After due consideration, I have decided to start my own Substack. Under the rather unimaginative title, “Infrequent Reflections”, I will continue to offer my thoughts on a range of political, cultural, theological, and cultural issues. While I may update my WordPress blog from time to time, chances are that most of my writing will appear on the new site.
For anyone interested, my Substack can be found here.
The following is a long-form project I undertook for my theological studies in 2021-22 (the main reason for the extremely light posting during that time). As the title suggests, it critically assesses the model of the Trinity put forward by the philosopher and theologian, William Lane Craig. A warning: it’s not for the faint of heart. At around 17,000 words — and dealing with a host of somewhat obscure or arcane issues — it requires a certain degree of patience. But for those willing to persist, I trust you will be rewarded!
Introduction
The doctrine of the Trinity, so central to Christian belief, has generated a near-ceaseless stream of controversy since its formal articulation in the fourth century. A key source of this protracted debate, exciting theologians and philosophers alike, is the so-called “three-in-one” problem: that is, how the one true God can at the same time be three distinct persons, all of whom are equally divine. Anyone trying to provide a compelling account of the dogma is immediately confronted with the task of avoiding contradiction, while endorsing the following seven propositions:
This heptad forms a narrow strait that a person must navigate if she is to remain within the bounds of mainstream Trinitarianism. On one side lies the Scylla of tritheism, while on the other lurks the Charybdis of modalism. But the demand for rational consistency must also be met: how, for example, would the apparent identity relations of (1)-(3) be reconciled with (4)-(6), which imply personal distinctions?[1] With regard to the Trinity, fidelity to both the canons of logic and orthodoxy have long occupied the doctors of the church.
Several basic families of Trinitarianism have emerged as possible ways of resolving these dilemmas. One of them, Social Trinitarianism (ST), flourished in the second half of the twentieth century as part of a wider renaissance in Trinitarian thought. While a variety of social models exist, they are united by the conviction that the Trinity can be conceived of as a loving family or community of three psychologically robust selves. Among the champions of ST is philosopher and theologian, William Lane Craig, who has developed a model of the triune God he dubs Trinity Monotheism (TM). He argues that although Father, Son, and Spirit are fully divine, only the Trinity as a whole can properly be called “God”. Depicting the Deity as a soul-like substance possessing three sets of rational faculties – each of which is sufficient for personhood – Craig contends that the Trinity instantiates divinity, while the persons are divine in virtue of being proper “parts” of God.
Craig’s proposal has generated a paltry response from the broader theological and philosophical communities. The following essay aims to remedy this relative lack by offering an extended assessment of its viability. My contention is essentially negative in cast: although TM exhibits certain strengths, it is weakened by a series of conceptual, logical, and theological flaws – afflicting both Craig’s formal theory and his model – which together prove fatal. Whatever virtues it possesses, Craig’s proposal ultimately fails. Regrettably, anyone wanting to settle the various conundrums thrown up by the doctrine of the Trinity will have to search elsewhere.
The essay will unfold as follows. First, I will describe TM in detail, surveying its main contours. Second, I will briefly examine one of the key strengths of the scheme, relative to other social models of the Trinity: namely, a fairly robust principle of divine unity. These sections will constitute a prelude for my critical assessment of Craig’s proposal, the essay’s most important phases. I will divide this segment of my analysis between TM’s formal theory (the persons are divine because they are proper parts of the Trinity) and the model proper (God as a soul-like substance with three sets of cognitive, affective, and volitional faculties). Turning my attention to what I consider some of the proposal’s key deficiencies, I shall scrutinise it in conversation with previous criticisms. It is here that I will substantiate my basic position, arguing that TM does not provide a coherent philosophical – and indeed, theological – account of God’s tri-personal life.
Among other things, I will argue that the mereological foundation Craig uses to allege the persons’ full divinity, supplemented by his cat analogy, is too fragile a basis for the claims he wishes to make. More than that, I shall contend that the proposal has a deflationary effect on the persons’ status, implying different types or grades of divinity. I will explore Craig’s proffered Cerberus analogy, suggesting that neither it nor other alleged parallels throw sufficient light on the question of how three divine persons may constitute one God. I will also examine the implications of TM for the nature of the divine persons in relation to the entire Trinity – contending that the model Craig offers is both unstable and ambiguous, lacking sufficient clarity concerning the members’ ontological status. This will go along with critical comments concerning the lack of proper coherence between Craig’s model and other aspects of his thought. Finally, I will elucidate what is perhaps the most serious (and surprising) charge against TM: that whatever else he might say, Craig’s proposal ultimately entails God’s non-personhood.
Some notes on structure and methodology
Before moving on, several important methodological decisions ought to be clarified. First, the essay will be a largely philosophical (or philosophical-theological) examination of TM. My focus will be on the conceptual and logical issues thrown up by Craig’s proposal, and as such, I will concentrate less on specifically biblical or exegetical issues. That said, because the Trinity is an avowedly religious doctrine, such concerns – especially the comportment of TM with biblical texts and later creeds – cannot be entirely excluded. I will therefore make targeted reference to representative passages and formulae in cases of apparent conflict. Second, I will simply assume that God’s nature or being is somehow tri-personal (however this is to be understood), and that such a view is entailed by a reading of the relevant New Testament texts; arguing for this point will form no part of the essay.
Third, my approach will be largely critical, rather than positive and constructive. After supplying the necessary context, I will be occupied with assessing Craig’s scheme; I will not make proposals of my own (except, perhaps, en passant), and I will not be advocating other models. Finally, I will refrain from critiquing TM using tools and concepts that are themselves controversial. For example, Craig’s compositional approach to the relations between the persons and the entire Trinity can easily be criticised on the grounds that it violates the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). DDS, of course, hinges on the claim that in God there are no parts of any kind (whether material or metaphysical). Moreover, it has a long and venerable history, and continues to enjoy warm endorsement within the guild of philosophical theology. But while the doctrine remains compelling to some, it attracts substantial criticism from those who, like Craig, reject it as incoherent or unintelligible. To try and defend (in this case) DDS would require far more space than is available here, rendering the current enterprise unworkable.
Trinity Monotheism: A Summary
I turn now to Trinity Monotheism, which Craig developed during a particularly fertile period for analytic Trinitarian theorizing. TM is a species of Social Trinitarianism, or what has otherwise been dubbed “three-self” theories of the Trinity.[2] Proponents of ST conceive of God, not as a single individual or self, but as a trio of subjects, bound together in a loving, intimate, and harmonious way. Despite their diversity, ST theorists are united in their commitment to a group-notion of the triune God, in which the three members constitute a kind of divine society.[3] Underlying this conception is the crucial claim that Father, Son, and Spirit are persons in a modern, psychologically rich sense: they are not merely subsistent individualisations of the divine essence, nor “concrete particular non-properties”,[4] but fully-fledged personal agents akin to human subjects.
Craig’s basic thesis can be summed up as follows: while the persons of the Godhead are fully divine, it is the Trinity as a whole that may legitimately be called “God”. As he writes, “…the Trinity alone is God…the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while divine, are not Gods”.[5] This conviction underpins Craig’s entire proposal, which can be conveniently divided into two segments: his formal theory, which concerns the divine members as “parts” of God; and the model proper, where he conceives of God as a soul-like substance with three sets of cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood.
Craig’s account of the Trinity is partly motivated by philosopher Brian Leftow’s criticism of similar models. Leftow threw down the following challenge to champions of TM (part of a broader critique of ST thought):
Either the Trinity is a fourth case of the divine nature, in addition to the Persons, or it is not. If it is, we have too many cases of deity for orthodoxy. If it is not, and yet is divine, there are two ways to be divine – by being a case of deity, and by being a Trinity of such cases. If there is more than one way to be divine, Trinity Monotheism becomes Plantingian Arianism. But if there is in fact only one way to be divine, then there are two alternatives. One is that only the Trinity is God, and God is composed of non-divine persons. The other is that the sum of all divine persons is somehow not divine. To accept this last claim would be to give up Trinity Monotheism altogether.[6]
Craig disputes Leftow’s framing of the dilemma. He rejects the idea that the Trinity is a fourth instance of deity and denies that the Godhead is composed of non-divine persons.[7] Moreover, he repudiates what he deems an unjustified assumption on Leftow’s part – namely, that if there are two ways of being divine, the persons of the Trinity will invariably be hobbled by a kind of “diminished” divinity. Craig argues that there is, in fact, more than one way of bearing this property: by instantiating the divine nature; and by being a part of that exemplifying entity.[8] Deploying the notion of part-whole relations, he explains that the members of the Trinity are fully and unequivocally divine because they are proper “parts” of the Deity. The entire Trinity is God, for unlike the persons it instantiates the divine nature. But Craig insists that while divinity may be possessed as a result of different factors, this in no way undermines the status of the persons.
Craig’s motivation is clear: not only is he anxious to avoid a Quaternity; he also wants to ensure his scheme does not court tritheism by positing a series of individuals that independently exemplify divinity. On his account, there are not four gods since there is only one exemplification of the divine essence; Father, Son, and Spirit should therefore not be seen as identical with God in the same way that the whole Trinity is.[9] Craig recognises the potential strangeness of using mereological language to conceive of intra-Trinitarian relations (as God is not a material object extended in space). But he also notes that a certain part-whole relation seems to obtain in this instance, given, for example, that “…the Father…is not the whole Godhead”.[10]
Craig attempts to illuminate his theory with the analogy of a cat. He deploys his feline example to explain how the persons can be divine without exemplifying that nature, and why this does not entail an unfavourable disjunction between them and the entire Trinity. Although a cat’s DNA and skeleton do not instantiate felinity or “cat-ness”, they remain fully feline because they are proper parts of a cat (which does instantiate that essence).[11] Similarly, because the members of the Trinity are proper parts of God, their own status is safely underwritten. Craig writes that “far from downgrading the divinity of the persons, such an account can be very illuminating of their contribution to the divine nature”. He goes on to say that the entire Trinity possesses some properties because the members do (e.g., omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness), while the members enjoy other attributes – necessity, aseity, and eternity – “because God as a whole has them”.[12]
Craig realizes that this still leaves unexplained the reason why the persons should be viewed as metaphysically integral parts of the same entity, rather than three otherwise discrete beings (who happen to be united). He therefore cites a second, and somewhat infamous, analogy: Cerberus, the mythical three-headed dog of the underworld.[13] “Cerberus has three brains”, Craig writes, “and therefore three distinct states of consciousness of whatever it is like to be a dog”. Despite this mental plurality, Craig avers that “Cerberus is clearly one dog” and “a single biological organism” – points that he thinks can be used profitably to illuminate the notion of a single entity enjoying distinct, multiple, and co-occurring states of personhood.[14]
To be sure, the analogy requires elaboration, lest it fall short of showing how an immaterial being may “support” three persons while still being one. Craig therefore invites us to reflect upon the nature of the soul and how it can be applied to the Trinity. He argues that:
God is very much like an unembodied soul; indeed, as a mental substance God just seems to be a soul…endowed with three complete sets of rational…faculties, each sufficient for personhood. Then God, though one soul, would not be one person but three, for God would have three centres of self-consciousness, intentionality and volition, as Social Trinitarians maintain…God would therefore be one being that supports three persons.[15]
For Craig, God can be described as a soul-like substance, supporting or underlying three sets of cognitive, volitional, and affective faculties. God-as-soul is likened to its human analogue: while a human soul sustains a node of consciousness, the Deity is so richly-endowed that he bears three bundles of such “equipment”, each constituting a distinct individual. These entities are fully personal, possessed of agency and intentionality.[16] Craig not only contends that TM captures the spirit of orthodox creedal lore; he also claims that it pushes beyond mere recital of fourth-century language and tropes to provide an intelligible and philosophically cogent account of the Trinity.[17]
Assessing Trinity Monotheism: Relative Strengths
TM and the principle of divine unity
Although much of my analysis of TM will be critical in nature, I want to start by making a few comments in favour of Craig’s proposal. Conceiving of God as a kind of soul-like substance, of which Father, Son, and Spirit are proper “parts”, carries at least one key virtue lacking in many of the main “pro-social” alternatives to TM: a comparatively strong account of divine unity. Many forms of ST on the market arguably lack a sufficiently robust principle of divine oneness, which means that such models remain vulnerable to tritheism. In his broad-based study of ST, Daniel Spencer has perceptively suggested that most of the alleged solutions to the lurking dangers of polytheism proffered by Social Trinitarians fail in the final analysis.[18] The reason is that they rely on an “as if” reading of the members’ unity for their success: while the Trinity is conceived of as a divine society, the persons are treated as if they were one, based on such features as interpenetration, absolute mutual devotion, or an immediate, non-inferential awareness of each other’s internal states.[19] However, these appear to be mere verbal solutions, which seek to paper over the metaphysical gap between multiple selves existing, say, in a state of perfect harmony, and a being that is genuinely unified in nature.
Consider Richard Swinburne, the widely regarded Christian philosopher (and avowed Social Trinitarian). On his functional monotheistic view, three divine beings sharing one common, abstract nature exist together of logical necessity, thereby constituting an indivisible collective that is the source of all things.[20] Swinburne suggests that what he calls G1 actively (and timelessly) causes G2 to exist, thereafter permitting the second being’s ongoing existence; together, they then co-operate in bringing about G3.[21] But as certain philosophers have observed, this is logically compatible with three discrete individuals enjoying the same essence and a complete concord of wills.[22] There may not even be anything inherently impossible about three separate immaterial beings experiencing a deep kind of co-inherence or psychological interpenetration. Other models, like that of Keith Yandell, appear to be afflicted by similar defects. He argues that Father, Son, and Spirit each possess a set of “G” properties, sufficient for divinity. In order to individuate the persons, Yandell contends that all such properties – including those that appears to be identical – are bearer-specific. But he also insists that the persons cannot logically exist apart from each other, enjoy complete volitional unity, and possess non-inferential awareness of each other.[23] However, if critics are right, then he has also failed to provide justification for why the three should necessarily exist in a relationship of metaphysical dependence, or why their co-existence should entail a genuine, ontological unity. They remain three ultimate principles, whose status as discrete beings is logically consistent with what Yandell has advanced.[24] Ultimately, Spencer is correct: advocates of ST relying on such strategies to burnish their monotheistic credentials are not dissimilar to a person who fashions a megagon and calls it a circle.[25] Since this kind of polygon is not truly circular (regardless of appearance), it remains a mere approximation; the qualitative fissure that exists between the two shapes cannot be bridged by pretence or linguistic veneer.
