A Muslim's Four Objections to the Trinity Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. It’s Kevin Harris. As we go back to the studio to pick up where we left off last time, we want to invite you to give to our matching grant campaign. Between now and the end of the year whatever you give will be matched dollar for dollar by a generous group of donors. Take advantage of that. Go to ReasonableFaith.org and between now and the end of the year double your impact for the kingdom of God with our matching grant campaign. Let's go to the studio with Dr. Craig.

Dr. Andani introduces his fourth and final argument in this next clip. Here it is.

The fourth argument that I would give is that in Craig's understanding both of the Trinity and of the incarnation the Son of God literally dies on the cross, and that entails that God the Trinity dies on the cross. I'm going to explain how we get that.

He'll elaborate some more – that's just an introduction – but has there ever been a legitimate view in Christianity that allows for the death of one of the persons of the Trinity?

DR. CRAIG: Absolutely. This is something that became very clear to me in my recent study of christology in reading the church fathers. The church fathers freely affirm things like God the Son died on the cross just as they affirm that Mary (the Virgin Mary) was the mother of God. Now, they didn't mean that God died in his divine nature or that in his divine nature God was born of Mary, but what they mean is that the person who was Jesus Christ was a divine person. He was the second person of the Trinity. So, yes, God the Son died on the cross with respect to his human nature. He was born of the Virgin Mary with respect to his human nature. So it is unobjectionable to say things like “God died on the cross” so long as you understand these locutions properly and do not attribute the death to the divine nature.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andani begins his elaboration on his fourth argument by defining your christology. Here's the next clip.

So, firstly, what is Craig's view of christology or the incarnation? Craig believes differently than most Christians. Most Christians believe that the Son of God, the divine person, assumed a human nature, and what the Son of God assumed was a human soul and a human body. That's what the Chalcedonian Creed says. The Chalcedonian Creed says that Jesus has a rational soul and a physical human body, and the body-soul composite – that constitutes the human nature of Christ according to traditional Catholic, Orthodox, and most Reformed Christians. Craig does not affirm the Chalcedonian view in that way. Craig believes that Jesus does not have a human soul. Instead, Craig believes that God the Son takes the place of ordinarily what would be a human soul in the man Jesus of Nazareth.

You can go to town on your response there. Once again he accuses you of being out of the mainstream here.

DR. CRAIG: Right. It is true that the mainstream ecclesiastical tradition thinks that Jesus had both a merely human soul and a human body as parts of his divine nature, or to make up his divine nature. I adopt what I call a neo-Apollinarian christology which says not that Jesus lacked a human soul or that the Logos replaced the human soul of Jesus, rather I say that the Logos (the second person of the Trinity) was the human soul of Jesus. In these christological debates, it's critical that one distinguish between what is called a replacement thesis and an identity thesis. The replacement thesis says that the Logos replaced the human soul of Jesus and therefore Jesus didn't have a human soul. But the identity thesis says that the Logos is identical to the human soul of Jesus and therefore Jesus does have a human soul on this model. Now, the soul of Jesus is not merely human. That's correct. But that's true of Jesus in general – that he is not merely human. He is truly human but he's also divine. And I would say the similar thing is true of the soul of Jesus.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's further elaboration. He gets into it a little bit more in this next clip.

It's almost as if you could say that Christ on Earth loses some of his divine abilities according to Craig. Now Craig will nuance that and say he didn't lose the ability; it's just the divine abilities are in his subconscious. But Craig would say that Jesus didn't have access to those abilities. At least he didn't have full access to his divine abilities when he's on Earth. And as far as I'm concerned, if you don't have access to something that's yours then you don't really have it. Right? Unless you can access it by your own will any time. But if he doesn't have access, he doesn't have it. So, in other words, Jesus on Earth – and it's not just Jesus, remember. It's God the Son. So the second person of the Trinity when he's incarnate on Earth, the second person loses access to his divine powers.

Well, you've applied philosophy and even psychology to this question, but I wonder – is Philippians chapter 2 a key passage on this? That Christ limited himself in the incarnation?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Philippians 2 says that Christ did not consider his equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he humbled himself and took on human form. In my model of the Trinity I argue that you can differentiate the mind of Jesus into conscious and subconscious parts in a theologically significant way. In his waking consciousness Jesus was just like us. We don't need to imagine the baby Jesus lying in the manger contemplating the infinitesimal calculus or charting the courses of the planets. He had a genuine infant consciousness. The Scripture says that as he grew, he grew in wisdom and in knowledge as well as favor with God and man. So we want to posit a genuine human waking consciousness in Jesus. Too many Christians think of the incarnation as being like Superman disguised as Clark Kent, and that is not the biblical view of the incarnation. The biblical view of the incarnation is that during this state of humiliation Jesus had an ordinary human consciousness and therefore felt anxiety, temptation, weariness, worry, and so forth. You see that especially in the Garden of Gethsemane as he faces the cross. So on this view you differentiate between the conscious and subconscious aspects of Jesus’ mind. Now, it is not part of my view that Jesus was unable to access his divine subconsciousness. The model leaves that completely open. It may well be the case that Jesus voluntarily prescinded from accessing the divine subconscious in order to fully associate with us during his state of humiliation. So that's just not a part of the model. The model simply holds that during the state of humiliation Jesus did not draw upon his divine subconscious in regular frequent ways. Now perhaps on occasion he did; for example, with regard to prophecy. Perhaps that was the bubbling up of divine subconsciousness into conscious awareness. Or with respect to his own divinity, I think that would be another example of something of which he became aware as he grew up. So I think there is a percolating, as it were, of the divine subconscious into the conscious life of Jesus. And this may well have been under his control. He could have simply voluntarily prescinded from drawing upon these resources. So I think Dr. Andani is really chasing at bugabears here. It's just not the view.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip for today. Here's the final one. Andani concludes his fourth argument.

