My email to Dr Beau Branson

Dr Beau Branson, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brescia University in the USA. A presentation by him on his 'Monarchical' version of Trinitarianism can be found here.

Dear Dr Branson,

I long ago ceased to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, chiefly because of what I consider to be its logical incoherence. However, I also believe that the one version of Trinitarianism which seems closest to being susceptible of a rational interpretation is that espoused by Fathers John Behr and Thomas Hopko and, as far as I can tell, by yourself (all adherents of the Orthodox branch of the Christian faith) which holds that while the one God is most definitely the Father, yet the Son and the Spirit are each also God in some secondary or derived sense. 

My problem with this understanding of the Trinity, however, is that it seems to me to equivocate as to the sense in which we may refer to the Son and the Spirit as God. Clearly when we call the Son God we cannot mean that he is the same God as the Father, otherwise he would simply BE the Father. But if by calling him God we mean that he is a different God to the Father then surely we are guilty of tritheism. I would be most grateful if you could clarify your position and clear up this conundrum for me. Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards,

Andrew

See Dr Branson's response to my email.

Reflection on the previous post

It seems to me, on reflection, that the Eastern Orthodox formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity as explicated by Fr John Behr, Fr Thomas Hopko, Dr Beau Branson and others, which I described in the previous post, while it doesn't suffer from the logical problems that other versions of the DOT do, still suffers from the semantic problem that the term "is God" is used in a way that makes no sense in modern English (I alluded to this in the previous post itself). We do not use the term God as an adjective but only as a noun (or a proper noun). Thus, for the Orthodox at any rate, the trinity doctrine would be more correctly formulated in English as follows:

The Father is divine
The Son is divine
The Sprit is divine
There is only one God (namely, the Father)

Also, the part of the Nicene creed describing the relation of the Son to the Father would be more correctly translated by the admittedly cumbersome phrase "divine Person of God, light of light, true divine Person of true God".

While a semantic problem is not as serious as a logical one, I am also not convinced that the above formulations represent what the average Orthodox Christian actually believes. If asked "is Christ actually God, or merely a divine Person", I can't help thinking that most Orthodox believers would affirm Christ's deity rather than just His divinity.

An Orthodox solution to the logical problem of the doctrine of the trinity?

I have mentioned before in this blog about how some Orthodox theologians seem to believe that the one true God is simply the Father. In that regard I referenced Fr John Behr, but I have read a similar view from Fr Thomas Hopko. Both of them, however, maintain that the Son and Spirit may also be referred to as God - a point that I did not feel that either of them particularly clarified the reasons for. I have also discussed in a previous post the significance of the definite article and lack thereof (theos vs ho theos) in the wording of 1st John Chapter 1 vs 1. In this lecture which I came across this morning, by another Orthodox theologian (Dr Beau Branson) both of these points are brought together, and the position elucidated by Behr and Hopko (both of whom are mentioned in the lecture) is made even more explicit: The one true God is NOT the Trinity but simply the Father. There are three divine Persons - Father, Son and Spirit - with the latter two deriving their divinity from the former (something else I have discussed previously on this blog). The Son and Spirit are called God but (according to Branson) not in the same sense (the 'definite article' sense) as the Father is. In other words, neither the Son or the Spirit is "the One God". That title is reserved strictly for the Father. (This distinction between the ways in which the term 'God' is used to reference the Father and the way it can be used to denote the other two Persons is, admittedly, still rather unclear to me. It seems to me that it would be better, in modern English, to simply use the adjective 'divine' to describe the Son and the Spirit while reserving the title of 'God' for the Father alone).
The view of the doctrine of the trinity described in this post is, apparently, considered orthodox (both with and without a capital 'O') in the Eastern Church and is, according to Branson, the view of all the Church fathers prior to Augustine.
If this is correct (and I believe it is) then the problem of the coherence (or perceived lack of it) of the doctrine of the trinity is resolved. In its Orthodox formulation, as outlined by the likes of Behr, Hopko and now Branson (amongst others who Branson refers to in the lecture I have linked to), it seems the doctrine is not incoherent at all and may be believed in without compromising ones intellectual integrity.

Update: See my next post, which is a reflection on this one.