Re: Trinity models (was Re: Physical Resurrection)

Craig is certainly right that claim that there is 1 divine nature in 3 persons is not self-contradictory, quite apart from any considerations about extra dimensions. It is not a claim that 1 = 3 - i.e., that there is 1 God but also 3 Gods, or 3 persons but also 1 person. But it seems to me that Ross's error is more elementary - the notion that the doctrine of the Trinity is a logical or mathematical conundrum. Christian doctrines of the Trinity are not (or should not be) abstract statements about oneness & threeness but expositions of the belief that Jesus and his Father and their Spirit are one God.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Janice Matchett
  To: David Opderbeck
  Cc: asa@lists.calvin.edu
  Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 11:06 AM
  Subject: RE: Trinity models (was Re: Physical Resurrection)

  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 11:33:06 2006