Trinitarian Metaphysics
I have a student writing a paper on this, and it behooves me to understand what he is talking about.
According to Catholic orthodoxy, God consists of three different Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. How can that be? Are they the same thing or three different things?
If they are the same thing, then they have the same properties (by the indiscernibility of identicals). But based on what the Bible says, they seem to have different properties. For instance, sometimes the Son speaks to the Father, which suggests that they are doing different things at different times. If they have different properties, then they are different things (by the contrapositive of the indiscernibility of identicals). But this conclusion is polytheistic heresy from a Catholic standpoint.
Is there any other way out of this? Perhaps they partially overlap: they have a common part (a unique divine essence?) but they also have distinct parts (e.g., the Son has his mortal incarnation as a part unique to him). Then we could say that they are “the same God” in the sense of sharing the same divine essence as a common part, but “different Persons” in the sense that they also have their own different parts with different properties. At the moment, this is the only solution that makes sense to me.
Would this solution be remotely acceptable to the Catholic Church? Does anyone know what the Church’s official view on this is? What about other Christian denominations?
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April 15th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Hi Gualtiero,
I’m not Catholic, and am no philosopher of religion, but I word on analytic mereology and I know there’s been a recent resurgence of interest in the topic from that angle. Searching around quickly I found a few articles with that bent, listed below.
Another natural starting place would be through the medievals (Abelard especially, i THINK but am not sure). I would start with Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and go from there.
Michael Rea is a natural here — he and someone else I don’t know have a forthcoming paper on mereology and the trinity:
http://www.nd.edu/~mrea/Online%20Papers/Material%20Constitution%20and%20the%20Trinity.pdf
The bibliography there looks like the starting point you need. Looks like Swinburne’s book might be good.
Rea, Michael. 2003. “Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity”, Philosophia Christi, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 431-445.
also found…
Peter Forrest, ‘The Trinity and Personal Identity’ (In English ) :in The Trinity: East/West Dialogue (Melville Y. Stewart ed.) Dordrecht : Kluwer, 2003; 75-82.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Hi Dr. Piccinini,
I actually got my MA in philosophy of religion at protestant Christian seminary before moving on to my current program of study in moral and political philosophy at Bowling Green State University. Anyway, I took a course on the Trinity while there and recommend chapter eight of Richard Swinburne’s “The Christian God” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)for a philosophical treatment of the concept and how it has been developed historically. That’s obviously something one could fill books with, but I think Swinburne gets his hands around the main questions. I’d be happy to correspond if you’d like to discuss this topic further.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
From what I understand, the trinity is officially considered a paradox. Granted, this does not stop theologians from spilling oceans of ink on the subject in efforts to help the understanding of it. But the point here is that one cannot “make sense” of a paradox. God is three persons, there is only one God. A leap of faith is necessary, I think, to believe that it ultimately makes sense. Think of it as ineffable, or mystical. Any logical deduction that makes sense of the doctrine will wind up being heterodox, in that it will amount to a polytheism, or a lowering of full-deity status of any of the 3 Persons. So don’t try