Craig’s proposal, by contrast, seems to come closer to something resembling authentic metaphysical unity. His contention that the members of the Trinity function analogously to “parts” in one larger entity underwrites their essential oneness far more readily than the main rivals to TM. This is buttressed by his model: Father, Son, and Spirit are personal “elements” of the one divine soul, thus enjoying a kind of organic solidarity that does not rely on mere comity or volitional harmony. Craig’s position is reinforced by the apparent fact of his seeing the divine nature in concrete, rather than universal or abstract, terms. On a universal view, it is possible for a certain nature or cluster of properties to be exemplified in, or borne by, discrete tokens.[26] Humanity, for instance, is a universal that is instantiated by any number of separate individuals. This, too, would leave one’s Trinity theory vulnerable to charges of tritheism, where each person exemplifies the divine nature as an individual item. Craig’s model operates with a single trope of divinity, which seems to avoid the problem of multiple exemplification to which universal properties inevitably lead.[27] This would allow him at least to blunt the “three Gods” threat, thereby gaining an advantage over certain other iterations of ST.
I fear, however, that Craig may have won a Pyrrhic victory: securing the essential unity of the divine persons by way of his proposal comes at a cost. In what follows, I will attempt to show just how exacting that cost is.
Assessing Trinity Monotheism: The Formal Theory
We arrive now at the heart of my essay: a critical assessment of Trinity Monotheism. Does Craig’s scheme offer a satisfying version of Trinitarianism? Is it logically sound and internally consistent? And does it successfully observe some of the basic constraints of Trinitarian orthodoxy? Unfortunately, my fundamental answer to these questions is “No”. For ease of analysis, I will divide this section into two main segments: Craig’s formal theory; and the model proper.
Contending with creeds, sparring with Scripture
I start with Craig’s theory, which seeks to explain the divinity of the persons by way of part-whole relations. I suggest that it is riddled with a number of serious flaws; for the Christian, the degree to which it fails to properly cohere with orthodoxy is of utmost concern. Indeed, one must contend with the fact that Craig’s view of the persons’ divinity conflicts sharply with both early church councils and biblical texts. This is most obvious when it comes to his contention that the persons, while divine, are not properly God. The second council of Constantinople (AD 553), for instance, declares that there is “one God, even the Father of whom are all things…”. Judging by this particular statement, the authors of the creed were seemingly convinced that the Father, far from only being God predicatively, was to be identified with the ultimate principle of all creation. The Nicene Creed is also quite clear, enjoining Christians to “believe in one God, the Father almighty…”.[28] This is quite similar to the Apostles’ Creed, which declares belief “in God, the Father…”. Their basic coordination of the two figures in question appears to be unambiguous: the Father is God.[29] It is difficult to see how these clauses, occurring in creeds that have won near-universal acceptance, can be reconciled with Craig’s claim that the Father is “merely” divine by predication.[30]
Craig suggests that ecumenical councils, while important, should not set the bar for what counts as licit theological statements; that norming role, of course, belongs to Scripture. But while this may be true, his view encounters further problems, with the divergence between TM and the biblical narrative reflected in several key New Testament texts. Let two passages stand for many. First Corinthians 8:6a declares that there is “one God, the Father (cf. John 17:3a)”. This, too, seems to be saying that God is the Father. But if Craig is right, then Paul’s claim is incorrect, and the Apostle was wrong to apply the label “God” to this particular member of the Trinity. On Craigian Trinitarianism, we may recall, one would be forced to say that the Father is not, strictly speaking, God. One possible alternative is to interpret the clause predicatively: where “God” is used, Paul would simply mean something like “divine”. But this will not work, for the position of “God” in that clause suggests it is being used in nominal, not predicative, fashion. And why does the Apostle also say “one God…”? This would imply the existence of numerically one being possessing divinity – the Father himself. What, then, of the Son and Spirit? According to Craig, there are three divine beings, who help compose the triune God. However, if his claims concerning predication are accepted, then it seems that 1 Corinthians 8:6 must be read as referring to only onesuch individual. Anyone wanting to uphold orthodox Trinitarianism would be right to resist such bizarre interpretations.
Craig might respond that such an argument can be turned against a prima facie reading of the passage: if the one God is the Father, how do we account for the divinity of the other two members? Traditional conceptions of the Trinity can appeal to the idea that the Father is the principle of deity; the Son, meanwhile, proceeds from the Father as the eternally begotten Logos.[31] Whether or not this is ultimately satisfying, such a course represents one way of reconciling a surface reading of 1 Corinthians 8:6 with dogmatic claims concerning the Son (and Spirit). Craig, however, cannot make use of it, given his rejection of relations of origin within the Godhead.[32]
Second, consider Colossians 2:9, where Paul affirms that “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form”. This clearly seems to set forth the claim that the divine essence resides completely in the man Jesus – i.e., that he is God in physical form or “solid reality”.[33] If certain commentators are correct, and this represents an expansion of Colossians 1:19, then the point is simply underlined: the plenitude of God, the origin and guarantor of all things, has filled Jesus Christ to the uttermost.[34] At the very least, this clashes with Craig’s insistence that the Son-Logos (who he would agree became enfleshed in Christ) is not the whole God, but “merely” one part or element of that larger entity. Could this really be the case if, as Paul declaims, the earthly Son bore fully the nature of the Creator himself?[35] That would introduce a strange contrast, since Jesus would have possessed the divine nature in greater measure during his worldly sojourn than did the Son-Logos in his pre-incarnate state. And of course, “God” in this passage cannot be read as the entire Trinity, for this would lead inevitably to heterodox positions concerning the various operations ascribed to the divine members. Patripassianism, or the view that the Father himself suffered in Jesus’ passion, is only the most obvious entailment of such a view. It seems that a text such as this should be interpreted as saying that the Second Person of the Trinity bears fully the divine nature. Craig’s theory, then, is questionable on biblical-textual grounds.
Mereological Objections to TM
Quite apart from exegetical problems, TM raises a clutch of philosophical concerns, traceable largely to the unusual manner in which Craig distinguishes the Godhead from Father, Son, and Spirit. I shall begin with faults relating to mereology (or the study of part-whole relations), which afflict his formal theory in a variety of ways.
Undermining God’s aseity
We might firstly reflect on the implications of Craig’s claim that some kind of part-whole relationship obtains between the persons and the Trinity. A mereological approach suggests that God is a composite of (at least) three “elements”: Father, Son, and Spirit. One key worry is related to the idea of ontological dependence, since God’s existence would seem to hinge on those elements. According to a major stream of classical mereology, composed objects are metaphysically posterior to their parts, which maintain them in being. Borrowing the language of contemporary metaphysics, any such item is grounded in its constituents.[36] Grounding denotes a state of non-causal dependence between multiple items; in the present context, it may be closely related to the idea of fundamentality, which here refers to God’s status as the ontological bedrock underlying all other realities and states of affairs.[37] For something to be fundamental just means that it is grounded in nothing else.[38] The trouble with saying that God is grounded in his constituents, however, is that it conflicts with his allegedly fundamental being. In particular, the claim compromises his aseity, or the conviction that he relies on nothing that is not himself for existence.[39] According to theologians holding to versions of divine aseity, God is self-sufficient and independent, which comports neatly with his bearing fundamentality. It is arguable, however, that a mereological God cannot bear this property, thereby failing to possess the kind of ultimacy fitting for the Deity.[40] It might be possible to argue that God depending on his parts does not violate the notion that he exists a se; because Father, Son, and Spirit are internal to the Godhead, reliance on them does not imply ontological dependence in the way that a creature relying on various external conditions would. One problem with this response is that it does not take account of the peculiar approach that Craig adopts, wherein he makes a clear metaphysical distinction between the persons and the entire Godhead.[41] He argues that although the Trinity is God the persons are “merely” divine by predication, while his division of attributes – some possessed by the whole Godhead, others “lodged” in the persons – suggests a similar difference. It seems, then, that God relies on components that are, strictly speaking, distinguishable from himself.[42]
But perhaps my objection is gratuitous: why assume that God is dependent on his parts because he is (as Craig’s theory suggests) complex? The unstated premise here is that wholes are always reliant on the elements that compose them.[43] However, it is arguably not always the case that a whole is posterior to its parts. Grounding relations may travel in the other direction: an entity could be ontologically prior to its constituents, whose existence is guaranteed by the totality. Instead of the entire Trinity relying on the persons, they would be grounded in the divine whole. And indeed, many of Craig’s explicit statements can be read as implying this very claim: the persons are divine because they are parts of the entity called “God”, finding their identity within it; they possess certain incommunicable attributes in virtue of the entire Godhead having them; and, to anticipate my evaluation of Craig’s model, the persons are likened to centres of consciousness, supported by the divine soul.[44] Even so, these points are belied by elements of Craig’s mereological approach to God, which strongly imply that he must, in some sense, rely existentially on his parts. Since for Craig the persons bear certain great-making attributes primitively (e.g., omnipotence, omniscience), it is only on their account that God himself does. Moreover, triunity – which Craig argues is integral to God’s instantiation of the divine nature – only appears possible because of the conjunction of the three persons. It means that key aspects of God’s essence remain grounded in his personal constituents – a state of affairs that, somewhat incongruously, ends up undermining it.[45]
Could recourse be made to some notion of metaphysical interdependence? On this view, a totality and its parts are bound together in a profoundly mutual way, such that there exists a relationship of reciprocal metaphysical reliance. The whole depends on its parts for existence, but the parts also rely on integration within a broader system for theiridentity and persistence in being.[46] By analogy, God and the persons could be said to exist in a relationship of ontological interdependence, where both “parties” rely on each other. Unfortunately, Craig will find no refuge here. He explicitly states that substances are ontologically prior to their constituents. While this conflicts with some of the already-noted entailments of his formal theory, it nevertheless rules out any notion of metaphysical interdependence from the outset. But even if such a position were permissible, problems would remain. For example, contemporary defences of mutual dependence theory also tend to deny notions of well-foundedness (e.g., the claim that any item, X, is either grounded in a fundamental entity, or itself bears fundamentality).[47] What this means is that neither the whole nor its parts can be ontologically basic. Such a move may be tolerable for contingent entities embedded in wider networks of existence and being; it is far less attractive when applied to an allegedly ultimate (i.e., fundamental) entity.
Failing to shore up the persons’ divinity
So much for God’s ultimacy. A more immediate and obvious objection to Craig’s formal theory is that it fails to provide sufficient logical warrant for the persons’ (full) divinity.[48] Recall that for him, the persons are divine because they are parts of the Trinity, just as (e.g.) a cat’s DNA is feline because it is part of the overall animal. But this does not seem to furnish a robust foundation for Craig’s claims. To see why, we might explore first the notion of transitivity. If Craig is right, and the persons are fully divine by virtue of parthood, then the nature of transitive relations implies that their parts (e.g., the Father’s cognitive or affective faculties) are as well.[49] This seems deeply implausible, however: those faculties do not exemplify all the great-making attributes one normally ascribes to divinity, such as aseity, omnipotence, omniscience, or unsurpassed moral goodness. Nor do they have eternity per se, even though they are constituents of purportedly eternal beings. It is therefore not at all clear why mere parthood should be deemed adequate to uphold the divinity of the three persons.
Craig is liable to raise two counter-objections at this point. First, he has insisted that some mereological analyses limit proper parthood to a certain “level” within a composite entity: a door may be part of a house, for instance, while the door’s handle is merely part of the door (not the dwelling as a whole).[50] Conceiving of the Trinity as an individual composed of individuals – where “individual” stands for something that is neither disguisedly plural nor mass – Craig argues that “parthood is not transitive across types of composition”.[51] He contends that since the Father himself is an individual while his faculties are not, parthood cannot devolve further to include the latter; although they may be a part of him, they are not, strictly speaking, a part of God. Only three “elements” – Father, Son, and Spirit – could be legitimate candidates for “unambiguous” divinity, for they are the only genuine components of the Trinity.[52]
Second, one might suggest that to count as a part in the relevant sense, something must make a “direct, functional contribution to the whole”.[53] Another term of art is “determinate function” – i.e., the defined, circumscribed purpose something may have, which limits the scope of mereological relations. A handle may make an immediate contribution to the proper functioning of a door, but not to the house in which the door is located. Similarly, while a set of cognitive and volitional faculties might contribute to the centre of consciousness Craig calls the Father, its role within the entire Trinity is indirect – mediated by the First Person, just as a door mediates the role a handle plays within a particular house. By another (though complementary) route, therefore, God’s authentic parts would be limited to Father, Son, and Spirit.
How should one respond to these rejoinders? It appears, firstly, that in some cases, there is nothing inherently invalid in saying that parthood is transitive across levels of composition.[54] So long as care is taken to specify the functional domain of a certain part (where that domain can be variable in scope), presuming the transitivity of the part-whole relation may be permissible.[55] While “the house has a handle” seeks to draw an untenable inference from the knowledge that a particular door has a handle, there appears to be nothing intrinsically wrong with saying “the house has a doorhandle”.[56] Formulating this kind of relationship via statements in the form of “X is a part of Y” would be even less problematic, since they do not carry the implication that Y is the functional domain of X; saying that a doorhandle is a part of the house, while a little unusual, remains technically correct.[57] And in the case of a metaphysically integrated entity like the Trinity, where the relevant constituents are held together necessarily, it is difficult to see why someone should object to such a construction. Contrary to Craig, extending the part-whole relation to an item’s sub-parts is not always illegitimate.
