Trinitarianism vs Unitarianism Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, you asked Tuggy a question in this next clip. Let's go to this one. Number three.

DR. CRAIG: To Dale Tuggy then. In your closing statement you say, “An army of apologists and conservative systematic theologians assure us that some Trinity doctrine or other is clearly implied by all that scripture says. In contrast, none of this book's Trinity theory defenders agrees that any such doctrine is part of the contents of the New Testament books being obviously implied or assumed by such.” That's exactly what I believe, so I wonder how could you have so seriously misread me?

DR. TUGGY: Well, I remember in part of the book you, I believe if I remember right – correct me if I'm wrong – that you said the rival hypothesis T is something that no Trinitarian would stand up to because it was basically an anachronism. So it was the claim that the one God is the Trinity and each of the persons are fully divine or something like that. I think that was the reason. Hasker, by the way, clearly agrees with me. It's not part of the contents of the New Testament but he thinks it's kind of the best explanation of what's there.

DR. CRAIG: Right. I would be the one who thinks there is a biblical doctrine of the Trinity.

DR. TUGGY: Well, sorry, your minimal view isn't going to count. It doesn't have enough claims. It doesn't mention a triune God.

DR. CRAIG: Even though it meets the [de udata] for a doctrine of the Trinity that you lay out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Trinity that you wrote?

DR. TUGGY: No, because I say it's popularly expressed that way.

DR. CRAIG: Commonly expressed.

DR. TUGGY: Yeah, like, not well.

KEVIN HARRIS: He refers to your minimal view there, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. To understand this exchange we need a little background. In my essay, I describe or defend what I call the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. This is a very simple doctrine that has two tenets. Number one: there is exactly one God. Number two: there are exactly three persons who are properly called God. Now, it astonished me that in light of my essay that in his closing statement Tuggy would then say that none of the authors in this Four Views book defends the position that the Bible teaches or implies the doctrine of the Trinity in any form! I was shocked to read that because this is exactly what I believe and exactly what I argued in my essay. So my question was: How could you have so seriously misread me as to say that none of the authors in this book believe that the Bible teaches or implies the doctrine of the Trinity? And what he does is to disqualify my view as a Trinitarian view. He says, “Oh, well your view isn't really Trinitarian. It doesn't count.” And I said, “Well, now, how can you say it's not a Trinitarian view when it meets the definition for the doctrine of the Trinity that you yourself give in your article on the Trinity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?” If you read that article, he says that the doctrine of the Trinity is commonly understood to mean that there is one God who exists in or as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's exactly the view that I defend as being taught in the Bible. So Tuggy’s response is to misquote his own article. He says, “What I say is the doctrine of the Trinity is popularly understood.” And I corrected him. “You didn't say ‘popular’. You said this is the common understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity.” And he tries to back away from it, but in fact if you read the encyclopedia article this is the operative definition he uses throughout. He never backs away from that definition or tries to qualify it. So I think he is being very disingenuous in trying to disqualify the position I defend as a Trinitarian view.

KEVIN HARRIS: You point out that you're saying the New Testament says that there are three persons who are properly called God. That's a distinguishing characteristic there – “properly called God.” Talk about that a little bit.

DR. CRAIG: That's right. In the Old Testament and intertestamental Judaism there are exalted quasi-divine figures like angels or even the Jewish king who could be called elohim (“god” in Hebrew – the same word). But this is not an ascription of deity (properly speaking) to these figures. It's metaphorical or figurative. When I say that there are three persons that are “properly called God,” what I mean is something like “truly and literally” called God. I say that specifically to differentiate the attributions of deity to Jesus Christ in the New Testament from the hyperbolic use of the word “god” for principal angels or exalted patriarchs or these other figures in pre-New Testament Judaism.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to the next clip then. Dr. Tuggy asks you a question in this next clip. Clip number four.

DR. TUGGY: I mean, look, people that want to defend a doctrine of the Trinity just mean, Dr. Craig, a creedal doctrine. You punt on that as soon as the book starts: “I'm not defending a creedal doctrine.” You have those ultra-minimalistic two sentences. You don’t even name the Father, Son, and Spirit. You don't even mention a tri-personal God. That's mighty thin soup. I can see how you think that might be in the New Testament, but most people wouldn't count – most Trinitarians wouldn't count – that as a doctrine of the Trinity.

DR. CRAIG: I guess that remains to be seen. I think that they probably would, but in any case. With regard to doctrine T, why do you say that all of your book’s interlocutors disavow T rather than say all agree that I have misformulated T, which is what we all said. That you set up a straw man.

