Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Long, Strange Story of the Trinity

Posted on by

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity claims one God in three persons. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines it: “In the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another.”
Unity but also distinct? Three but also one? That makes no sense, so let’s go to the source and read about it in the Bible.
And the Bible says …
Though the Trinity is one of the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the Bible says nothing about it directly. Did Paul and the apostles define God in a trinitarian fashion? If the Trinity is essential to a proper understanding of Christianity as the modern church claims, the ancients’ silence on the matter suggests that it is a later invention.
That’s not to say that one can’t use the Bible to form arguments in favor of various relationships between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Several interpretations competed in the early centuries of the church.

  • Was Jesus merely a good man, adopted by God (Adoptionism)?
  • Are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit just labels for the different roles of one being (Sabellianism or Modalism)?
  • Was Jesus created by God and subordinate to him (Arianism)?

These are all plausible interpretations, justifiable with Bible passages, but they are heresies today. It took about two centuries for the doctrine of the Trinity to enter the debate (through Tertullian), and it took almost two more centuries of haggling for the doctrine to mature into its present form and sweep away its competitors at the First Council of Constantinople (381).
While still a cardinal, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI was asked if he was bothered by many Catholics ignoring papal dictates. He said that he was not, because “truth is not determined by a majority vote.” But a majority vote is exactly how doctrines like the Trinity came into being.
Comma Johanneum
You know how I said that the Bible says nothing directly about the Trinity? For completeness, we should address this:

For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. (1 John 5:7)

The part in italics is called the Comma Johanneum (a “comma” is a short clause). The oldest and most reliable manuscripts do not show the Comma. It appears first in a few 7th-century Latin manuscripts and only centuries later in Greek manuscripts. Unlike much of the rest of the New Testament, it doesn’t appear in the letters of early church fathers, many of whom would’ve delighted in supporting their position with such a quote.
It is agreed by scholars to be an addition to the original.
What is the Trinity?
Lots of analogies have been proposed for the Trinity. Maybe it’s like water, which has the three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Or like a person who can be spouse, parent, and employer. But this is modalism—God acts in different modes at different times.
Okay, then maybe it’s like an egg, which has shell, white, and yolk. Or like time, which has past, present, and future. Or like the Borromean rings in the picture above that only compose a linked whole when all three rings are present. But this is Partialism, the claim that the three persons of God are three separate parts.
Given the clear history of conflict on this question and the many discarded explanations, you’d think that heretical analogies wouldn’t be offered.
Most Christians simply say that it’s a mystery and admit that we can’t understand it. Contrast that with the monotheism celebrated by Islam. The shahadah, the basic creed of Islam, says, “There are no deities but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”—simple and unambiguous.
A few questions raised by the Trinity doctrine
Instead of the convoluted and unintelligible Trinity, why not simply embrace the polytheism? My guess is that first-century Christians so valued Jewish monotheism that this tenet couldn’t be dropped. As the stature of Jesus increased over time, from a good man adopted as messiah by God (as told in Mark) to a being who was there at the beginning (John 1:1), they were stuck with fitting the square peg of the divinity of Jesus into the round hole of monotheism.
Why not then have a duality, Yahweh + Jesus? The problem is that two is the number for male and female, which was not the symbolism they were going for. Perhaps the Holy Spirit, initially just a bit player or merely a synonym for God, was elevated into the Trinity. And even this is flexible. While the idea of Mary as Co-redemptrix is not Catholic doctrine, it has threatened to become so at various periods in the church’s history.
And now let us close …
The typical Christian response to a contradiction is to find a way to make both claims true. This is never clearer than with the Trinity. The Bible says that there is one god, but it also says that Jesus existed since the beginning of time. So they must both be true! But what first-century Christian would rationalize this with the doctrine of the Trinity?
Or, take this from the other direction. Explain the Trinity to first-century Christians and ask if they buy it. If you imagine that they do, you have a new problem: why the vitally important doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t explained in the New Testament.
The Trinity is a Christian mystery—something that can’t be explained by reason alone. A supernatural explanation is necessary. (This raises the question: If it doesn’t make sense, why accept it? But let’s set that aside.) Apologists often admit that they will just have to ask God about it when they get to heaven.
That humility is laudable, but how about some of that in other areas? If you don’t trust yourself to make sense of the Trinity, why imagine that you correctly understand God’s position on polygamy, slavery, and genocide when the Old Testament gives clear support for them? Why imagine that your evaluation of abortion and gay marriage is correct when the Bible doesn’t address these topics directly?
If only the Trinity were a frequent reminder for Christians to be humble in their claims, it would be valuable for everyone.
See also: “God Has Many Names, But Do We Need One More?”

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity
to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism
that three are one and one is three,
and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
— Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 1813)

Photo credit: Johansson

Christianity Can Rot Your Brain

Posted on by

There’s a lot of killing in the Bible—the honest and wholesome kind. The God-commanded kind.
What are we to make of this violence? Apologist William Lane Craig takes a stab at justifying “The Slaughter of the Canaanites.”
Craig’s entire project is bizarre—trying to support the sagging claims of God’s goodness despite that deity’s passion for genocide—but he gamely has a go. Craig responds to the question, “But wasn’t it wrong to kill all the innocent children?”

