sky—all of it, as David proclaims “display the glory of God.” Learn to receive all the good things of God—and the difficult and painful—as gifts.
How might we defend this doctrine? Well, there are many books written on this topic! I hope one day to write a book explicating the metaphysics of the doctrine of creation myself. But I am getting ahead of myself. There are two main sources of support in defense of the doctrine of creation: biblical and philosophical (I include scientific evidence within the philosophical, since the empirical evidence from science figures into premises in philosophical arguments). Biblically, we are told over and over again, from the first pages to the last, that God is the creator of all distinct reality. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we read in Genesis 1:1. In Revelation 4:11 we read of the heavenly throne room, where God is “worthy . . . to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things.”
Philosophically, the doctrine of creation can be shown coherent and plausible. The family of arguments for God that go under the names cosmological and teleological figure into a cumulative case with the conclusion that God is the best explanation for the origin and ongoing existence of the universe. Yet again, we find faith and reason unite and find their fulfillment in the Christian story of the world. As Calvin famously described, the heavens and the earth are a “dazzling theatre of God’s glory.” May we rest today in God’s goodness, for he is the source of all things.
David Baggett
Omnibenevolence and Aseity
More of a philosopher than a theologian, I am not altogether comfortable or in my element venturing into a matter of theology like this. But if I am going to discuss one of God’s attributes, I am most inclined to discuss either God’s omnibenevolence or aseity (and inch toward apologetics). The former is a divine trait central to my work in moral apologetics, and it really is in many ways the central-most characteristic of God. God is not just largely good, or pretty good, loving for the most part, or merely contingently or accidentally righteous or just. Unlike, say, the fickle, capricious gods of Euthyphro’s Greek pantheon, God is essentially good, altogether loving, wholly upright, and perfectly just—in him there is no shadow of turning—which means, among other things, that the ease with which some might contrast God’s love with his other features, like his holiness or justice, seems to be a mistake.
To say “God is love but God is also holy” casts, however unwittingly, God’s love and holiness, to some measure, as standing in tension with one another. What God’s perfection and impeccability instead suggests is that God’s love and holiness, or God’s love and justice, are perfectly congruent and coherent, without the slightest bit of tension or dissonance between them. Likewise God’s love and sovereignty, God’s love and wrath, God’s love and every other attribute that he has. Love functions primordially and foundationally, coloring and conditioning every other of God’s attributes. Simplicity theorists are surely right at least in the minimal suggestion that God’s various attributes never stand at odds or in variance with one another, and love is who and what God is most essentially of all. God’s Trinitarian nature, which Paul Copan earlier discussed, is a big reason why this is so.
God’s aseity is the other divine attribute that has mesmerized my attention for a great long while, for organically connected reasons. For God to possess aseity, or to exist a se, means that God is absolutely independent, ontologically speaking. It is often closely associated with God’s sovereignty—Alvin Plantinga, of course, referred to the “aseity/sovereignty intuition” in Does God Have a Nature? There is a positive and a negative aspect of this, because, on the one hand, God possesses such a feature—exists in this way—and, on the other hand, nothing and nobody else does. This axiomatic, fundamental truth about God has rich implications, among them that God is dependent on nothing and nobody else for his existence. Although he is profoundly relational, God alone is absolutely independent relative to his existence.
In my work in ethics and metaethics, convictions about divine aseity render it practically impossible for me as a serious theist to entertain the hypothesis that something so important as the realm of ethical truth can exist and obtain out from under the provenance and providence of God. Such a notion has always seemed to me predicated on too small a view of God. If an atheist is a firm moral objectivist, I can well understand his or her desire to make sense of morality apart from God. I respect those honest, assiduous, and intelligent efforts and always find fascinating serious attempts by secularists to lay out the foundations of morality as they see them—particularly if they are as averse as I to resorting to reductionist or deflationary accounts of ethical truth to make their tasks more palatable and practicable.
What I have always had a much harder time respecting, however, is the insistent attitude that even if God does exist, he is still largely irrelevant to ethics. For if God exists a se, then to my thinking there is little principled reason to suspect that something as important as ethical truth itself would not depend on God in some important way, and every reason to think that moral realism evidentially points to God. If God doesn’t exist, I am the first to pack it up and stop from pontificating about what the world is like. If God does exist, though, those who refuse to believe it, or those with paltry, wispy conceptions of what God is like, should, in all honesty, have the decency to return the favor and graciously vacate the lectern.
In the meantime, inhabiting the same epistemic boat, we find ourselves with robust evidence calling for rigorous explanation. Saddled as we are with our cognitive limitations, all we can do is our best. Recall some of the moral phenomena in need of solid explanation: the essential equality of human beings, the intrinsic worth of every person, the binding authority of moral obligations, the rationality of the moral enterprise, an objective condition of guilt for wrongdoing, coincidence between moral facts and our epistemic faculties, adequate resources to undergird moral forgiveness, transformation, and ultimately perfection, to name but a few—all of which are arguably better explained by a God who is morally and metaphysically good and is the good, and who alone exists a se, than by anything on offer by our secular interlocutors, thus pointing to a vital (asymmetric) dependence relation of morality on God.
The precise, fine-grained details of that dependence relation is the cause of plenty of debate. However, the fact that theistic natural lawyers, divine will, divine command, divine desire, and divine motivation theorists all affirm such a dependence relation in one form or another, for a range of compelling considerations, is highly significant. To get off the ground, what something like the moral argument requires of its proponents is not unanimity on the precise shape of the dependence relation, but the simple principled agreement that some such essential dependence relation obtains of even necessary moral truths on God. Nothing less than a God with aseity, and who created and upholds this world each moment by his sustaining power, can furnish so robust an explanation. This is one among other important ways in which the moral argument(s) gesture not just to God’s existence, but to his character and nature.
Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay
Become a Patron
Would you like to help us in our work of bringing the best resources in Christian worldview and apologetics to believers around the world? If so, we invite you to become a patron at our Patreon site. Patrons receive exclusive content from the team as well as autographed books and access to special events. We welcome your support as we seek to make the Bulletin one of the best resources available for proclaiming and defending the Christian worldview!
News and Book Deals will return next week!