DR. TUGGY: What my three interlocutors said is . . . so I'm comparing two explanations as regards to those 20 facts which I think are facts. Dr. Craig gets off the bus with some of them. Dr. Craig, you suggest that a better explanation is what you have – T*. This is your minimal theory, and that just doesn't explain most of the facts that I'm pointing at.

KEVIN HARRIS: The moderator interrupted at that point, Bill, so you didn't get a chance to respond. Any response now?

DR. CRAIG: Sure. Again, this is one of these statements in Tuggy's closing statement of the book where I think he really misrepresents what the other members of the book are saying. He proposes a doctrine he calls T as the doctrine of the Trinity and as he states it this is the conjunction of three claims about the New Testament authors. First, they assume the numerical identity of the one God with the Trinity. Second, they assume the full deity of the Son. And thirdly they assume the full deity of the Holy Spirit. That doctrine T is a misrepresentation of what Trinitarians believe. It's a straw man. All three of us in the book say that's not what the doctrine of the Trinity states. My formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is, I think, much simpler and much more biblical; namely, there's exactly one God and there are exactly three persons who are properly called God. That formulation explains the 20 facts listed by Tuggy far better than does his unitarian hypothesis.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip. Here's an exchange between you and Tuggy on the concept of the modern relation of identity. Clip number five.

DR. TUGGY: I think Dr. Craig is right in that the formal logicians didn't have a logic that treated identity in the way that we do in modern times. That's right. But I explain in the book why I think the concept of identity is a part of just the cognitive equipment that God gave to anyone. You could see this in various ways. You refer to something successfully by any means, now you refer to something by any means by thought or word or pointing or whatever. And you can ask yourself, did I just refer to the same thing twice, or did I refer to one thing and then another thing? If you can even ask that question, yes, you have the concept of identity, never mind whether logicians have properly captured this part of common sense.

DR. CRAIG: You don't have the concept of the relation of identity though, Dale. You can say here are three balls . . .

DR. TUGGY: Dr. Craig is the only one who thinks that no ancient person except maybe Aristotle and a few friends had a concept of identity.

DR. CRAIG: The modern relation of identity.

DR. TUGGY: It's part of Trinitarian confessions to say that the Father's different than the Son’s different than the Spirit, and all the Trinitarians who study philosophy in modern times say, yeah, that's a denial of identity. So the anti-modalist premise of just any standard Trinitarian thinking employs the concept of identity by denying the identity of the persons.

KEVIN HARRIS: And again the moderator steps in to move things along but I can tell that you have plenty more to say.

DR. CRAIG: Sure. It is certainly true that people have a primitive concept of identity – that everything is identical to itself. But the ancients did not have a grasp of the modern relation of identity as explained by William and Martha Kneale in their text on the history of logic – The Development of Logic. And that would be very easy to refute. If Kneale and Kneale are wrong about that, all you have to do is provide a citation by an ancient author in which he expresses the modern relation of identity as a reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and Euclidean relation. And you won't find it. Now, the doctrine of the Trinity is unproblematic unless you interpret statements like the “Father is God” as an identity statement rather than as a predication of deity. We have every reason to think that the New Testament authors were not making identity statements. For example, John says “the Father is the only true God” (John 17:3). But he also says that “Jesus Christ is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20). Now, if these were identity statements then the transitivity of identity would imply that Jesus Christ is the Father which John would have vigorously repudiated. So these are not identity statements. These are predications of deity, and therefore are logically unproblematic. Unitarianism stands or falls with this assumption that the New Testament authors are making identity statements rather than predicating statements.

KEVIN HARRIS: I've heard it said that every major cult and aberrant Christian group begins with a misunderstanding or a corruption of the concept of God. So defending the Trinity is certainly a priority. I'm thinking if Dale Tuggy continues to have influence and becomes popular, the Christadelphians will be referring to him, the Jehovah's Witnesses will. Our Mormon friends. All of these will be saying, “Hey! See there? We have this Christian scholar who agrees with us.” So it is important to defend the Trinity. To sum up your approach to the Trinity, it is based both on scriptural teaching and philosophical introspection.

DR. CRAIG: That's correct. Scripturally speaking, I think that the New Testament teaches that there is only one God and that there are exactly three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who are properly called God. Philosophically, I think this makes perfect sense to think of God as an immaterial, spiritual, tri-personal substance. So the view that I defend in the book I call “tri-personal monotheism.” It seems to me that that is a perfectly coherent formulation or model for understanding the doctrine of the Trinity.^[1]