Of course, Craig is likely to still insist that because the Father is an individual but his faculties are not, transitivity cannot proceed, for different types of composition allegedly renders this an illicit move.[58] That appeal, however, would trigger pressing questions regarding consistency: after all, Craig has contended that both an entire cat and its distinctive parts are “fully and unambiguously” feline. This looks suspiciously like an attempt to traverse different types of composition: a cat is a good example of an individual (as used by Craig), even though its DNA and skeleton are not. Compositional distinctions, however, have not prevented him from saying that the latter bear the property of felinity just as much as the former. Granted, the parallel he initially sought to draw was between a cat and the entire Trinity, not the individual persons. But that is irrelevant to the matter at hand, which concerns the legitimacy of positing an extension of mereological principles – and any attendant properties – across various types of constitution. There appears to be no good reason to restrict this to a particular level of parthood, especially if sameness of composition does not impose a limiting principle. Craig is therefore faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he can maintain the cogency of his cat analogy. Such a move would, however, compel him to concede that the divine persons are in principle susceptible to a similar procedure, even though they and their faculties are not of the same compositional type. That, of course, would lead him into the absurd position of saying that the persons’ attributes are just as divine as God is. On the other hand, he can continue to claim that “assuming…transitivity across different types of”[59] constitution is an illicit move – thereby rendering his cat analogy wholly untenable.
As for the second rejoinder – that direct functional contribution circumscribes the notion of proper parthood – I have already indicated that in some cases, the domain of a specific component within a larger whole is not necessarily a barrier to transitivity. Handles can still be said to be parts of houses, even if their role is determinate. Moreover, it is arguable that on TM, at least some divine properties do seem to play an immediate role in the proper “functioning” of the entire Trinity. Craig himself suggests that the whole Godhead, not the persons, bears necessity, aseity, and eternity in a primitive sense; such attributes help form the Deity’s nature in a direct, non-mediated way. While it might seem odd to think of such attributes in terms of parthood, a mereological model of God – one that seems to implicitly permit the use of mereological language across types of composition – leaves the door open to this concept. In any case, for all their importance as “components” of the Deity, necessity, aseity, and eternity are hardlydivine in the full-orbed sense. On the part-whole theory of TM, however, they would be just as divine as the persons or the Trinity.
One might object that these properties do not play a functional role within the Godhead; unlike an “active” attribute like omnipotence, they are static or inert in nature. However, this severely limits the concept of “functional” beyond its common meaning. A particular part may indeed operate by changing or actively maintaining the state of some object (e.g., a piston firing in a car to generate locomotion; a pair of lungs that permits regular respiration). But it may also lay down the conditions for other parts to function as required. It is arguable that a divine individual could not be omnipotent if it did not have eternity; the power possessed by such an entity would be contingent, subject to temporal constraints. Indeed, its occupancy within the bounds of space-time would see it subject to the vicissitudes of the historical process. Only an eternal, self-subsistent being can coherently be said to exercise unlimited power. In a broad sense, then, something like eternity plays a crucial functional role in upholding God’s omnipotence, and does so in the direct sense Craig deems important. But can it really be divine in the same way the persons are? Our initial contention therefore seems sound: mere parthood is insufficient to guarantee the persons’ divinity.
Diminishing the persons’ divinity
Craig’s mereological approach lacks the logical force necessary to guarantee the persons’ divinity, while also generating a series of conceptual confusions. And yet, his formal theory also has an actively deflationary effect on the nature of the persons – something that has been dubbed the problem of “diminished divinity”.[60] However exalted they may be, Father, Son, and Spirit bear this status in a downgraded sense when compared with the entire Trinity. To some extent this mirrors my earlier criticism concerning God’s ontological reliance on the persons, an implication Craig has seemingly failed to recognize. And yet, his theory also seems explicitly to require the subordination of Father, Son, and Spirit to the Godhead – a move that can only issue in a depreciated divinity, despite his insistence to the contrary.
Why might this be the case? For starters, it is entirely unclear how something may be fully divine (or human, ursine, planetoid, etc.) without instantiating that nature.[61] Craig’s contention that there are two ways of being divine is arguably a mere verbal solution to Leftow’s charge. That is, he takes two different states of being – instantiation and parthood, respectively – and insists that they can underwrite the same nature. It may be an ingenious linguistic strategy, but it also seems to gloss over a disjunctive definition of what it means to be (in this case) divine. Although the same term has been applied, the fact remains that it has been deployed to cover what appear to be very different conceptual zones. Craig, of course, thinks that his cat analogy provides a satisfying answer, illuminating what it means for something to be of a certain kind, whether through instantiation or parthood. To be sure, there is a genuine sense in which the characteristic features of a cat are feline (they do not belong to dogs or horses, after all). But mere predication cannot but have a depreciating effect; the part in question is what it is only “adjectivally”, depending on membership within the entire composition. Instantiation, by contrast, suggests a kind of metaphysical abundance that a thing’s components lack.[62] Indeed, within the logic of Craig’s scheme, an object exemplifying a certain essence and being a member within that same object do not seem to have the same ontological status. How, then, can they offer access to the same nature, and to the same degree?
It is worth examining Craig’s analogy in more detail. I have my doubts about its usefulness, although some objections are weaker than others. For example, while it is true that the atoms of a cat are not feline in the same way that its DNA or skeleton are,[63] one can simply restrict the theory to a thing’s proper or distinctive parts.[64] This would instantly rule out parts like atoms, since they are not unique to any one organism, having the capacity to “migrate” between material objects. But consider yet another part of a cat: its ears. They seem uniquely feline, both morphologically and physiologically, properly belonging to members of the domestic cat family. Indeed, they are perfectly fashioned to enable the animal to hear even the softest of sounds – important for the life of a (would-be) predator. However, it still seems hard to credibly maintain they are feline in the same way, and to the same degree, as the entire cat. For all the adaptive brilliance they exhibit, a cat’s ears cannot pounce, climb, catch rodents, or see well at night. These are properties and powers characteristic of felines considered as entire biological systems. That in itself appears to suggest a qualitative difference between the whole entity and a particular element composing it. It also suggests that the felinity of a cat’s ears, skeleton, or DNA are circumscribed, just as the divinity borne by Father, Son, and Spirit would be circumscribed if viewed through the lens of parthood. The suspicion that Craig’s analogy is finally unilluminating – and that his mereological approach actually diminishes the divinity of the persons – continues to linger.
Of essences and properties
This brings me to a related way of elucidating the problem. Consider the connected ideas of essences and properties – for example, the nature or essence of a human being. According to some conceptions of humanity, we are rational animals.[65] From that basic nature flow powers like language, a sense of humour, a capacity for narrative construction, abstract reasoning, and so on. Now, if Craig’s cat analogy is valid – and behind that, his part-whole approach to the persons’ divinity – then a human’s skeleton and DNA are, mutatis mutandis, “fully and unambiguously” human. Moreover, they are just as human as the entire human organism, albeit in a different way. But here is the rub. A human’s skeleton and DNA do not reason; nor do they use language or engage in personal I-Thou relationships. Only the entire human being bears and engages those properties. Even if an advocate of TM argued that such parts make a direct functional contribution to a properly functioning human, it is still the case that their powers and capacities are restricted in a way that the entire organism is not.
The crucial point is that properties are an important element in distinguishing what an object is – that is, identifying its nature or essence.[66] If something does not exhibit what are held to be the requisite attributes for a particular item,[67] then we have reason to question whether it is truly and wholly what it is claimed to be. In the case of TM, Craig singles out triunity as that property which distinguishes the entire Godhead from its members;[68] the implication of his view is that only the whole Trinity bears divinity in its fullest sense, for it alone has the attribute of tri-personality.[69] While it is arguable that God’s triune nature depends on the conjunction of the persons (which, as I have argued, undermines his ultimacy), the particulars of Craig’s theory introduce a qualitative distinction between him and the divine members. This means that despite Craig’s protestations, the persons, for all their splendour, are saddled with a kind of shrunken divinity – excluded from the fullness of that nature because they lack a key distinguishing attribute of Godhood. Indeed, if they do not have triunity, we are compelled to ask whether, on Craig’s account, they can be unambiguously and unqualifiedly divine.
But isn’t triunity essential to the divine nature?
At this point, Craig might insist that his proposal naturally proceeds, at least in part, from the prima facie plausible claim that triunity is an essential part of the divine nature; a distinction must therefore be made between the persons, who allegedly do not possess it, and the entire Trinity. To be sure, this fits well with basic Christian intuitions about God’s identity. Surprising though it may seem, however, we have reason to resist the notion. This requires some elaboration. First, while an attribute is held necessarily, it does not follow automatically that said property plays a constitutive role in a thing’s essence. As some critics have alleged, arguing otherwise is logically fallacious,[70] which would mean that triunity is not an essential part of the divine nature. Second, arguments purporting to demonstrate that tri-personality is qualitatively similar to features traditionally held to establish divinity are unpersuasive. Justin Mooney, for example, suggests that it underlies God’s maximal greatness, just as the properties of (e.g.) omnipotence and aseity do.[71] But while tri-personality may be superior to uni-personality, his construal presumes a “pro-social” form of the attribute (i.e., “loving, co-operative communities”), begging the question in favour of ST.[72] Furthermore, if divinity means maximal greatness – that is, the very summit of magnificence – then why would the existence of three persons within the Godhead be adequate? If a loving society per se is better than a solitary monad, would not, say, six, 13, or 745 persons be superior to a trio? A unified triad might get you some way towards a maximally great God, but the logic behind this argument suggests that there is nothing uniquely superlative about the number three. Such observations indicate that drawing a contrast between the Godhead and the persons on the grounds of triunity are somewhat shaky.
But let’s concede that there is some merit to Craig’s contention regarding tri-personality and the divine nature. Unfortunately, this would merely change the shape of the problem for him: saying triunity is constitutive of divine nature jars with other intuitions that exert an equally potent claim on the Christian’s acceptance. I have already suggested that embracing such a position invariably commits a person to different grades of divinity within the Godhead – intolerable for anyone wishing to affirm the full deity of the persons.[73] It also appears to conflict with creedal and biblical statements (e.g., Colossians 2:9) that are seemingly untroubled by the notion that the persons can instantiate the divine nature – quite apart from questions of triunity. The Gordian knot could perhaps be cut, but in ways that are barred to the Trinity Monotheist. Michael Willenborg, for instance, argues that the persons themselves are triune, possessing a common nature that includes existence within a relationship of triadic metaphysical dependence.[74] The Son would be triune in that he has a nature, possessed alike by Father and Spirit, and only exists if the other two persons do.[75] If successful, this would allow someone to embrace the essential character of triunity and the full divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. Craig, however, cannot resort to Willenborg’s proffered solution, for the distinction between the divine members and the entire Godhead – under which lies the attribute of triunity – is essential to his theory. Remove it, and the entire philosophical structure collapses.[76] But nor can he credibly maintain the distinction, for the reasons already adduced.
A two-tiered Deity
Michael Rea has made a perceptive observation that dovetails neatly with the preceding lines of argument. He agrees that Craig’s theory effectively posits not one, but two types of divinity: the primitive nature, instantiated by the Trinity as a whole; and the divinity of the persons, which is derived or mediated.[77] This is certainly hard to reconcile with Craig’s subsequent claim that divinity is a single property that something can possess “as a consequence of various factors”. If indeed we have multiple, yet unequal, forms of the divine nature, then the insistence that only one such type of divinity exists cannot easily be maintained. But more importantly, a derived property or status is incompatible with full and “unambiguous” divinity, precisely because it depends on something else – in this case, the entire Trinity – for its actualisation. The problem of mereology and divine ultimacy has returned, only in reverse: Father, Son, and Spirit bear several of the great-making attributes essential to deity, but in derivative fashion. They do not seem to be fundamental, for what they are is grounded in the Godhead; if divinity is associated with being metaphysically basic (something that does not appear possible on Craig’s model, in any case), then the persons do not qualify. Yet again, this appears to be a kind of circumscribed or diminished deity, at odds with what is normally taken to be essential to theistic conceptions of God.
It might be possible to blunt the objection by arguing that the Trinity just is the three persons; on this reading, no substratum exists, acting as an ontological guarantor for their divine status. But as I have already observed, the strong impression one acquires from reading Craig’s reflections on the Trinity is that such a foundation does exist (e.g., God as a soul-like substance supporting Father, Son, and Spirit).[78] To posit that nothing divine exists over and above – or “beneath” – the persons would bring the theory into conflict with the model proper. But then if my contention is valid, it means that that the persons are metaphysically rooted in that underlying substance for their ongoing existence. Any lingering trace of aseity would dissolve entirely. It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that this segment of TM entails two, unequal modes of divinity: one pertaining to the entire Trinity; and a lesser form, borne by the persons.
Assessing Trinity Monotheism: The Model
I turn now to the second half of Craig’s proposal, which concerns the model proper that he has developed for the Trinity: God as a soul-like substance supporting three sets of cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood. We have seen that Craig’s formal theory suffers from several defects. How does the model itself fare? I will outline a variety of criticisms, which I submit are overwhelming for its credibility.
Is Craig’s model metaphysically possible? Assessing the Analogies
Lurking beneath Craig’s model is the pressing concern that it may not be metaphysically viable – or at least not in any way that we can grasp conceptually. This will become clearer as we make our way through a series of proffered analogies.
William Hasker, who argues for a view similar to TM, has rendered the model in the form of a theoretical proposition:
Trinitarian Possibility Postulate: it is possible for a single concrete divine nature – a single trope of deity [i.e., God as a soul-like substance] – to support simultaneously three distinct lives, the lives belonging to the Father…the Son, and…the Holy Spirit (qualification in parentheses mine).[79]
This is where Craig’s now-infamous Cerberus analogy becomes relevant, which he thinks can show us how his model might be true. Recall that for him, Cerberus is a single, concrete trope of “dog-ness”, which exemplifies canine nature. Rather than supporting one canine consciousness, however, he is in possession of three states of dog-like cognition, volition, and affectivity.
