At 09:07 PM 4/11/2006, David Opderbeck wrote:
>Apropos of this, tonight, out of the blue, my 8-year-old son asked
>me "dad, how can God be three and one at the same time." Wow! I
>remembered that old illustration using an egg (shell, yolk and
>white), but it seems pretty weak. Anyone have a better one?
@ Hugh Ross thinks he does. I don't. :) ~ Janice
HUGH ROSS'S EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL DEITY: A REVIEW ARTICLE by WILLIAM
LANE CRAIG *
http://www.ldolphin.org/craig/index.html
[huge snip]
Now, as I said, Dr. Ross thinks that postulating divine
extra-dimensionality serves to shed new light on traditional
theological problems. Take, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity.
Dr. Ross claims that the doctrine of the Trinity preserved in the
Christian creeds is a paradox-that is, an "apparent contradiction"
(p. 89, cf. p. 53). But Dr. Ross believes that extra-dimensionality
can help to resolve seemingly contradictory statements. He considers
the following conjunction of two statements: "Triangles cannot be
circles, and triangles can be circles." Dr. Ross does not seem to
appreciate the fact that not only are these statements
contradictories, but the second conjunct alone is broadly logically
impossible. Dr. Ross asserts that in three dimensions the second
conjunct is true because a triangle can be rotated about an axis to
form a cone, which may be analyzed as a stack of circles. But surely
the correct response to this thought experiment is that a triangle is
not a cone (not to mention that a cone is not a circle)! Moreover,
even if we admitted the second conjunct were true, that would do
nothing to resolve the original problem, for then the first conjunct
would be false. When Dr. Ross says, "...the truth of both
statements...can be recognized" (p. 56), what he leaves us with is
not a resolution, but an antimony.
Now Dr. Ross asserts that "The charge that 'Trinitarians' accept a
mathematical absurdity would seem appropriate ... if the biblical God
were confined to the same dimensional realm as humans" (p. 82). This
amounts to saying that a denial of God's extra-dimensionality is a
sufficient condition of the doctrine of the Trinity's being a logical
absurdity. I take this to be an enormously serious allegation, for it
implies that Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin
and other champions of Trinitarian doctrine, who did not believe in
God's extra-dimensionality as Dr. Ross understands it, were all
advocating a logical incoherence and that anyone accepting the
doctrine of the Trinity was believing a logical contradiction. In
fact, however, Dr. Ross never shows how the traditional formulations
of the Trinity are even apparently contradictory. There is not even
the appearance of contradiction in affirming that "There is one only
and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three eternal
and coequal Persons" (p. 88, citing Ryrie). If there were a
contradiction, positing God's existence in extra, spatial dimensions
would not solve it. At best, then, Dr. Ross appeals to
extra-dimensionality only to illustrate how three can be one. But as
an illustration of the Trinity, Dr. Ross's scenario of a
three-dimensional hand intersecting a two dimensional surface seems
no more adequate than the well-known, deficient illustrations he
criticizes. When flatlanders see the finger of the hand intersecting
their plane in different ways, "They might never discern that the
six-plus manifestations were all governed by one entity and one
source of operation" (p. 93). But this amounts to an illustration of
modalism, not the Trinity. Later Dr. Ross imagines the flatlanders
seeing the several intersections of the hand's fingers with their
plane, commenting, "The twoness, threeness, or moreness of our hand
(or one aspect of that plurality) they could imagine, but not the
oneness" (p. 95). But the fingers are merely parts of the one hand,
and Dr. Ross himself earlier quoted from the Augsburg Confession that
"...the term 'person' is used, as the ancient Fathers employed it in
this connection, to signify not a part or a quality in another but
that which subsists of itself." The hand-flatland illustration thus
only succeeds in illustrating modalism or one thing's having three
parts. It certainly does not make the Trinity more intelligible.
Dr. Ross also believes that God's extra-dimensionality serves to
illumine Christology. Unfortunately, although Dr. Ross clearly
affirms that Jesus is both God and man, it may be justifiably doubted
whether he affirms the Chalcedonian formula of two natures united in
one person. For example, he does not describe the incarnation as the
second person of the Trinity's taking on a human nature in addition
to his divine nature, but as God's literally turning himself into a
human being:
...the second person of the triune God, the Creator of all angels and
of the entire universe, actually became a man.
...God supernaturally entered the womb of a virgin (Mary). How He
interacted with or modified Mary's egg is not made clear in
Scripture, but He became a flesh and blood embryo (p. 104).
