The two hands of God

The Church Father Irenaeus described the Son and Holy Spirit as the two 'hands' of God. That thought is certainly compatible with my own understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity.
When my hand is holding something, or pointing at something, it is actually me that is doing the holding or pointing, even though my hand is not identical to me. Similarly, when the Son or Spirit are acting or speaking it is actually God who, through them, is acting or speaking. It is in this sense, I believe, that we can speak of the Son and the Spirit as God - not in the strict sense of being identical to God, which is, in my opinion, applicable only to the Father.
As I've stated previously, while not being strictly identical to God, the Son and Spirit are certainly divine, by virtue of the fact that they are 'parts' or aspects of the one true God (the Father) - namely His Word and His Spirit.

A simple statement of my symbolic understanding of the Trinity

My understanding of the nature of the relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit and of the nature of the Godhead can be summarised as follows:

1) The Father is God
2) The Son reveals God
3) The Spirit conveys (or communicates) God
4) There is only one God

My conversation with Dale Tuggy

A few days ago I tweeted a link to my previous post and copied in Dale Tuggy, a philosopher specialising in Analytic Theology, Philosophical Theology, Philosophy of Religion and Early Modern Philosophy, who has taught in the Department of Philosophy at The State University of New York at Fredonia since 2000 and who runs the popular Trinities blog and podcast series, some of the episodes of which I have been listening to lately.
Mr Tuggy was good enough to respond to my tweet, and over the next couple of days I had a short conversation with him, via twitter, about the views I had expressed in my post.
The twitter conversation (complete with abbreviations!) is reproduced below. Dale Tuggy's words are in bold.

Me:
A coherent explanation of the Doctrine of #TheTrinity: http://luthersmarbles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/my-own-take-on-trinity.html?m=1 … #Christianity #Christian #theology #philosophy @DaleTuggy

Dale Tuggy:
There are many arguably coherent ways to parse the language, but most are mutually exclusive. Real problem is fit with the Bible.

Dale Tuggy (again):
Not coherent. Trin sposed to be monoth, but you say 3 Gods. Which in ur view is the one God - the Trinity or the Father?

Me:
Def Father, as per Jesus' words ('Only true God'). Son and Spirit are 'God of (or from) God' as per creed. 3 Gods but 1 div nat.

Dale Tuggy:
Not sure if you mean three Gods or three "God"s. Do you see the difference?

Me:
1 uncaused God (the Father), 2 'Gods' in a secondary sense, deriving their divinity from the Father. Do you think it's heretical?

Dale Tuggy:
No, I think that's subordinationist unitarianism, like that of Clarke, Novatian, or Origen. Not trin because one God not = Trinity

Me:
I just recapped on Clarke and I agree with his views, but they are actually not that different to some East Orth eg. Fr John Behr

Dale Tuggy:
I need to read more East. Orth. sources on the Trinity. I suspect they are ambivalent about whether God = Trinity vs. God = Father

Me:
I think they def more favourable to God=Father than Western trad is. Thanks for comments. Congrats on excellent blog and podcasts

(End of conversation)

Of course Dale Tuggy is right, the formula I came up with in my most recent post was never really going to pass muster as orthodox - at the end of the day it would mean that Christians are worshiping three Gods, even if all three do share the same divine nature. But I've never set any store by the argument that because there is only one divine nature then the three persons who share that nature must all be the same God. If possession of the divine nature makes a Person God, then if three Persons possess that nature there must be three Gods. So this idea about one Supreme God and two secondary Gods deriving their divinity from Him was the closest I could come to what I felt the Trinitarian language was trying to get at. And I'm glad Mr Tuggy mentioned Samuel Clarke because it made me check back on his views (I have come across them once before) and I realise that he too felt that this type of idea was the closest one could come to Trinitarianism while remaining coherent. Dale Tuggy calls this view Subordinationist Unitarianism, which I think is a better label than Tritheism, considering that I am not talking about three 'independent' or separate (as opposed to 'distinct') Gods.
Incidentally, I think that Father John Behr's (the Orthodox Priest who I mentioned in my penultimate tweet) attempt to explain the doctrine of the Trinity can only be rendered coherent if the Son/Word and Spirit are viewed as, in some sense, secondary deities deriving their divinity from the Father.
Every now and then I try to bring my view of the Trinity more into line with traditional orthodoxy - after all, who actually wants to be a heretic? (I prefer the word 'liberal' or even 'radical protestant'). None of these attempts have ever survived any serious scrutiny, though, and this latest one is no different. I do think, however, that the idea of one uncaused, true God, who is in turn the cause of the divinity of his Son and Spirit, is a better approximation to the way the New Testament writers and the earliest Christians appear to have understood the nature of the Godhead than the later Trinitarian theories of Athanasius which, it seems to me, are impossible to conceive of in any coherent or logically plausible way.