The fundamental issue with Craig’s preferred analogy is that it thoroughly fails to illuminate his model, or show how it might be possible for one entity to support, sustain, or uphold three centres of cognition, will, etc. Consider the related – and real-world – example of dicephalic parapagus twins, who share one body below the neck. If Cerberus is really one instantiation of “dog-hood” with three centres of canine consciousness, then such twins would have to be considered similarly. But Brittany and Abby Hensel, perhaps the most well-known example of dicephalic parapagus twins alive today,[80] appear to be two distinct tropes of humanity, albeit sharing largely the same physical structure. They have their own personalities, aspirations, mental states, and ways of relating to other people. In short, the Hensels seems to exhibit all the trappings of what we would normally associate with distinct human individuals. If intuition is a reliable guide, it suggests that we are dealing, not with one case of humanity supporting two human-like sets of consciousness, but two human beings.[81] And because there is no salient difference between the Hensel twins and Cerberus, we should therefore regard the mythological guard-dog of Hades as three instantiations of “dog-hood”. Deployed consistently, Craig’s analogy yields the unwelcome conclusion that there are three gods, or three exemplifications of divinity, within the Trinity. This would not be triunity, but tritheism.[82]
Craig might respond that while Brittany and Abby are distinct persons, there exists only one human being in their vicinity. Multiple sets of consciousness, mental states, or personalities are consistent with this view, which means that more than one instance of humanity is not logically demanded. Mutatis mutandis, the same could be said of Cerberus: while there are three canine “persons”, there is only one instantiation of a dog. That might suffice to show how a divine soul could “support” three divine persons, without the latter devolving into three separate exemplifications of divinity. Such a move remains unconvincing, however. Embryological studies suggest that parapagus twins and dicephalic (“two-headed”) animals[83] are the result of incomplete twinning or embryonic fission: that is, where an embryo fails to properly divide. But behind the phenomenon lies a plurality of organisms, even if the process of bifurcation was stymied by certain factors in utero. Such organisms tend to have more organs than would be required for just one body, which may also suggest that if the pre-natal developmental process had continued unimpeded, two morphologically distinct exemplifications of (e.g.) humanity would exist. As such, these unusual occurrences do not seem to be genuine parallels to Craig’s Cerberus analogy, which remains unilluminating regarding his model.[84]
Grappling with some bizarre consequences
Pressing these analogies also leads to certain worrying metaphysical implications. Imagine, for example, that one of Cerberus’ canine members, Fido, is surgically separated. He still exists, even though he is not identical to the Fido that was part of Cerberus. The reason he is not identical is that on Craig’s reading, he was not a dog in the first place – merely a canine “person” that helped constitute one complete instantiation of “dog-hood”. This seems very strange, for it commits us to saying that the present animal is not the same entity as his pre-operative predecessor. Meanwhile, his present metaphysical status remains entirely unclear: is he a newly-formed substance, or merely a discarded “component” of the larger Cerberus organism? The only way, it seems, of avoiding such a dilemma is to say that Fido was and is a dog, before and after surgery.
Craig claims to have unearthed absurdities flowing from the aforementioned thought experiment, thereby nullifying it as an objection to his chosen analogy.[85] Suppose, for example, that Cerberus is a three-headed wolf. On the view propounded here, he is actually a set of three conjoined wolves. Now suppose once more that Fido is surgically separated from the rest of the organism, but is reconstructed using parts from a border-collie. Is he, then, a kind of wolf/border-collie hybrid? Or is he still a wolf made to look like a border-collie? And what was he prior to surgery? Although Craig thinks he has offered a sound rejoinder with these questions, there is reason to doubt his conclusion. For consider Fido, not as a member of Cerberus, but as a single, “stand-alone” canine (e.g., a wolf). Now imagine that due to injury or disease, Fido loses several body parts. Somehow, he has survived, with veterinary surgeons reconstructing him using parts from a border-collie. What breed of dog is the newly-minted Fido? Is he some kind of hybrid? And if so, what was he prior to surgery? I cannot detect any relevant difference between this scenario and the one Craig has offered – and yet, no one would dispute the claim that before the procedure, Fido was a wolf. More to the point, I do not think that anyone would argue with the contention that he was and is a single instantiation of “dog-hood”, despite the paradoxes yielded by this set of circumstances. Craig’s attempted rebuttal, I submit, is unsuccessful.
In any case, an implied Craigian interpretation of real-life cases generates similar absurdities. Consider again the Hensel sisters. If dicephalic parapagus twins truly are one exemplification of humanness (as the multi-headed Cerberus is allegedly one instantiation of “dog-ness”), then given the absolute nature of identity relations,[86] neither Abby nor Brittany is identical with the composite organism. But then it seems that we have two metaphysical classes of people populating the world: conjoined twins, neither of whom can be identified with a particular human being; and “ordinary” individuals, who can be so identified. There is, in other words, a specific kind of distinction between person and human being in the former case that does not obtain in the latter case. But how plausible is this sort of division? Moreover, how would we account for the fact that members of one alleged metaphysical class (i.e., the Hensel twins’ parents) somehow generated members from another class entirely? By contrast, simply thinking of such twins as two (conjoined) human beings – something that the logic of Craig’s Cerberus analogy prevents him from doing – would see this conundrum dissipate.
Finally, consider the troubling consequences Craig’s construal would have for the very nature of the Hensel “organism”. Because he is logically committed to the notion that only the total entity would instantiate humanity, his view falls prey to some acute inconsistencies. We might recall what I said earlier about human nature, and how it has often been conceived – i.e., as rational animality. Whether one accepts this precise formulation, it seems clear that what marks out humanity as a species, as well as a metaphysical “item”, is its capacity for rational thought. And as embodied individuals, we rely in some sense on our brains to exercise that capacity. But in the case of the Hensels, those brains – and the minds with which they are associated – are the possession of Brittany and Abby, not the organic whole. Moreover, the Hensel “organism” cannot be identical with either of its personal constituents, given classical identity relations.[87] Strictly speaking, it fails to bear the faculties necessary for rational thought, which means that it cannot (fully) instantiate human nature[88] – a conclusion that is sharply at odds with what Craig needs to claim. In the final analysis, both Cerberus and conjoined twins remain unyieldingly opaque as analogies, giving us little independent reason for thinking that the model underlying TM is sound.
Split brains and multiple personalities: some augmented analogies?
Philosophers and theologians sympathetic to Craig’s scheme have proposed different analogies, drawn from the worlds of neuroscience and psychiatry, in an attempt to demonstrate its intelligibility. Hasker has explored the possibility that medical phenomena like commissurotomies and multiple personality disorder (MPD) offer bona fide examples of several, distinct selves sharing a common substance (i.e., a human body).[89] In the case of commissurotomy (split-brain) patients, the brain’s two hemispheres have been severed, often in an effort to control seizures. Controlled experiments have yielded some startling results. In one example, the words “key” and “ring” were projected onto a screen, such that “key” appeared in the subject’s left visual field (and therefore transmitted to his right hemisphere) and “ring” in the right visual field (with corresponding transmission to the left hemisphere). Asked what he observed, the subject answered “ring” without knowing what kind of ring it was. Directed to point with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to what he saw, he pointed to a key, not a ring.[90] Some have interpreted such data as evidence for the emergence of two sets of (proto)-consciousness in one individual. For advocates and allies of TM, this may provide warrant for thinking that multiple and co-existing conscious agents can be grounded in the one exemplification of a certain nature.
For all its apparent plausibility, however, the analogy fails to throw sufficient light on Craig’s model. While researchers have gathered some fascinating data from such studies, philosophers and neuropsychologists have recently argued that the so-called “social ordinariness” of split-brain patients was the most common experience post-surgery.[91] That is to say, such individuals acted in a socially common way, with little or no indication of distinct streams of consciousness or global psychological bifurcation. Even clinical experiments themselves have generated ambiguous results: some patients evinced a marked division between the hemispheres during controlled activities, while others displayed a clear capacity for inter-hemispheric communication.[92] The “availability of content” afforded to split-brain patients tends to be chaotic and fragmented, with individuals frequently appearing to reach for phenomenal data in an uncoordinated manner across the two hemispheres.[93] This is not the kind of neat division between clearly demarcated mental “workspaces” one would expect if commissurotomies issued in the generation of distinct centres of consciousness – precisely because the force of the analogy depends (at the very least) on such “siloed”, independent nodes.
Even if the contents of one’s phenomenal field appear to be partitioned or incohesive, this does not necessarily entail a division into multiple conscious subjects or perceivers.[94] Indeed, experimental conditions still suggest that the same self is engaged in the task at hand, despite apparent conflict implying nodal fracturing within his or her consciousness.[95] This reflects the difference between what some philosophers have termed experience-based consciousness and agency-based consciousness: while an advocate might argue that the former can be divided, it still seems to be the case that a single, unified agent underlies those experiential fragments. Again, the social ordinariness of most split-brain patients tends towards an interpretation of behavioural unity, which persists despite possible fluctuations in perceptual integration.[96] It would therefore be very difficult to conclude that two discrete conscious subjects had arisen within the one individual human being.[97] As Hasker himself has conceded, “there is little to recommend” the argument that distinct persons develop as a result of this procedure – the very phenomenon that would be required to make commissurotomy patients true analogies to Craig’s “pro-social” model.[98]
As for those afflicted by MPD, it is claimed that two or more personalities inhabit the same body; the original personality has very often become divided, leading to parts that are “separate aggregates, each with its own memories, [forming] the nucleus for new, independently functioning constellations”.[99] Now, advocates have marshalled impressive evidence, supplemented by suggestive data gleaned from changes in localised brain activity,[100] that could imply the presence of co-occurring conscious agents in an individual suffering from MPD. This includes people testifying to being “intra-conscious” of their alters – experiencing intimate awareness of their thoughts and actions – and even a kind of inter-personal interaction with these identities.[101]
MPD could therefore bring us closer to illumination of Craig’s model than any other analogy on offer. But crucial questions loom: does the presence of certain “alters” really signal the emergence of multiple persons within the one human being (necessary for the phenomenon to act as a credible analogy to TM)? Or is it the case that individuals afflicted with this condition are instead suffering “merely” from the effects of one fragmented psyche? In fact, the phenomenon of multiple personalities faces potent problems. Even if a person’s alters are considered authentic psychic entities, the notion that we are dealing with a single fractured personality – where the various states are regarded as “parts” or “shards” of the basic ego – may ultimately be more plausible.[102] One key reason is that mainstream therapy with MPD patients continues to aim at re-integration of the various personalities that have been hived off the primary identity; that this remains the goal of clinical and psychological treatment implies the professional judgment, not that distinct personal agents inhabit one body, but that the individual in question suffers from a disintegrated personality, manifested in the appearance and evolution of semi-autonomous identities. The fact that a number of people afflicted with MPD have been able to achieve a healthy degree of psychic re-unification lends some weight to this position.[103]
Even on stronger interpretations of the available evidence, there are several crucial dis-analogies between the condition and Craig’s model. First, most advocates admit that the alters of an MPD patient are not fully-fledged persons in the way that two separate human beings are.[104] If they were, then the desired outcome of therapy with sufferers would literally end the lives of other people – in other words, homicide.[105] It is exceedingly difficult to see how anyone might accept this as an interpretation of therapeutic re-integration, regardless of how vivid said personalities are.[106] Furthermore, if such a goal is in any way possible, then it already suggests that we are not dealing with distinct subjects; after all, would it be possible for separate agents to undergo a process of therapeutic “fusion”? A psychological chimera seems implausible in the extreme (and would not be open to Craig, given his commitment to the divine members’ irreducibly first-person perspectives).[107] The problem, of course, repeats the one encountered in our exploration of split-brain patients: by failing to rise to the level of full personhood, the alters in an MPD patient do not constitute a suitable analogy for TM.[108]
Second, there is some evidence that what we might call subsidiary personalities are actually parasitic on the “host”, who remains the subject throughout one’s experience of MPD.[109] The alters, for all their vitality and uniqueness, seem to be at times ephemeral and intermittent, relying on the primitive personality as a kind of ontological anchor. But the members of the Trinity, at least on TM, are not related to each other in this way at all. It is not as if the Son depends on the Father as host – drawing his life from him as an epiphenomenon – nor the Spirit on either of them. And it will not do to say that the divine members are somehow parasitic on God as a whole. Aside from the bizarre spectacle of insisting on such a relationship between the Godhead and the persons, this would turn the Trinity into an unorthodox Quaternity: God, the primary or host identity; and Father, Son, and Spirit as subsidiary personalities, who exist in a co-occurring (though utterly dependent) relationship with him.
To be sure, a transcendent God, unbound by time and space, can never be fully captured by our mundane categories. But despite Craig’s insistence that TM provides an intelligible account of the Trinity, it seems that the analogies featured here ultimately fail to illuminate, thus leaving interested readers in a place of unrelieved agnosticism. Meanwhile, the metaphysical interior of the model remains utterly mysterious. Craig, for his part, insists that any analogy is simply a jumping-off point for reflection on his model, and has lambasted critics for apparently “fuss[ing] terribly” over the examples he offers.[110] But if neither Cerberus, nor the Hensel twins, nor split-brain patients, nor even sufferers of MPD, function as cogent parallels for TM, how can they be profitably deployed? What do they illuminate precisely? What are they launching pads for if they repeatedly thrust the advocate into a thicket of theological or philosophical problems? And if there are no other alleged analogies in the extant literature, what should we conclude about the purchase Craig’s model has on concrete reality?
Doubting the Coherency of Craig’s Model
Following in the wake of the above discovery is the disturbing realization that TM may not be metaphysically conceivable. Still, Craig and others might wish to endorse his model on the grounds that it allegedly satisfies orthodoxy and is not manifestly incoherent (even if one is not quite certain how it could possibly be true). Such a course would represent a retreat from the bolder claims he has made for its intelligibility. Worse still, close examination of the model calls into question any decision to embrace it. I turn now to concerns regarding Father, Son, and Spirit, exploring problems internal to Craig’s construction, as well as the tensions it generates with other aspects of his thought.
Are the divine persons substances?