This remarkable statement suggests that Dr. Ross stands in the
Alexandrian tradition of one-nature Christology. Such a conception
seems to require God's relinquishing some of his divine attributes in
becoming a man, and this is just what Dr. Ross affirms:
In coming to Earth as an embryo in the virgin's womb, Christ
"emptied" Himself" leaving behind the extra-dimensional realm and
capacities He shared with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
When He had completed the work He set out to do, the work of
redemption, He returned to the place and powers He had left behind (p. 49).
This passage constitutes an endorsement of kenotic theology, which
interprets Christ's self-emptying as the divestiture of certain
divine attributes. Now this sort of non-Chalcedonian, kenotic
Christology seems to me a very serious aberration. As the Antiochean
theologians realized, if Christ had only a single "theanthropic"
nature, then he was in fact neither God nor man, but sort of hybrid
of the two. Kenotic theology faces the severe difficulty of how it is
that God can give up his attributes, since any being lacking such
attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, aseity, and so
forth, by definition is not God. As is typical chez kenotic
theologians, Dr. Ross would preserve Christ's deity by means of the
continuity of his moral attributes: "Jesus' divine identity as God.
His character, wisdom, purity, and motives, remained perfectly
intact, but He voluntarily relinquished the independent use of His
divine attributes and His extra-dimensional capacities" (pp. 103104).
Consistency requires us to say, then, that attributes such as
omniscience, omnipresence, and so forth, are not in fact essential to
God's nature, that in some possible worlds God is weak, ignorant,
spatially confined, and so forth. This seems to me an extraordinarily
high price to pay for any supposed benefits thought to accrue from
the kenotic approach.
Dr. Ross's non-Chalcedonian Christology leads to a bizarre view of
the atonement. Traditionally Jesus is understood to have died in his
human nature, but his divine nature is, of course, incapable of
perishing. But if Christ has only a single nature, then his death is
literally the death of God. Thus, in a section entitled "God Both
Dead and Alive" Dr. Ross seems to affirm precisely what the title states.
Some skeptics and atheists have argued that if Jesus were God, He
could not have cliecl and if He died, He could not have been God.
They recognize, of course, the contradiction in saying that Jesus is
both really dead and really alive...
The simultaneity of Jesus' death and immortality would only be a
contradiction, however, if the time, place, and context of His death
were identical to the time, place and dimensional context of His
being alive....
Because of Christ's identity as God and His access to all the
dimensions or super-dimensions God encompasses, He could experience
suffering and death in all the human-occupied dimensions and then
transition into any of His other dimensions or realms once the
atonement price had been paid (pp. 108109).
Here Dr. Ross does seem to affirm that God was both dead and alive,
but that contradiction is avoided by extra-dimensionality. But this
escape does not seem to work. For Dr. Ross had clearly affirmed that
in the incarnation God the Son had left the extra-dimensional realms
and capacities he shared with the Father and the Spirit. Thus, if he
died in our human realm, God died. How he could then transition back
to extra-dimensional realms once he had died seems inexplicable. In
any case the logical problem here is not just God's being both dead
and alive, but God's being dead, period. By definition, God cannot
perish. But without a two-natures Christology, we are forced to
affirm the absurdity that God died.
Extra-dimensionality leads Dr. Ross into even more bizarre
speculations about the atonement in answer to the question of how one
man's death could pay for all people's sins. Instead of answering
that question in terms of the dignity of Christ's person, he
hypothesizes that perpendicular to our time dimension is another
dimension composed of billions of separate time lines on each of
which Christ suffers death and subsequent isolation from God for
infinite time (p. 112). 1 find this speculation profoundly
unacceptable. It requires, in effect, billions of Christs, thus
destroying Christ's personal identity. For it is a distinct person
who dies on the cross in each of these time lines. Moreover, each of
these Christs suffers separation from God endlessly with no hope of
resurrection and victory at the end. That Christ rises in our
temporal dimension is the exception to the rule; the other Christs
remain separated from God forever, which makes a mockery of Jesus's
triumph over death.
Dr. Ross also makes a curious suggestion concerning Jesus'
resurrection appearances: in disappearing from view, Jesus "rotated"
each of his three spatial dimensions into a fourth, fifth, and sixth
spatial dimension respectively (pp. 46-47). Jesus' resurrection body
thus literally came apart and became three one-dimensional lines-not
a very robust conception of a body!
Dr. Ross also thinks that extra-dimensionality will help to resolve
the conflict between divine sovereignty and human freedom, but a
reading of the relevant chapters makes clear that most of what he
says has little to do with extra-dimensionality, focusing instead on
the relative strength of God's influence on us as we draw near to or
retreat from him. When he finally gets down to reconciling
sovereignty and freedom, what he winds up with is, in effect, if he
is to avoid determinism by our circumstances, a middle knowledge
account of providence (pp. 153-154). But such an account owes nothing
to extra-dimensionality.