Clarification of my view on the Trinity

I stated in my initial post on this blog that I see the Trinity as more a case of one God in three 'presences' than three Persons: the 'only true God' (the Father, as described by Jesus) is present in the Son, by the Spirit.
The fact that both the Son and the Spirit share all the divine attributes of the Father (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, infinite love or omnibenevolence etc.), however, means that it is not inappropriate to refer to them also by the title 'God'. I think the reason that the doctrine of the Trinity requires us to say that although all three Persons are God, yet there is only one God, is that if we were to say that there were three gods, that would imply that there were three 'independent' sources of supreme power, three seperate sets of divine attributes, etc.
By saying that although there are three who are God, there is only one God, we are constantly reminded that there is only one supreme 'power source', only one source of infinite love and knowledge etc. - that of the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, as the Nicene Creed puts it. The Son, rather than being God in an unqualified sense like the Father, is 'true God from true God', to borrow another phrase from the creed (italics mine). Likewise with the Spirit. While the Father is uncaused, the Son (God's 'Word' or Wisdom, which became incarnate as Jesus Christ) is eternally generated and the Spirit eternally 'spirated' by the Father. As such, the Father is eternally the source of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit.
When we try to view the doctrine of the Trinity as a logical or mathematical idea it inevitably leads to incoherence if not outright cognitive dissonance. It is, rather, a religious concept expressed in symbolic language. Translated into straightforward, 'face value' terminology, I believe that what it is trying to express is the idea that while there is one supreme God, there are two other Gods who share all of the divine attributes of the supreme God because they derive them from Him.

My own version of material constitution

The following is an extract from a post I wrote on one of my old blogs back in March of this year, and represents one of my countless attempts, over the years, to make sense of the traditional understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. In some ways it is similar to Dr Michael Rea's ideas about material constitution that I criticised in this post. The words of my original post are in bold:

Most of the tenets of the doctrine of the Trinity, in its traditionally understood form are, of course, indispensable: The unity of God is non-negotiable as is the distinctiveness of the Persons and of course the Deity of each. However, the idea that God does not have 'parts' (the doctrine of Divine simplicity) seems to me to be less fundamental. It is a required belief for Roman Catholics according to the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 and also Vatican II, but as a protestant I do not feel bound by these Councils; and the Eastern Orthodox Church, with it's teaching on the distinction between God's essence and His energies does not seem as wedded to Divine simplicity as the RCC. By discarding the necessity for it to involve the idea of God having no parts, I have been able to come to an understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity which is, I would argue, both coherent and maintains those three 'non-negotiables': God's unity (oneness), the distinction between the Persons and the Deity of the Persons.
This understanding of the Trinity is as follows:

The Father is the one and only God ("for there is one God, even the Father", as the Bible says).

The Son is a part of God - namely His Word or Logos, His Wisdom, begotten of the Father and therefore of 'one substance' with the Father (analagous to how an earthly child is made from the very bodies of its biological parents).

Likewise, the Holy Spirit is a part of God - namely His Spirit (what it says on the tin!)

It could be objected that, according to this understanding, there is no difference between the Father and the Trinity as a whole. This is a reasonable objection, but I would argue that the name Father refers to the first Person of the Trinity (of whom the second and third Persons are parts) considered on His own, while the term Trinity refers to all three Persons considered together. Admittedly the difference is subtle and largely a matter of emphasis.
Another objection is that, on this understanding, the Son and the Spirt appear to be less than fully God; that each is merely a part of God. However, I would argue that, because of the unique and infinite nature of the Godhead, every part of God contains the fullness of everything that God is - the fullness of the Divine Essence or Nature - and that therefore each part of God may be rightly called God. This is not to say that each part of God is a distinct and seperate God, or that each part of God is literally identical with the whole of God. To illustrate what I mean I will use an analogy: Imagine you are holding an apple and you have just taken a bite of it. What you now have in your mouth is not an apple; neither is it the apple; nevertheless, it very definitely is apple. Because the apple is, in a sense, simple - not made up of distinct parts each of which is something other than apple - every bit of it can rightly be referred to as apple. Similarly, even though, according to the view described here, God does have parts, in another sense He can, in fact, still be described as 'simple' because each part of him, while not being the whole of God, nevertheless contains all the essential characteristics, qualities and attributes of Divinity and can therefore rightly be referred to as God. The Son is God, the Spirit is God, and yet there is only one God - the Father - just as in my analogy there is only one apple!
This way of understanding the doctrine of the Trinity may be somewhat unorthodox - some might even say heretical - although, paradoxically perhaps, I think it is closest to the Eastern (and Oriental) Orthodox way of thinking about the Trinity, which emphasises the Father's role as the eternal source of the Son (through 'generation') and of the Spirit (through 'spiration'), and also as the source of the Divinity of each of the other two. Nevertheless, Eastern/Oriental Orthodox theology does not (I believe) make the Son or the Spirit subordinate to the Father and neither is my portrayal of the Trinity intended to do so.