An immediate worry concerning Craig’s model is that his position on the metaphysical nature of persons conflicts with his implied account of Father, Son, and Spirit, all while leaving their status entirely opaque. In describing the divine members as individual centres of will, cognition, and consciousness, Craig openly likens them to persons, akin to human beings. One would expect nothing less, given his avowed Social Trinitarianism. Moreover, Craig argues that persons in general are paradigmatic examples of individual substances (other typical cases being trees, dogs, or planets).[111] He even elucidates a set of features something must manifest for it to qualify as such:[112]
What happens when we apply these criteria to, say, the Father?[113] He seems to satisfy (1)-(3), as well as (6). Some might baulk at saying that the Father satisfies the sixth criterion, on the grounds that he cannot exist apart from membership within the Trinity. Craig himself suggests that the persons do not have the “stand-alone” quality of genuine substances.[114] Perhaps. But whatever principle of individuation one employs – and Craig seems to think the members can be distinguished according to the trappings of individual personality – it is clear that the Father is neither the Son nor the Spirit. Indeed, while they exist together, their complete individuality – not as mere relations, but as fully-fledged personal agents – is crucial to Craig’s model. As for feature (5), it is hard to deny that the Father is a member of a certain class of things, united by a common “whatness” – namely, divine personhood, and all the properties that flow from it. Craig denies that the persons of the Trinity instantiate an essence, but unless one is prepared to say that there is nothing in particular distinguishing Father, Son, and Spirit from other “items”, then it appears that they are constituents of a natural cohort. Consequently, the only possible feature the Father might fail to satisfy is (4), for it could be said that he is not subject to growth or perfection. But if this is true of the divine members, then it must also be true of God as a whole: he has no need of growth or development, for he is already complete. That God cannot meet all six criteria, however, does not seem to trouble Craig, since his account hinges on the notion that the Deity is a (primary) substance. As such, (4) may not be necessary when identifying individual substances, which means that Father, Son, and Spirit would qualify after all.
This is all well and good. However, according to Craig’s model, only God as a whole is a substance. He denies that the divine members are eligible, for on his account (whether as “parts” or as nodes of consciousness grounded in a soul-like substance), they do not enjoy a mode of being as fundamental as that of the entire Godhead. Craig cannot admit that the persons bear the metaphysical status of substance, since that would leave him with a surplus of entities: God as a whole, as well as Father, Son, and Spirit. Such a Quaternity is manifestly unorthodox, although it is difficult to see how this can coherently be avoided, given Craig’s prior metaphysical commitments. He therefore faces yet another intractable dilemma: accept the logical implications of his own view of substances and concede that the divine members satisfy the relevant criteria; or maintain his model. The former would see Craig move beyond Christian orthodoxy, while the latter would mean being at odds with himself.[115]
Again, Craig makes much of the claim that a true substance must have a “stand alone” quality, and likens Father, Son, and Spirit to hands: while a hand has a high degree of integrity, and could be said to have a kind of nature (from which certain properties flow), it is not a genuine substance in its own right.[116] There are at least a few problems with this rejoinder. First, if this kind of free-standing characteristic is essential to being a substance, then not even God himself would qualify on TM. For as I have already argued, Craig’s mereological theory (inadvertently) entails God’s dependence on his parts for both existence and exemplification. He would therefore fail to be a “stand-alone” entity, contrary to what Craig might insist. Second, it seems illegitimate to compare the persons with hands, for the latter are clearly mere instruments. Hands are used by the persons who have them; they do not possess independent agential power but are employed by those who do. The divine members, however, seem to bear such capacities; after all, it is not as if they are driven or directed by the divine substance. Granted, none of the members exercises power independently, if by that one means “unilaterally”. The conviction that Father, Son, and Spirit always operate in complete unison has long been part of the structure of orthodox Christian belief.[117] However, such agency remains qualitatively different from a hand: the latter has no self-determining or self-generating causal power, and only “acts” in so far as its owner does. One might continue to insist that neither a hand nor the persons can exist apart from the entities of which they are parts. This may be true, but it brings us back to the first objection – namely, how Craig’s compositional approach to God undermines ontological autonomy as a criterion for substantial existence.
Third, Craig’s reference to Father, Son, and Spirit having “sufficient integrity” to possess “natures” seems somewhat vague.[118] We still want to know what they are in a basic metaphysical sense. What are the persons if, on Craig’s reading, they are not individual substances? While they do not seem to be mere instruments (like hands), Craig is reluctant to commit himself to the logical entailment of his view. He gestures towards the idea that the divine members have natures/essences, but this is hardly a clarifying statement. On his account, only God as a whole has a nature; the persons may be divine, but only as elements within the Trinity. How, then, can they have an essence as well? And even if this were possible what, according to TM, might it be? The sense of confusion is only deepened when Craig, trying to elucidate his position, suggests that Father, Son, and Spirit are divine in virtue of being “God’s persons”.[119] I have already highlighted the problems associated with hinging divinity on something more fundamental than those who allegedly bear it. Beyond that, to claim that Father, Son, and Spirit are “God’s persons” (where one interprets that clause in a possessive sense) is to cast the Deity as primary subject. The members’ status, meanwhile, is shrouded in a metaphysical fog, which thickens when Craig simply calls them God’s “cognitive faculties”.[120] Persons just seem to be subjects: individuals possessing a first-person point of view, and capable of entering into I-Thou relationships. Craig would likely want to agree, given his declared commitment to a version of ST. But as I shall note in more detail below, mere “cognitive faculties” do not seem to rise to the level of personhood.
Ambiguities such as these have an obfuscating effect on Craig’s model. Does it mean that TM entails four substances? If so, then we begin to drift back towards a quartet of divine entities. On the other hand, if the persons are not themselves subjects, but merely modes or facets of God (who alone is true subject), then we have abandoned TM altogether, trading it for a radically one-self theory of the Trinity. Inherent doctrinal problems aside, such a move would conflict with the rudiments of Craig’s social model.
Persons, souls, and the Incarnation
There is another incongruity pertaining to Craig’s account of the divine persons, this time dovetailing with his construal of the Incarnation. Christian orthodoxy holds that around 2,000 years ago, the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate, being joined with a human nature to form the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Craig adopts what he calls a neo-Apollinarian reading of the doctrine, in which the soul of the Son-Logos completes the human nature of the individual in question, thus realizing the emergence of a genuine person.[121] The keen-eyed reader is likely to be left wondering how these claims cohere: after all, on TM it is God as whole, not the persons, who is the soul-like substance. The Son-Logos is, by contrast, only one node of consciousness within the Godhead. How, then, could he furnish the man Jesus – himself an individual substance – with a rational soul?[122]
To be sure, this may not be a problem for other advocates of TM, so long as they are not committed to Craig’s Christology. How might Craig himself deal with the inconsistency? First, he could equivocate on the concept of “soul”. In the case of God, the soul is the mental substance capable of sustaining a coherent set of cognitive, affective, and volitional faculties. But how could the term be defined differently without suggesting a complete disjunction in referent? Indeed, in what way could the notion be applied to both the Godhead and the individual persons, if not to denote the same type of object and its capacities? One could argue that what helped compose the person of Jesus was a kind of sub-soul, which itself is one of God’s parts. But this would just see Craig collide with a more general problem, one that I will canvass below: how the Son can be a fully-fledged person without also being a fully-fledged soul. In any case, if the Son-Logos were not a rational soul in a sense similar to Craig’s usage, it is unclear how he might undergird the qualities necessary to guarantee the genuine personhood – including all the extant powers of reason and cognition – of the man Jesus.
Second, Craig could try and argue that the entire Trinity was united with a human nature to form Jesus, such that he would bear a rational soul. It should be manifestly clear why this is untenable. The idea that all three persons became incarnate in Christ leads, of course, to a variety of thorny theological problems. Not only does it invite the heresy of, say, Patripassianism; it would also make a nonsense of certain biblical texts (who, for example, was speaking from the heavens at Jesus’ baptism if all three persons were embodied in him [e.g., Mark 1:11]?). That leaves only the third alternative: admit that the Son-Logos is, in fact,a soul. But this, too, appears to be proscribed. Embracing it would destroy the coherency of Craig’s model, for the only entity that can be a soul is the Trinity itself. Only by revising his Trinitarianism or his Christology can he hope to remain (theo)logically consistent.
Of souls and support: some logical and conceptual problems
The problems of souls and divine personhood bleed into issues concerning the various concepts Craig uses to illuminate relations between the entire Trinity and the persons. To be sure, certain critics have misfired in their objections to this phase of his proposal. The term “support”, for example, has been censured for its apparent unintelligibility.[123] Such an objection is unnecessarily obtuse, however: Craig’s meaning seems perfectly clear, in that he intends something like “maintain in being”. The primary idea is that God – this soul-like entity – acts as the metaphysical basis underlying the three divine persons. His insistence that the word means the whole Godhead is “explanatorily prior” to Father, Son, and Spirit seems to bear this out.[124]
But while this complaint may have been successfully rebutted, it hardly renders Craig’s model sound. That is because some of his language and analogizing also appear to imply that where the Trinity is concerned, the divine being or substance can “be” three psychologically distinct agents.[125] For Craig, God is a mental substance – in other words, a richly endowed rational soul. Rational souls, meanwhile, are equated with persons, which Craig thinks is confirmed by our long acquaintance with other human beings.[126] He then compares the Trinity with what obtains between a human person and her soul: the one divine being supports three persons, “just as” an individual human soul supports one person.[127] But as Howard-Snyder asks, what does it mean, say, for my individual soul to “support” my person? On Craig’s view, it appears that I am absolutely identical with my person, although I am also absolutely identical with my being/soul. By the transitivity of identity, then, the particular soul-like substance in question (i.e., me) is absolutely identical with the person in question (also me).[128] This has some very concerning implications for Craig’s model: if we are to understand the model in the same way we understand relations between a human person and her soul, “then God, this single composite item, is absolutely identical with the three [members]”.[129] However, this seems logically false, for identity relations are usually seen as one-to-one – i.e., symmetrical – not one-to-many, in nature.[130] For X to be identical with Y, both items need to bear all properties in common; but this does not appear to be true of the entire Trinity and the persons, given the numerical differences involved.[131] Of course, Craig implies that God and the persons are distinct: notions of “support” suggest an asymmetric relationship between the divine members and the soul-like substrate. Yet somewhat confusingly, his framing of the matter also amounts to the claim that one item is indistinguishable from three items – a position which seems flatly incoherent, as well as incongruent with other elements of his model.
Now, Craig cannot say that souls and persons are distinct, for the metaphysical picture he has painted renders this an impermissible move. Could he appeal, then, to a notion like Composition as Identity (CAI) for clarification? Advanced by some scholars sympathetic to Trinitarianism, CAI holds that a conjunction of parts is, in certain contexts, identical to the whole thus composed.[132] They have then argued that because Father, Son, and Spirit compose the Trinity, they are constitutionally identical to it. However, several problems with this alleged solution spring to mind. First, I have been at pains to point out that Craig’s model creates a metaphysical distinction between the persons and the divine soul. While this conflicts with his broader claims concerning such concepts, it means that merely conjoining Father, Son, and Spirit (as per CAI) would be insufficient for achieving the desired degree of identity. Second, Trinitarian proponents of CAI neglect the enduring differences between the persons and the entire Godhead, even if its application to TM were legitimate. For example, there are certain properties the Trinity has which Father, Son, and Spirit lack.[133] The Trinity is triune; according to Craig’s theory, the divine members are not. Similarly, only the Trinity instantiates divinity, while Father, Son, and Spirit are merely divine by predication. Certain aggregates of beliefs as they apply to the persons and God, respectively, also imply a real distinction in characteristics. In a theoretical possibility left open by Craig’s construal of the “siloed” nature of the persons’ mental states,[134] the Father may affirm A and not B, the Son B and not C, and the Spirit C and not A. Consequently, the Trinity would “affirm” A, B, and C, in contradistinction to its three constituents. Contrast this with Craig’s human analogy: it seems undeniable that if my person affirms A that I myself affirm A, thus preserving identity. Instances such as these indicate that CAI probably cannot relieve the tensions resident in Craig’s portrayal of the Deity. And while he avers that “God, though one soul, would…be three [persons]”, it is doubtful whether he can coherently hold this position.[135]
These concerns reflect a basic instability in Craig’s model. Recall that for him, rational souls are substances with mental properties, while human souls are deemed to be identical with persons. Such statements – and the positions lying beneath them – cannot be easily reconciled with the way he conceptualises God or the divine members. For as we have also seen, Craig does not think of the divine persons as substances. Nor can they themselves be souls, since on his view the underlying divine substance is the only “soulish” element in the vicinity of the Trinity. And yet, they are the tri-fold loci of the Godhead’s mental properties. How can these various positions be reconciled, given Craig’s metaphysical priors? Indeed, how can Father, Son, and Spirit be persons without the quality of “soul-hood”, especially when Craig thinks of souls as entities with intellect and rationality? If a human soul is identical with a human person, then it seems reasonable to think of divine souls as identical with divine persons. Rational souls just are persons on Craig’s account. Yet worryingly, it is not at all clear that this is possible for the members, such are the constraints of TM: there is only one soul within the Trinity, which is the divine substance.
The minority reading of TM could see God modelled as one being enjoying a tri-fold mental life.[136] Again, this is implied (perhaps unwittingly) by some of Craig’s statements, casting the persons as God’s cognitive faculties.[137] He would then be a single intellectual substance, refracted through three dimensions of the one psychological state, with the identity of souls, personhood, and mentality preserved. That would be enough to remove some of the inconsistencies I have just noted. But as we have seen, interpretating Craig’s model in this way is highly problematic. For then Father, Son, and Spirit would no longer be persons in the true sense of the term, but merely mental aspects within the divine self/soul we designate “God”. The latter would be the personal substratum underlying the three members, who may be seen as his powers. However, while I myself may be endowed with the integrated capacities of rational thought, intentionality, and affectivity, such faculties do not rise to the level of personhood; only the total entity (i.e., me) can be thought of as a person. Consequently, the robustly “pro-social” commitments of TM would be violated, for interpersonal interaction, so essential to Craig’s model, simply cannot occur within oneself; it requires distinct and fully-orbed personal subjects capable of dialogic intercourse. And it can only be repeated that anyone appealing to this reading of TM would sail dangerously close to a one-self or modalistic conception of God, with the persons reduced to aspects, functions, or “life streams” of the entire entity.[138] It seems, then, that Craig’s model is both structurally unsound and irreconcilable with other aspects of his thought.
TM and God’s non-personhood
Cutting across much of the preceding discussion is perhaps the most remarkable entailment of TM: namely, that on the majority (and more plausible) reading of Craig’s model, God – this soul-like substance – is not a person.[139] Whatever other elements within the model imply, logical analysis of the relations between the members and the Godhead suggests the latter does not bear true personhood.