God the Son became not just emotionally separated from God, but God the Son became ontologically separated from God the Father. Basically the Son of God gets ripped out of the Trinity. If Jesus does not have a human soul and it is God the Son who's experiencing the suffering on Earth and the death on the cross, and if Jesus’ suffering is separation from God (which is what Craig believes in) then God the Son separated from God the Trinity. It's almost as if one-third of the Trinity was ripped away from the whole. One objection to what I'm saying Craig could come and say, “Look I'm not saying that Jesus, that Christ, suffered in his divinity. I'm saying he suffered in his human nature.” I don't think Craig can make this move and say the suffering and death of Christ is only in his human nature because under Craig's nominalism there is no human nature. Under nominalism there's no such thing as universal humanity that every particular human being (including Christ) gets to partake in. Number one, Craig believes that Jesus doesn't have an actual human soul, so he's missing something that seems to be integral to human nature. But under nominalism (which Craig believes in) humans don't have a nature. Every human is a bare particular and the incarnate Jesus is also a bare particular. And Jesus, even in a human body, he doesn't share anything in common. He shares no nature with the rest of humanity. It's actually God the Son who suffers on Earth, who experiences a limitation of his own divinity on Earth, and then God the Son has the experience of separation from the Father. The Trinity itself becomes unraveled.

I want to mention that you address much of this in a question of the week – question of the week number 81, “Fictionalism and the two Natures of Christ.”^[1] But go ahead and respond to what we just heard.

DR. CRAIG: I think here we see how those previous misunderstandings really come home to roost in this final clip. I do believe that Christ has a human soul. As I said, I defend an identity thesis, not a replacement thesis. Moreover, I do think that Christ has a human nature that he shares in common with us. I just don't think that his human nature is an abstract object that exists beyond time and space to which he stands in some sort of exemplification relation. I'm simply an anti-realist about those sorts of things. But I will affirm exactly the truths that that is meant to affirm; namely, that human beings are made in God's image and therefore are personal, self-conscious, intentional free agents endowed with intrinsic moral value. I affirm, of course, all of those things. I agree that Christ, or God the Son, dies on the cross with respect to his human nature. Now, what is that? What does that mean? Well, death is the separation of the soul from the body, and in dying on the cross Christ's soul is separated from his body. Moreover, the separation that the Son experiences on the cross is not an ontological separation. This is where Dr. Andani’s pie chart really becomes misleading. I'm talking about a relational separation. God the Son experiences alienation and estrangement from God the Father as he bears the sin of the world and the punishment for that sin that we deserved. So he cries out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” as he experiences that relational separation or alienation from God. But there is no ontological separation whatsoever. The Trinity doesn't fall apart. Jesus is fully divine. It is simply that in his waking human consciousness, he who never experienced alienation from God now experiences that on our behalf in bearing the punishment that we deserve for our sins.

KEVIN HARRIS: I said at the beginning of the podcast that Dr. Andani seemed to be trying to represent your views accurately, but he also has misunderstood much of them. What can you say in summation today for this podcast?

DR. CRAIG: I think you're absolutely right, and I really appreciate his attempt to engage with my view in a fair-minded way. I love talking with Muslims about these sorts of issues. I think that the failure of his objections illustrates very well for us that before you begin making pronouncements on these sorts of metaphysical questions that you really need to do your homework and make sure you understand what you're talking about because these are difficult issues that often involve very subtle nuances and distinctions. And if you neglect those then I think you get into the kind of mess that Dr. Andani did in this video.

Hello! This is William Lane Craig. Here at Reasonable Faith we are in the midst of our fall matching grant campaign. From now until the end of the year, every gift you give to Reasonable Faith will be doubled by a group of generous donors, up to $250,000. So this is a tremendous way to double the impact of your giving to the Lord’s work. Remember this offer goes until December 31st at midnight, so I hope that you’ll consider this and be a part of our fall matching grant campaign.^[2]