With respect to doctrine of salvation, Dr. Ross's diagrams on pp.
161, 162 seem to betray the Reformation doctrine of sola fide, for
they show a non-Christian gradually increasing in "Christlikeness"
until he irrevocably crosses the "salvation threshold." Even if we
interpret this increase to be the result of God's prevenient work, it
is still surely false that salvation is achieved by a non-Christian's
growing more Christlike until he crosses the line of no return and is saved.
In the remainder of his book, Dr. Ross treats such issues as
perseverance, the problem of evil, and hell; but his insights on
these questions do not involve essential reference to extra-dimensionality.
In short, while appreciative of Dr. Ross's work in other areas, I
find his attempt to construe God as existing in hyper-dimensions of
time and space and to interpret Christian doctrines in that light to
be both philosophically and theologically unacceptable. I am sure
that Dr. Ross did not realize some of the implications of the
positions he took in Beyond the Cosmos. He needs now either to
explain why his views do not have such implications or else to modify
his views so as to avoid them. (7)
Notes:
1. In personal conversation Dr. Ross has told me that he felt that
the crucial qualifications were made in the book and that our
differences were "just semantic." But even after our conversation it
is still unclear to me how literally he takes God's
extra-dimensionality. He clearly believes that there are six
additional spatial dimensions, and he seems to think that God
actually inhabits these. He insisted in conversation that God is not
confined to ten dimensions but can exist in as many dimensions as one
can imagine. But my critique is not aimed it God's being confined to
extra dimensions, but is rather lodged against the claim that God
literally exists in spatio-temporal dimensions, and Dr. Ross's
response only reinforces one's suspicion that Dr. Ross believes God
literally to exist in such dimensions. Similarly, his insistence to
me that God's extra-dimensionality is merely a possible solution to
the problems he addresses, rather than the actual fact of the matter,
shows that he is taking extra-dimensionality literally, for divine
transcendence could not he so characterized. Perhaps the problem here
is that Dr. Ross does not appreciate that tire classical doctrine of
omnipresence entails God's transcending space altogether, while being
cognizant of and causally effective at every point in space In ;my
case, I am absolutely confident that lay audiences who hear him do
riot understand him to he speaking metaphorically, so if that is his
intention, he needs to affirm clearly that God does not literally
exist and operate in extra dimensions of space and time.
2. xIt should be noted that the classical doctrine of divine
timelessness holds that it is impossible for any creature, even
angels, to share in God's timeless eternity.
3. In personal conversation, Dr. Ross told me that he is merely
adopting the common scientific understanding of time in order to
communicate efrectivelY with the type (if person he is trying to
reach. Such people think that God's timelessness implies that God is
causally inactive. Dr Ross's response is apparently intended to show
such persons that God is not timeless in that sense. This strikes me
as very odd apologetic strategy: rather than correct the person's
misunderstandings, one instead formulates a view of God's eternity
which is compatible with the person's misconceptions but which we
know to be literally false. Thus our unbelieving friend is led to
become a Christian at the expense of his accepting beliefs which we
know to be wrong, i.e. believing literally what we understand to be
merely metaphorical, viz., that God exists in some sort of hyper-time.
4. Notice here that whether literal or metaphorical, Dr. Ross's
account of God's relationship to time is confused and theologically
unacceptable.
5. A curious feature of this model is that it is our time which is
the hyper-time in which God's time is embedded, not vice versa. For
there is one line of our time, but many timelines for God. Since
these are timelines which endure through moments of our hyper-time,
they cannot also represent lines of divine causal influence, as Dr.
Ross suggests. Moreover, it is incorrect to situate God only at the
pole, for this would treat his time as the embedding hyper-time; in
fact he would exist at all points along his longitudinal time lines.
6. Again, notice that in what follows Dr. Ross's account is
problematic theologically, whether we construe it literally or
metaphorically. He just has an incorrect understanding of divine
proximity, the Trinity. the two natures of Christ, etc.
7. For a response by Dr. Ross to this critique, see Philosophia
Christi 21 (1998): 54-58. 1 shall leave it. to the reader to judge
whether Dr. Ross has adequately responded to my criticisms.
==================
* William Craig is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School
of Theology and lives at 1805 Danforth Drive, Marietta, GA 30062-5554.
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
JETS 42/2 (June 1999) 305-373
Received on Wed Apr 12 11:06:53 2006
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