How could this be? It is important to note that Craig, like all good Trinitarians, is keen to avoid a Quaternity, and must do so to remain safely within the bounds of orthodoxy. God as a whole cannot therefore be a person in addition to the divine members, since this would lead to four such beings within the vicinity of the Trinity. We might also recall that as a champion of ST, Craig is committed to the full personhood of Father, Son, and Spirit. His model therefore casts them as three selves within the Godhead, bounded personal agents possessed of consciousness, self-reflection, rationality, and will. But where does that leave God? Once more, he is not identical with the persons: as I have already argued, positing this would be logically incoherent,[140] for one personal agent cannot be equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, three such individuals.[141] Arguing that God is identical with one of the divine members is also unsatisfactory, since this would mean that (e.g.) the Father is God, while the Son and Spirit are, say, ancillary nodes of divine “consciousness”. Aside from generating yet more absurdities (God having a primary consciousness as well as supplementary sets of such faculties), this move irretrievably diminishes the divinity of the Second and Third Persons – another sure route towards heterodoxy.
The only discernible alternative, then, is to say that on Craig’s model, the Trinity is not identical with any of the persons – which is another way of saying that God as a whole is not a person.[142] He may be a society or warm collective of personal beings – even beings joined together as an ontological unity – but he himself cannot bear the same status.[143] While Father, Son, and Spirit might enjoy a high degree of cohesion on Craig’s model, this comes at the cost of depersonalizing the total entity. To be sure, I am not referring to any particular philosophical account of personhood (e.g., a kind of Cartesian res cogitans), nor to a crude, anthropomorphised version of the concept, but to any individual that can (e.g.) credibly use first-personal pronouns, bears something analogous to rationality, and participates in an I-Thou relationship.[144] Such appears to be the portrayal of God in Scripture and tradition. But if the present line of criticism is correct, then it has catastrophic consequences for Craig and other advocates of TM.[145]
For one thing, a non-person does not have the capacity for rationality or intentional action; at a stroke, omniscience and omnipotence disappear as properties the entire Trinity can properly exercise. It also suggests that strictly speaking, God cannot do anything normally ascribed to divine individuals. Take creation: on TM, God as a whole could not be said to fashion the world. Creation is an act of rational, intentional power, requiring foresight and strategy. But a non-personal God cannot act, nor plan, nor intend; the persons may do this, but the numerical distinction between them and the entire Trinity on which Craig insists presents an insuperable barrier. Similarly, God in his entirety could not set about redeeming his people if he did not have the trappings of personhood. Redemption, like creation, is planned, organised, and deliberate. It also has as its end the re-forged relationship between God and the community of faith – something that seems to be possible only for true persons.[146]
One might also point to the vast array of statements in the Old Testament, especially in the prophetic corpus, wherein the divine voice is used. Whether in judgment or in mercy, the divine “I” is frequently employed by Israel’s God, as he reveals himself to his wayward people (e.g., Isa 45:5-7; 46:4; Jer 2:1c; 30:22; 31:1-2, etc).[147] But if God is not a person (or personal in a substantive sense), then the reams of material one finds in the body of written prophecy constitute grievous misrepresentations of the divine nature.[148] Indeed, since it appears that on TM he is (logically) deprived of personhood, how could he participate in an interpersonal relationship with his people? To rebut this objection, some advocates have appealed to the idea of corporate personality as a way of trying to show how the ancient Israelites could think of an assembly of individuals as a unified agent.[149] On this view, the God of the OT may be construed as a corporate person, capable of participating in I-Thou relationships akin to a single subject. But as a plausible model for early Jewish and Old Testament thinking about God, this remains deeply controversial, having been severely criticised on numerous historical and methodological grounds.[150]
As if all this were not calamitous enough, we confront a yet more fundamental issue: anything that is not a person has no credible claim to godhood. This is deeply dissatisfying, to say the least. On the one hand, Craig wants us to say that only the entire Godhead exemplifies the divine nature. But on the other hand, his model entails that he, God, does not possess a key feature of the divine essence. How, then, could the whole Trinity instantiate the nature that is claimed for it?[151]
Preserving the personhood of Craig’s God: some failed strategies
There are several possible rejoinders to this criticism, although I would argue that they all fail to assuage one’s doubts. Craig protests that the view just outlined has been cashed out by his critics in a highly “tendentious manner”, apparently relying on the belief that God must be a unitarian Deity.[152] But as Howard-Snyder and other critics observe, this is not a numerical claim about God, but pertains to the proper locus of personhood: if God as a whole cannot be identified with any one of the three centres of consciousness, then how can he genuinely be called a person?[153] They might bear all the trappings of personal agency, but the logical demands of identity relations means that he does not.[154] Craig has also complained that while the tradition has always maintained that God is personal, it has not held that he is a person.[155] However, this is a rather narrow, unnuanced reading of Christian doctrinal and intellectual history.[156] Modern Christian philosophers, for example, have leaned on the notion of God’s being a person.[157] And thinkers from earlier eras – even those like Aquinas, who stressed the deep, ontological differences between God and his creatures – were apparently comfortable with judicious application of the word “person” to the Deity.[158]
A respondent might argue that Craig’s Trinity, while not a person in the strict sense of the term, is so by analogy. In the case of God, we are compelled to use such language, given the metaphysical gulf lying between him and the creation.[159] Hasker thinks that God as a whole partially corresponds to what we normally think of as persons, given he is “composed” of three personal agents. He goes on to suggest that analogical notions are satisfied by treating God as if he was a person.[160] Lamentably, he has misapplied the lessons of analogy: the term “as if” is not analogical language, but that of mere appearance. Analogy is only applicable when the property (or properties) in question can truly be predicated of both parties to the alleged parallel. A good wine and a good man bear a certain quality of goodness, for example. Both items meet certain standards of excellence and approbation, even if what they satisfy is not exactly the same. The key point, however, is that any correspondence between a man and a bottle of wine hinges on genuine possession of goodness.[161] But if the present criticism of TM is valid, then God as a whole does not actually bear personhood; the divine members enjoy that property, but as I have noted, they are bounded conscious subjects. And since God as a whole is metaphysically distinct from Father, Son, and Spirit – and therefore not identical with any of them – he technically remains impersonal. In fact, by using terms like “as if”, Hasker implicitly concedes the point at issue, attempting to gloss over the non-personhood of TM’s God via linguistic pretence.[162]
It could also be tempting to suggest that even if the entire Trinity is not strictly a person, it could “borrow” properties constitutive of personhood from the divine members, in a manner similar to other composite forms.[163] Thus, God redeemed the multitudes because Father, Son, and Spirit were so determined. But while such an entity may bear certain qualities as a result of its constituents doing so, this is only the case when it has an antecedent capacity to do so.[164] Unless God possesses the prior ability to (e.g.) act deliberately and rationally – i.e., in a way one normally ascribes to a person – then it appears that he cannot perform those activities, even derivatively. That lack is complemented by the aforementioned observation concerning the circumscribed personhood of the divine members, which means that transitivity of the relevant properties is blocked. This simply underscores the gravity of the problem: the Trinity not only fails to fully instantiate the divine nature (not being a person); it is incapable even of drawing those powers and qualities from its members.[165]
God the group agent?
At this point, Craig could lean on an intriguing proposal developed by Chad McIntosh: the Trinity as a functional person.[166] An advocate of ST, McIntosh has conceded that many social theories of the Trinity are vulnerable to the charge I have been laying out. He therefore argues that the triune God may be seen as a person – functional yet genuine – distinct from the divine members. To do this, he appeals to the notion of group agency, which may be seen as a contemporary philosophical analogue to the allegedly ancient Hebrew idea of corporate personality. McIntosh contends that groups or collectives can exemplify and manifest the features one normally attributes to authentic individual agents (holding representational states, being committed to certain goals and positions, etc.), distinct from the members that compose them.[167] McIntosh deploys this as the basis for his version of group personhood, arguing that while the divine members are persons intrinsically (what they are by nature), the entire Trinity bears this property functionally – i.e., by what it does and how it acts.[168] And if certain ordinary groups can be considered persons, then the triune God – whose internal relations are much more tightly interwoven – would undoubtedly qualify.[169]
McIntosh’s account is certainly an ingenious one. But whatever merit the general concept of group personhood has, I do not think it can rescue Craig’s model. Several reasons spring to mind. The idea of group personhood as applied to TM seems to gloss over several substantive distinctions between the Trinity and its members. McIntosh himself acknowledges that his proposal means that they are qualitatively different. For social models like TM, Father, Son, and Spirit are three genuine selves, who can credibly use the word “I” and enjoy an integrated, first-person point of view (characterised, for example, by psychological interiority and irreducible subjectivity).[170] The overall entity, for all its claimed agential powers, lacks that same quality of selfhood; it has no internal mental life, for the divine members bear that capacity in a substantive, circumscribed (i.e., non-shareable) fashion. One might well ask where, if a first-person outlook is essential to true personhood, is that property “lodged” (so to speak) in God as a whole? There appears to be an unbridgeable metaphysical gap between God and the divine members, casting doubt on whether McIntosh’s account can be used to underwrite the former’s personhood – at least in the psychologically robust way that both modern laypeople and advocates of ST deploy the term.
But let’s say that God can legitimately be construed as a group person. It is then arguable that McIntosh has tried to have things both ways. He helps himself to claims of authentic personhood when necessary, before retreating to alleged differences between the Trinity and its members when his argument confronts unwelcome implications. Positing God as a (functional) person alongside the members seems to threaten a Quaternity of divine individuals. Alive to this concern, McIntosh insists that no such threat exists, because God, unlike the members, is not a hypostasis.[171] That may be, but if functional personhood is genuine personhood, then I do not see why hypostatization should be relevant; there would still remain four personal beings within the vicinity of the Trinity, which is one too many for Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, McIntosh argues for possible differences in beliefs between the members and the entire Godhead. While we may again wonder how the latter’s mental states are grounded, such a position would be intelligible only if we were dealing with a distinct individual.[172] And if being a hypostasis is germane to the discussion, then this arguably draws us back to the first objection. My point is that one cannot consistently argue that God satisfies the relevant conditions of personhood, while trying to resist heterodox conclusions by implying that this is qualitatively different from the kind borne by the divine members.
Furthermore, the idea of God as a corporate person, at least as McIntosh conceives of it, faces the sorts of mereological problems I have already raised. He suggests that God supervenes on the three divine members; in other words, he is existentially underlined by them. But as I observed earlier, God depending on his parts – a relationship that would also include his personhood – subverts his aseity and undermines the principle of divine fundamentality. Even if McIntosh’s account of the Trinity’s personhood was cogent in itself, Craig cannot coherently apply it to his own model, given the former’s insistence that the persons underwrite the Godhead.[173] The internal structure of Craig’s model is explicitly ordered in the opposite way, since the divine substance is “explanatorily prior” to Father, Son, and Spirit. And because the sets of relations propounded by McIntosh and Craig both appear to be uni-directional – albeit running along contrary routes – they cannot be made to properly gel. Ultimately, McIntosh’s proposal is of no help to Craig, who must make do with an entirely ersatz conception of God’s personhood.
Conclusion
William Lane Craig’s study of the Trinity, though less extensive than his treatments of other subjects, bears all the hallmarks that characterise his work: historical depth, theological sensitivity, philosophical erudition, and a steadfast refusal to rest easily on the authority of received tradition. Trinity Monotheism is a highly original attempt to resolve the many conundrums raised by the notion of a triune God, seeking to move beyond creedal formulae to provide an intelligible account of the Deity’s inner life. Moreover, TM seems to succeed where other forms of ST fail, underpinned by a stronger principle of divine unity than many of its theological cousins and forebears. Where many social models of the Trinity are bedevilled by the spectre of tritheism, Craig’s proposal can at least appeal to a genuine, metaphysically robust conception of God’s oneness.
But TM is not immune to criticism, as my essay has sought to show. If I am right, then it is vulnerable to a clutch of serious objections, touching on almost every element of Craig’s proposal. The mereological theory he deploys to explain the divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit is insufficient for the task. It cannot provide logical warrant for the persons’ divine status, with consistent application yielding the patently implausible conclusion that (e.g.) various attributes pertaining to God share the same property. This is additional to the theory’s deflationary effect on the divine members; despite Craig’s protests, one cannot avoid the overriding suspicion that it tacitly entails two tiers divinity. On this, critics like Daniel Howard-Snyder and Michael Rea are correct: the persons only enjoy a diminished divine status. Craig, of course, has insisted that his preferred cat analogy shows how something can be of a certain kind without exemplifying the relevant nature. But analysis of the alleged parallel simply underscores the problems at hand; the unfortunate conclusion is that Father, Son, and Spirit are divine only in attenuated fashion.
This is a reminder of just how mysterious Craig’s proposal is – a curious feature for something claiming the mantle of conceptual lucidity. For as we have also seen, all the available analogies in the extant literature fail for one reason or another to illuminate the model proper. Underlying those failures is the basic problem (as yet unresolved) of how three psychologically distinct selves can nevertheless constitute, or be supported by, one trope of the divine nature. And while it may be initially conceded that an advocate could still cling to the notion that TM is neither manifestly incoherent nor obviously heterodox, further scrutiny casts doubt on that position. From the metaphysical status of the divine persons to the consequences flowing from Craig’s use of soul-language to describe the Godhead, his model faces numerous – and in my view, insuperable – objections. The question of how the divine members can be persons without being substances lingers unanswered, as does the issue of how God can be a soul-like substance (and a mental substance at that) without also being a self. All this is to say that the various elements of Craig’s model are ill-fitting, which suggests that it is ineluctably incoherent. That is reflected in what is possibly the coup de grace for TM: the claim that the model entails God’s non-personhood. Indeed, while it may be surprising to some, logical analysis leads inevitably to the conclusion that on Craig’s view, God is not a person. In isolation, this criticism would be sufficient to render TM a dubious proposition; combined with the other issues identified in this essay, it simply completes the critical examination to which Craig’s views have been subjected.