If we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

What’s this supposed to mean?? Does it mean that Andrea Yates was actually right that she was saving her five children from the possibility of going to hell by drowning them one by one in the bathtub? Does it mean that abortion is actually a good thing because those souls “are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy”? I hope none of Craig’s readers have followed up with this route to salvation.
It’s hard to believe that he’s actually justifying the killing of children, but there’s more. Let’s fillet Craig’s next paragraph:

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment.

I thought that genocide was wrong. Perhaps I was mistaken.

Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.

Yeah, right. Killing children is actually a good thing. (Are we living Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”?)

So who is wronged?

Wait for it …

Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

Uh, yeah. That was the big concern in my mind, too.
Can you believe this guy? My guess is that he is a decent and responsible person, is a good husband and father, works hard, and pays his taxes. But he’s writing this? It’s like discovering that your next-door neighbor is a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
This brings up the Christopher Hitchens Challenge (video). Hitchens challenges anyone to state a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by an unbeliever—something that a believer could do but an atheist couldn’t. In the many public appearances in which Hitchens has made this challenge, he has never heard a valid reply.
But think of the reverse: something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Now, there are lots of possibilities. Obviously, anything containing variations on “because God says” or “because the Bible says” could be an example.

  • “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
  • “Despite the potential benefits to public health, we should avoid embryonic stem cell research because it’s against the Bible.”
  • “God hates fags.”

Or, as in this case, “God supports genocide.”
This reminds me what physicist Steven Weinberg said: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
In other words: Christianity can rot your brain.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/24/11.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Magician Uri Geller Teaches Much About Bible Miracles

Posted on by

Remember Uri Geller? He was the psychic (or entertainer) who bent spoons and performed similar demonstrations in the 1970s and later. He claimed that extraterrestrials gave him paranormal powers, but wet blankets like stage magician James Randi stated that all of Geller’s claimed paranormal demonstrations were done with conventional stage magic. Randi showed this by publicly duplicating all of Geller’s tricks.
Geller responded: “Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate [my performances] through trickery.” In other words, just because others can do these things as tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them using paranormal powers. But Randi observed that if Geller was actually doing what he claims, “He is doing it the hard way.”
Miraculous Bible claims
I was reminded of Geller when I recently read a defense of one of the Bible’s miracle claims. Maybe it was the Genesis flood story (which looks a lot like the prior Gilgamesh epic). Or the creation story (which looks a lot like the prior Sumerian creation story). Or the Jesus virgin birth story (which looks a lot like prior virgin birth claims of other great men). Or the Jesus resurrection story (which looks a lot like prior dying-and-rising stories of other gods from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean).
It doesn’t much matter which Bible story the apologist was trying to shore up—the defense is the same. It’s the Uri Geller defense. Geller would say that just because they did his stunts through tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them for real. And the Bible apologist says that just because other cultures anticipated some of the Bible’s fundamental miracle claims long before a Bible story was written doesn’t mean that that Bible story isn’t for real.
Granted. But if Randi can duplicate Geller’s demonstrations as tricks, that makes the null hypothesis that Geller’s paranormal claims are fraudulent. Geller has the burden of proof to show that this simple and obvious natural explanation is wrong. And if we have precedents for many of the Bible’s miracle stories, that makes the null hypothesis that these are just ancient Jewish versions of well-known supernatural stories. The apologist has the burden of proof to show that, while the other stories are just myths and legends, the Bible miracles actually happened.
Yes, but those earlier stories don’t count!
Some apologists try to dismiss the earlier stories, but early church father Justin Martyr tried to spin the similarities between Jesus’s virgin birth claim and those of other gods to his advantage. Why should the Greeks dismiss this miracle claim of Jesus, Justin asked, when they make similar claims about their own gods?
About the Jesus resurrection story, Justin speculated that the similar Dionysus story was planted in history by the devil himself. (I give Justin’s arguments in more detail here.)
Another angle is to emphasize that each Bible story is different from its precedents. Of course it’s different—if the Jesus story were identical to that of Dionysus (say), we’d call him Dionysus instead of Jesus. The question is: how can we trust a Jewish or Christian story as history when it came out of a culture swimming with older (false) stories with the same supernatural claims?
How we deal with similar claims.
Psychics might really be talking to the dead. Though that’s not where the evidence points, desperate customers want the psychics’ story to be true.
Crop circles might really be made by extraterrestrials. Though that’s not where the evidence points (creators have documented how they do it), crop circle enthusiasts dismiss the mundane explanation.
Uri Geller might be for real, though that’s not where the evidence points. Similarly, the Bible miracle stories might be true, but similar miracle stories in nearby cultures make copying by Bible authors the best explanation.
We can’t prove that the Bible’s miracle claims aren’t for real, despite all the precedents, but that’s the way to bet. The plausible natural explanation makes the supernatural explanation unappealing and unnecessary. Only someone with a desire to support a preconception wouldn’t follow the evidence where it leads.

I don’t want to argue
with people who believe the world is flat.
— Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong

Photo credit: Wikimedia

A Powerful Defense of Reason … or Maybe Not

Posted on by

In wrestling with the issues of faith and reason and how they should be used within society, I asked for the input from an experienced pastor.  Here’s his letter in reply.  I’ll let you evaluate it yourself.

(Alert readers will recognize this as an homage to the 1952 “If by whiskey” speech by Mississippi State Representative Noah “Soggy” Sweat, Jr.)
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/4/11.)