One problem with this attempt to make the doctrine of the Trinity work is that, in order to make it possible to refer to the Son and the Spirit as God, it requires us to think of the word 'God' as referring not only to the Father but also to some kind of divine substance, analogous to - if not actually - a material substance, of which the Father consists. For most Christians - as well as adherents of the other Abrahamic faiths - the word 'God' is, I think, used to describe a personal, supreme Being and not some kind of (albeit non-physical) material. But the term 'Divine Substance' is, of course, very much part of the traditional Trinitarian language and, as well as being used to denote the one divine Essence, Nature or Being of God, it is sometimes - particularly by some of the early Church fathers (Tertullian for example) - used to describe a kind of spiritual matter or 'stuff'. Still, as a solution to the problem of finding a logically coherent way to state the doctrine of the Trinity, I'm not at all sure that the method described above is entirely satisfactory!

Not guilty of modalism (possibly)

My formulation of the doctrine the Trinity as describing one God in three presences, rather than Persons, is, of course, open to the charge of being heretical on the grounds that it could be construed as a form of modalism or Sabellianism (the view that God is one Person with three 'modes' of existence - eg. that he existed originally as the Father, then came to earth as the Son and is now present with us as the Holy Spirit - as opposed to three Persons, each of whom exists as the same one Being). My only defense against this charge is to point out that it all depends on what is meant by the word 'person'. I don't know what the word 'person' meant to somebody in the Greek speaking world of the 4th Century. I understand that the Latin word 'persona' (from which we derive the English word 'person') is itself derived from a Greek word which originally meant 'mask' (as in the mask worn by an actor on the stage). Clearly, at least in its original form, it did not refer to an actual, individual self. However, our modern understanding of the word 'person' is that it refers to a conscious, self-aware subject or agent. In grammar, the subject of a verb is the one who acts while the object is that which is acted upon - so if God were three subjects then we would have to say, for example, that 'they created the world' rather than that 'He created it'.
Since none of us know exactly what the word 'person' meant to the people who devised the Nicene Creed or the early Trinitarian formulas, it is at least conceivable that they may have meant something similar to what I mean when I say that God is present to us in three different ways - that He exists as one self with three distinct presences, namely His transcendent presence as the Father, His very personal presence in the life and teachings of the man Jesus Christ and His immanent presence amongst us by means of His Holy Spirit.

Material Constitution and the Trinity

The other day I listened to this podcast in which a Philosophy Professor called Dr Michael Rea describes what he believes to be a coherent model of the Trinity. It involves the concept of material constitution. The version of this theory that he posits involves a lump of playdough tha has been made into a statue of 'Gumby' (I have no idea who or what Gumby is - Dr Rea is an American). The idea is that although the playdough and the statue occupy the same physical space and are, essentially, the same thing, there is also a clear distinction between the playdough and the statue. For example, one could destroy the statue without destroying the playdough; and if it was you who made the statue, you could say that the playdough was bought from a shop but the statue was not.
Dr Rea even posits a version of this theory that involves three distinct entities which are also the same thing - a lump of marble, which is also a statue, which is also a pillar.
Now, it seems clear to me that if a statue is also being used as a pillar, the difference is merely one of function. There is no intrinsic distinction between the statue and the pillar, and to use this as a trinitarian argument is akin to the oft peddled analogy of someone who is a husband, a father and a brother (this analogy fails, because the husband, father and brother are not three persons but merely one person with three different roles - the husband is the father and the brother - so it is modalistic and thus heretical).
The question of the distinction between the playdough (or marble) and the statue (whether of Gumby or anything else) is a little more complex. It is true that there is a genuine distinction here. There are things that are true of the marble that are not true of the statue and vice versa. However, in a sense, the distinction is als merely functional. The statue is a function of the lump of playdough - if you were to change the shape of it so that it no longer resembled Gumby, it would cease to function as a statue of Gumby. Similarly, if the man in the husband/father/brother analogy were to get divorced, one of his functions  (that of husband) would cease to obtain. The playdough/statue is really just one thing with two different functions. If you throw the statue in the air, you are also throwing the lump of playdough in the air. If you paint the lump of playdough red you will also be painting the statue red. This does not serve as an analogy for the Trinity because the distinctions in the trinitarian relations are more than merely functional - the persons perform different actions and have different experiences. For example, the Son 'took on flesh' and underwent crucifixion while the Father and the Spirit did not.
Dr Rea says during the podcast that the lump of playdough represents the divine essence, and that the three Persons of the Trinity are three distinct forms that the essence takes. This is not, in my opinion, a good analogy because (a) it suggests that, rather than possessing or constituting the Divine Essence (or Nature or Being), the Persons are somehow made out of - or constituted by - the Divine Essence almost as if it were a physical substance and (b) even if all three Persons were formed from the same 'lump' of Divine Essence, there would, as a consequence, be no distinction between them as one lump of any given substance cannot assume three distinct forms simultaneously - the same lump of playdough, for example, cannot, at one and the same time, be both cube shaped and spherical.
Incidentally, in the course of the podcast, Dr Rea offers similar criticisms of both C.S. Lewis's cube analogy of the Trinity and William Lane Craig's 'three headed dog'/Trinity Monotheism analogy/model to those that I made in my posts here, here and here.