Debate concerning the Trinity will no doubt persist unabated. But if my study of TM has contributed anything worthwhile, then it has exposed certain problems concerning one line of enquiry. Meagre though this might be, such an offering may help in channelling the wider discourse.
[1] See Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, in Thomas H. McCall and Michael C. Rea (eds.), Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 100-125.
[2] Dale Tuggy, “Trinity”, S.2, SEP (2009; rev. 2020), plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/.
[3] In addition to the “pro-social” Trinity theorists discussed below, see Plantinga’s classic statement. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., “Social Trinity and Tritheism”, in Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., and Ronald J. Feenstra (eds.), Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), 21-39. For a critical summary of ST, see Brian Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism”, in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (eds.), The Trinity (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 203-204.
[4] Rea, “The Trinity”, in Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 420.
[5] J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Revised; InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, 2017), 589. Hereafter, I shall refer to Craig only.
[6] Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism”, 221; Craig, “Towards a Tenable Social Trinitarianism”, in McCall and Rea, Philosophical and Theological Essays, 95.
[7] Craig, PFCW,588.
[8] Craig, PFCW, 589-590.
[9] Craig, PFCW, 589.
[10] Craig, PFCW, 590.
[11] Craig, PFCW, 590.
[12] Craig, PFCW, 590.
[13] Craig, PFCW, 592.
[14] Craig, PFCW, 592.
[15] Craig, PFCW, 592-3.
[16] There is another, minority interpretation of Craig’s model, suggesting that the entire Godhead is the primary self, with the members as his cognitive faculties. This stems from some of Craig’s language, which can be ambiguous. However, his overriding commitment to ST strongly implies that we ought to see the persons as psychologically integrated individuals within the one Godhead. In any case, I submit that both readings are problematic.
[17] Craig, PFCW, 593.
[18] Daniel Spencer, “Social Trinitarianism and the Tripartite God”, RS 55 (2019): 194-195. Plantinga (“Social Trinity and Tritheism”, 39) offers an example of this phenomenon: God is one, since there is only one divine family or community. How is this meaningfully different from a family of distinct individuals?
[19] Spencer, “Social Trinitarianism”, 194-195.
[20] Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: OUP, 1994), 180-181, 185.
[21] Swinburne, The Christian God, 172-177.
[22] Edward Feser, “Swinburne’s Tritheism”, IJPR 42 (1997): 178ff.
[23] Keith E. Yandell, “The Most Brutal and Inexcusable Error in Counting? Trinity and Consistency”, RS 30 (1994): 201-217.
[24] See William Hasker’s criticisms of Yandell: Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 158-161; “The One Divine Nature”, Theologica 3 (2019): 60-61.
[25] Spencer, “Social Trinitarianism”, 194. A megagon is a polygon with a million sides. To the naked eye, it can appear as a circle.
[26] This is analogous to humanity as an abstract universal being instantiated in three separate individuals. The danger of polytheism is not hypothetical: Prestige documents the drift towards an abstract view of the divine ousia in the sixth century, which led to, in his words, an “outbreak of tritheism”. See G.L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), 272-273.
[27] That does not augur the end of the issue, since it remains an open question whether a concrete or particular property (such as the one trope of deity) is shareable among multiple and distinct things in the first place (e.g., the persons of the Trinity on ST). I remain neutral on that issue for present purposes, but see Tuggy, “Hasker’s Quests for a Viable Social Theory”, Faith Philos. 30 (2013): 173.
[28] J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 369.
[29] Craig argues that many post-Nicene creeds bear traces of certain philosophical accretions (e.g., a drift towards DDS) that should make us question the identification of God with, say, the Father. It seems, however, that the phrase “God the Father” was commonly used in the post-apostolic church, well before DDS could exercise influence over creedal development. For numerous examples of “God the Father” appearing in early Christian writings (with slight variations), see Marcel Sarot, “Believing in God the Father”: Interpreting a Phrase from the Apostle’s Creed”, Hervormde Teologiese Studies 72 (2016): 1-4. Kelly, Early Christian, 133: “In the literature of the second and following centuries, ‘God the Father’ is so regular a description of the Deity that quotations illustrating it are superfluous”.
[30] We might also consider debates around the Athanasian Creed. Wierenga, a ST advocate, argues that with the Latin word deus (= “God”),the framers of that creed intended to declare that Father, Son, and Spirit are divine (i.e., bearing the property of divinity), not “God”. See Edward Wierenga, “Trinity and Polytheism”, Faith Philos. 21 (2004): 281-294. But Wierenga’s reading is strained: if the creed’s authors had wanted to say this, they would likely have opted for divinus instead. See Jeffrey E. Brower, “The Problem with Social Trinitarianism: A Reply to Wierenga”, Faith Philos. 21 (2004): 297-298.
[31] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth, 1948), 98.
[32] E.g., PFCW, 585, 593.
[33] N.T. Wright, Colossians and Philemon (TNTC; Leicester: IVP, 1986), 103.
[34] Wright, Colossians and Philemon, 103.
[35] Should Colossians 2:9 be read ontologically or functionally? Blackwell argues convincingly in favour of the former interpretation, concluding that Christ bore the divine essence in himself. This cannot be reconciled with Craig’s claim that the Son does not instantiate divinity. See Ben C. Blackwell, “You are Filled in Him: Theosis and Colossians 2-3”, JTI 8 (2014): 105-110.
[36] Joshua R. Sijuwade, “Building the Monarchy of the Father”, RS [nv] (2021): 4-5, 7.
[37] Sijuwade, “Building the Monarchy”, 5.
[38] Sijuwade, “Building the Monarchy”, 9.
[39] Tuggy, “On Counting Gods”, Theologica, 1 (2017): 195-196; Matthew Baddorf, “Divine Simplicity, Aseity, and Sovereignty”, Sophia 56 (2017): 409-410.
[40] This conflicts with Craig’s contention that the whole Trinity possesses attributes like aseity in a primitive sense: if God is reliant on his constituents, then he seems only to have it derivatively.
[41] See Tuggy, “The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing” RS 39 (2003): 168, who argues that all ST models make a numerical distinction between God and the persons.
[42] Although I use personal pronouns in relation to God throughout this essay, this is largely conventional. As I shall argue later, it is not clear whether, on TM, God can even be considered a person.
[43] A.J. Cotnoir, “Mutual Indwelling” Faith Philos. 34 (2017):138.
[44] Craig (PFCW, 201) argues that in the case of metaphysical substances, the whole is ontologically prior to its parts, which would imply that God – described as a soul-like substance – is prior to his “parts” (i.e., the persons). It is hard to reconcile this with some of the already-noted implications of his compositional approach to the Trinity.
[45] Baddorf (“Divine Simplicity”, 403-418) argues that a complex God can retain aseity, based on the notion of the ontological priority of the whole over its parts. However, this can only really apply to God’s properties, where any concerns that grounded-ness might undercut divinity are irrelevant (since divine properties, unlike the persons, are not divine per se to begin with).
[46] Naomi Thompson, “Metaphysical Interdependence”, in Mark Jago (ed.), Reality Making (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 38-57.
[47] Thompson, “Metaphysical Interdependence”, 48.
[48] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 114.
[49] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 114.
[50] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism Once More: A Response to Daniel Howard-Snyder”, Philos. Christi 8 (2006): 108-109.
[51] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 108-109.
[52] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 110.
[53] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 110.
[54] D.A. Cruse, “On the Transitivity of the Part-Whole Relation”, JoL, 15 (1979): 32.
[55] Achille C. Varzi, “A Note on the Transitivity of Parthood”, Applied Ontology 1 (2006): 142.
[56] Cruse, “On the Transitivity”, 32.
[57] Cruse, “On the Transitivity”, 32; Varzi, “A Note”, 142.
[58] Grimm argues that mereology adopts a liberal definition of individual, corresponding to any number of entity types. This seemingly undermines Craig’s “individualist” argument against transitivity. See Scott Grimm, “Degrees of Countability: A Mereotopological Approach to the Mass/Count Distinction”, SLTP 22 (2012): 588.
[59] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 109.
[60] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 104ff.
[61] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 103.
[62] Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism”, 210-211.
[63] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 109-110.
[64] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 106; Hasker, Metaphysics, 142-143.
[65] Many philosophers dispute the claim that things have essences or natures. However, given Craig helps himself to the idea (hence, his use of felinity as a stable metaphysical “core”, identifying certain cat-like objects), such appeals are legitimate. See Craig, PFCW, 199.
[66] For more on this, see Abner Shimony, “The Status and Nature of Essences”, Rev. Metaphysics 1 (1948): 38. Shimony uses a very broad conception of essence to include “any character” of a certain item, which is ambiguous. For a philosophically precise rendition of essences, see David S. Oderberg, “Essence and Properties”, Erkenntnis 75 (2011): 87; Oderberg, Real Essentialism (RSCP; London: Routledge, 2007), 44-47; Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 57, 60, 403-405.
[67] I am referring to intrinsic lack, not (e.g.) genetic defect or injury.
[68] Craig, PFCW, 589.
[69] Cf. Rea, “The Trinity”, 415.
[70] Howard-Snyder (“Trinity Monotheism”, 103, n.6) argues that Craig’s position fails, since God can have a property necessarily without it being constitutive of the divine nature. As another example, I might be left-handed in all possible worlds (i.e., necessarily), although that does not mean that left-handedness is part of my nature. Cf. Justin Mooney, “A New Logical Problem for the Doctrine of the Trinity”, RS 54 (2018): 6. That said, it could be argued that God’s triunity is far more fundamental to who he is than my left-handedness is to me.
[71] Mooney (“A New Logical Problem”, 6-7) also argues that triunity is, like other divine attributes, worship-worthy. But as a bare idea, this seems insufficient. For a property to induce worship of its bearer, it ought to be subject to clear conceptualisation; only then can it be assessed as something that should prompt veneration. But triunity simpliciter lacks the necessary clarity that would permit such an assessment: it remains ambiguous, requiring theoretical elaboration to have any force (to avoid heresy, for one thing). The advocate of TM would therefore be compelled to propose her favoured Trinitarian theory. But this brings us back to the problem at hand – i.e., whether triunity is an essential attribute of the divine nature. One would therefore have to presume the very notion at issue.
Mooney further suggests that triunity, like other great-making properties, plays an important role in identifying God (and presumably setting him apart from other, non-divine beings). But this claim is undermined by the realization that pre-Christian Jews seemingly had no trouble identifying Yahweh, despite having no clear conception of the Trinity. Indeed, one will be hard pressed to find any unambiguous reference to God’s tri-personality – even in latent or embryonic form – in the Old Testament, even though God’s people were capable of distinguishing him from false gods and could appropriately respond to his self-disclosures. The implied conclusion is that triunity is not required to uncover God’s identity.
[72] Mooney, “A New Logical Problem”, 7.
[73] Ironically, Craig elsewhere rejects the doctrine of eternal generation on the grounds that it creates different tiers of divinity within the Godhead (Craig, “Is God the Son Begotten in his Divine Nature?”, Theologica 3 [2018]: 22-32).
[74] Michael Willenborg, “The Persons of the Trinity are Triune Themselves: A Reply to Justin Mooney”, RS (2021): 1-8.
[75] Willenborg, “The Persons of the Trinity”, 3.
[76] Craig might respond that if there is no distinction between the persons and the entire Trinity, one runs into problems associated with the transitivity of identity relations (i.e., if the persons are identical with God, then that suggests identity with each other). Relations of origin (paternity, generation, spiration) might resolve the dilemma – although as we have seen, Craig rejects this (cf. n.72).
[77] Rea, “The Trinity”, 416ff.
[78] Many Trinitarian theorists have been careful not to privilege the divine substance over the hypostases, because it would suggest the latter has a metaphysically non-primitive status. Wilks observes this of the Cappadocians in the course of examining Zizioulas’ Trinitarianism. See J.G.F. Wilks, “The Trinitarian Ontology of John Zizioulas”, Vox Evangelica 25 (1995): 73; Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Inner Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012), 146. Cf. Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 52: “…in the case of God the Father and God the Son there is no question of substance anterior or even underlying them both”.
[79] Hasker, Metaphysics, 228.
[80] Lucy Wallis, “Living a Conjoined Life”, BBC News (25 April, 2013), https://www.bbc.com/news/ magazine-22181528.
[81] Eric Olson, “The Metaphysical Implications of Conjoined Twinning”, SJP 52 (2014): 27.
[82] See Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 118-119, for a fictional parallel to the Hensel Twins (called “Twinsy”). I shall use the Hensel twins, as a real-life example seems to make the relevant points more vividly.
[83] Craig (“Trinity Monotheism”, 103) raises the (rare) phenomenon of two-headed animals as a real-life parallel to Cerberus.
[84] Alexandra Boyle, “Conjoined Twinning and Biological Individuation”, PS 177 (2020): 2395-2415. Boyle suggests that because we can conceive of the idea of conjoined twins being cloned from an original, embryonic aetiology is immaterial. However, because this hypothetical clone just is a copy of twins who experienced interrupted bifurcation, aetiology remains indirectly relevant (for the nature of the facsimile is constrained by the pattern set by the original). In any case, Boyle’s conclusion that such twins constitute one, psychologically divided human would not help Craig, for his model relies on there being three distinct, psychologically integrated individuals.
[85] See Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 103.
[86] Craig seems to endorse the absolute character of identity relations, judging by his critique of relative identity in his work on the Trinity. See Craig, PFCW, 590. For a defence of the principle of absolute identity, see H.E. Baber, “Almost Indiscernible Twins”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 365-366. Cf. a summary of the issues in E.D. Bohn, “The Logic of the Trinity”, Sophia, 50 (2011), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-011-0265-1#Sec1.
[87] Again, see Baber, “Almost Indiscernible Twins”.
[88] To be sure, it may be possible to argue that the Hensel “organism” is capable of rational thought in an analogous sense, just because its personal constituents are. I deal with similar rejoinders below when discussing the claim that Craig’s model entails God’s non-personhood.
[89] Hasker, Metaphysics, 231-236. See also Trenton Merricks, “Split Brains and the Godhead”, in Thomas Crisp, David Vander Laan, and Matthew Davidson (eds.), Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), 299-326. Merricks concedes that even if distinct centres of consciousness emerge within a split-brain patient, the idea itself is ambiguous, failing to rise to the level of genuine personhood.
[90] Hasker, “Persons and the Unity of Consciousness”, in Robert C. Koons and George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 190.
[91] Wilkes stating that early researchers into the phenomenon were surprised by the manifest absence of behavioural disunity. See Kathleen V. Wilkes, “Multiple Personality Disorder and Personal Identity”, BJPS 32 (1981): 341-342. See also Edward H.F. de Haan, et. al., “Split-brain: What we Know Now and Why this is Important for Understanding Consciousness”, NR 30 (2020): 224-233, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-020-09439-3.
[92] Tim Bayne, “The Unity of Consciousness and the Split-Brain Syndrome”, TJP 55 (2008): 287.
[93] Bayne, “The Unity”, 288. But see Hasker, “Persons and the Unity”, 186-190 for a countervailing view.
[94] Yair Pinto, et. al., “Split-brain: Divided Perception by Undivided Consciousness”, Brain 140 (2017): 1231-1237.
[95] de Haan, “Split-brain: What We Know”.
[96] Bayne, “The Unity”, 286-289.
[97] Even Elizabeth Schechter, who argues the experience of split-brain patients offers evidence for two minds emerging within the one human being, does not think they rise to the level of persons capable of engaging in genuine interpersonal interaction. See Schechter, Self-Consciousness and ‘Split’ Brains – The Minds’ I (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 17.
[98] Hasker, “Persons and the Unity”, 179.
[99] Hasker, “Persons and the Unity”, 180.
[100] A.A.T.S. Reinders, et. al., “One Brain, Two Selves”, Neuroimage, 20 (2003): 2119-2125. This could over-interpret the data: localised brain activity may signal no more than a de-integration of consciousness, perception, memory, etc., consistent with psychic fragmentation.
[101] See Hasker, “Persons and the Unity”, 178-179 and the remarkable examples of MPD patients revealed therein.
[102] Using a variety of criteria (rationality, moral agency, etc.), Saks argues that the alters exhibited by a person with MPD are, in fact, separate persons. See Elyn R. Saks (with Stephen H. Behnke), Jekyll on Trial: Multiple Personality Disorder and Criminal Law (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 39-66. See Walter-Sinnott Armstrong and Stephen Behnke, “Criminal Law and Multiple Personality Disorder: The Vexing Problems of Personhood and Responsibility”, Nous 34 (2000): 304-305ff, for cogent replies to this claim.
[103] Philip M. Coons, “Treatment Progress in 20 Patients with Multiple Personality Disorder”, JNMD 174 (1986): 715-721.
[104] Armstrong and Behnke, “Criminal Law”, 304-305ff.
[105] Hasker, “Persons and the Unity”, 180.
[106] Some philosophers, defining personhood in narrative terms, argue that the alters of an individual with MPD may actually flow from a failure to hold together increasingly divergent and conflicting accounts of the self. The self is characterised as fragmented, but without implying the emergence of distinct and independent centres of consciousness. See Valerie Gay Hardcastle and Owen Flanagan, “Multiplex vs. Multiple Selves: Distinguishing Dissociative Disorders”, The Monist, 82 (1999): 649-652.
[107] Craig, “Does the Problem of Material Constitution Illuminate the Doctrine of the Trinity?”, Faith Philos. 22 (2005): 83.
[108] Applying MPD to the Trinity, Hasker (Metaphysics, 243)equivocates, saying the members are three “divine life streams”, analogous to certain alters. But is a “life stream” (no matter how rich) the same as a person?
[109] Armstrong and Behnke, “Criminal Law”, 302.
[110] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 101.
[111] Traditionally, philosophers have distinguished between two types of substance: primary substances that correspond to individual entities; and secondary substances (i.e., a thing’s nature or essence). I am here talking about substances in the first sense.
[112] Craig, PFCW, 196-200.
[113] Howard-Snyder (“Trinity Monotheism”, 116-118) defends the claim that on Craig’s own terms, the divine persons are individual substances. The succeeding paragraph is indebted to his observations.
[114] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 110-111.
[115] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 117.
[116] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 110-111.
[117] Kyle Claunch, “What God Hath Done Together: Defending the Historic Doctrine of the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity”, JETS 56 (2013): 781-800.
[118] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 111.
[119] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 108.
[120] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 108.
[121] Craig, PFCW, 610.For an extended explication of this critique, see James R. Gordon, “‘Twinsy’ and Trinity: An Assessment of Trinity Monotheism of William Lane Craig”, unpublished M.Div thesis, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (2008), 9-10.
[122] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 109.
[123] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 120.
[124] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism,” 104.
[125] Craig, “Towards a Tenable”, 99.
[126] Craig, “Towards a Tenable”, 99.
[127] Craig, “Towards a Tenable”, 99; Craig, PFCW, 253.
[128] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 120: “…the one I am absolutely identical with supports my individual being”.
[129] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 120.
[130] Tuggy, “Hasker’s Quests”, 180.
[131] See Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 107-108, n.18.
[132] Andrew Kirschner, “Will-Independent Mereological Trinity Monotheism: A Defence of the Logical Coherence of, A Priori Motivation for, and a Particular Model Concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity”, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Arkansas, (2019), 147ff; Bohn, “The Logic”, 367.
[133] Cotnoir acknowledges this kind of problem undermines stronger versions of CAI. See A.J. Cotnoir, “Composition as Identity”, in Cotnoir and Donald L.M. Baxter (eds.), Composition as Identity (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 13. Weaker versions may not be so susceptible, although they eschew the kind of numerical identity that is seemingly required here.
[134] Cf. Craig, “Does the Problem”, 83.
[135] Craig, “Towards a Tenable”, 99.
[136] Tuggy, “Hasker’s Quests”, 180.
[137] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 108.
[138] Tuggy, “Hasker’s Quests”, 180.
[139] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 107ff.
[140] This is why Thomas McCall’s objection to critics of TM fails. He argues that they have not “demonstrat[ed] that God must be only one person rather than three to be truly personal” (italics mine). But as I have suggested, one self cannot “be” identical to three selves, for identity is symmetrical and absolute. See McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 31.
[141] Tuggy, “The Unfinished Business”, 168; Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 107.
[142] Of course, this assumes that not being a person reflects a deficiency in God – something other Christian thinkers would dispute. For a philosophically rigorous response to major arguments against God being a person, see Ben Page, “Wherein Lies the Debate? Concerning Whether God is a Person”, IJPR 85 (2019): 297-317, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11153-018-9694-x#Sec6.
[143] Tuggy, “The Unfinished Business”, 168-169.
[144] Layman, advocating a model similar to TM, concedes that on such views, the Trinity cannot legitimately use first-person pronouns. See C. Stephen Layman, Philosophical Approaches to the Atonement, Incarnation, and the Trinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 160. Cf. Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Guide & Commentary (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 348-352, whose criticisms of reductive accounts of God are well-taken.
[145] This compounds the incongruities in Craig’s proposal I have already noted. To wit: (a) God is an individual (mental) substance; (b) God is not identical with any of the persons; but (c) persons are, on Craig’s view, paradigmatic examples of substances, who bear rationality and intellect. See Howard-Snyder, “Trinity”, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/trinity/v-2, 2015.
[146] Gary Legenhausen (“Is God a Person?”, RS 22 [1986]: 315-316) suggests that one’s supplicatory relationship with God need not imply personhood: God is perhaps far more than a person, since to be a person (allegedly) represents a limitation on his nature. But this proves too much: if saying God is a person threatens to limit his nature, affirming that he is a (one) God seems to have a similar constraining effect, for it picks him out as a distinguishable “item”. But then how do Christians affirm monotheism?
[147] Legenhausen (“Is God a Person?”, 314-315) canvasses an argument purporting to show that revelation does not require personhood: something can still be dubbed “revelation” merely if it issues in the acquisition of a message. A message, though, is a form of communication with intelligible content. How, then, could it be produced by something without a mind – i.e., a non-person?
[148] Thatcher comments that the Bible never applies the word “person” to God. This is hardly dispositive: if explicit use of certain terms was the yardstick for acceptable statements about the Deity, then we could not speak of him as a Trinity. And even if the word “person” is never used, the God of the Bible is arguably presented as bearing all the qualities normally associated with such beings. See Adrian Thatcher, “The Personal God and the God who is a Person, RS 21 (1985): 71-72.
[149] E.g., Chad McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, RS 52 (2015): 177-180.
[150] For a trenchant critique of the “myth” of corporate personality, applied to ancient Hebrew thought, see Stanley E. Porter, “Two Myths: Corporate Personality and Language/Mentality Distinction”, SJT 43 (1990): 289-299.
[151] Howard-Snyder (“Trinity Monotheism”, 122-123) observes that God’s non-personhood undoes biblical anthropology, subverting what is the lynch-pin of the doctrine – Genesis 1:27 and the imago dei.
[152] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 104.
[153] Howard-Snyder, “Review of Metaphysics and the Tri-personal God”, Faith Philos. 32 (2015): 112; Hasker, Metaphysics, 198, who misstates Howard-Snyder’s position as tending towards Unitarianism.
[154] This could also be cashed out in mereological terms: being a composite, God is not identical with any one of his parts. But since those “parts” just are bounded personal agents, he cannot be identical with any of them. See Tuggy, “The Unfinished Business”, 168.
[155] Craig, “Trinity Monotheism”, 104-105.
[156] Tuggy, “Hasker’s Quests”, 181.
[157] E.g., Swinburne, The Christian God, 125; Alvin Plantinga and Mark Tooley, Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 1-2. I do not necessarily endorse the way Swinburne or Plantinga conceive of God. I merely note their views for the record.
[158] See Aquinas, ST, 1a.29.3. Aquinas also argues that “person” captures the various descriptions of God found in Scripture, writing that “what the word signifies is found to be affirmed of God in many places of Scripture; as that He is the supreme self-subsisting being, and the most perfectly intelligent being”. True, Aquinas discusses the use of “person” in the context of the Trinitarian members. But as the above quote suggests, he could also apply the term to God as a whole. Moreover, since for Thomas the divine fullness resides in the persons, to speak of their personhood is, ipso facto, to talk about the entire Deity’s.
[159] Hasker, “Has a Trinitarian God Deceived Us?”, in McCall and Rea, Philosophical and Theological, 44.
[160] Hasker, Metaphysics, 197. Hasker’s error partly lies in his conflation of analogical and non-literal language, which he thinks permits the claim that God is analogous to a person, even if he is not literally so. But this is incorrect: analogical language is not non-literal. See Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 70-71, on this point.
[161] Looking at the issue from another point of view, imagine if I treated a guilty person as if they were innocent, and decided thereby not to punish them (say, because I wanted to exercise mercy, or acknowledge my role in whatever act of wrongdoing they had committed). This would not mean that they were guiltless in fact, and my treating them as such would not imply otherwise. To use a term like “as if” is simply a facon de parler.
[162] For more on the nuances of the doctrine of analogy, especially in its medieval/Scholastic form, see Davies, The Thought, 70-74.
[163] See Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 122, who raises this possibility only to reject it.
[164] Howard-Snyder, “Trinity Monotheism”, 122.
[165] I might also add that this exacerbates problems first encountered in Craig’s formal theory: no longer are certain great-making attributes open to God in a merely derivative fashion; if the present criticism is correct, then they are not open to him at all.
[166] See McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 171, for a description of the differences between functional and intrinsicist persons. Cf. Hasker, “Objections to Social Trinitarianism”, RS 46 (2010): 423.
[167] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 168-170.
[168] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 170-171.
[169] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 172.
[170] Craig, “Does the Problem”, 83.
[171] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 173-175.
[172] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 172.
[173] McIntosh, “The God of the Groups”, 175
Introduction
Revelation 1:4-8 is no ordinary salutation:[1] with it, John offers a stirring paean to God and his Messiah, capturing their common majesty as he extends their grace to his beleaguered addressees. Drawing on a rich storehouse of OT texts and images, he implicitly assures them that amidst their travails and temptations, the eternal One – whom they worship and obey – exercises complete mastery over all things. Such encouragement encompasses John’s depiction of Jesus, the faithful witness-cum-universal potentate, and his audience’s chief model and pioneer. I will explore such themes as I exegete 1:4-8 in the following essay. I will suggest that the pericope, though a distinct textual unit, provides an essential frame of reference for John’s work – telegraphing his fundamental emphasis on God’s triumphant sovereignty as he girds and consoles congregations facing a welter of internal and external pressures. I will further suggest that John’s theologically freighted presentation of Jesus dovetails with this emphasis, reminding his audience of the vast program of redemption – including all its benefits and obligations – that God has enacted eschatologically through Christ.
Contextualizing Revelation 1:4-8
1:4-8 is best viewed as part of Revelation’s prologue, which begins with an outline of the book’s fundamental purpose (vv.1-3).[2] Although textual links between vv.1-8 and vv.9-20 are also evident – v.9 clearly recalls the addressees of v.4 – vv.9-10 mark a clear geographic and temporal transition, as John becomes a protagonist within the narrative.[3] Moreover, 2:1-3:22 seem to form an organic whole, with the Seer’s visionary encounter flowing naturally into the subsequent letters. The opening elements of 1:4-8 constitute a common epistolary greeting, whose lineaments are similar to ancient Hellenistic correspondence.[4] It also helps frame Revelation’s body of apocalyptic-prophetic material, identifying John’s work as a letter (cf. vv.4-6 with 22:21).[5] While the pericope exhibits textual integration – v.8 echoes the language of v.4 – it remains susceptible to structural division, signaled by several transitional markers (e.g., “Amen” – v.6b). The passage begins with epistle and doxology (vv.4-6), the latter an outpouring of praise triggered by the former. Apocalyptic vision, filtered through OT texts enlarges the doxology’s exalted contents (v.7),[6] while prophetic oracle concludes the entire passage (v.8).
Exegeting Revelation 1:4-8
John introduces himself to the seven selected churches of Asia (v.4; cf. v.11). Given the numerological significance of the number seven, the congregations are probably emblematic of the universal church. Used frequently in Revelation’s grand apocalyptic visions (1:12; 4:5; 5:6), and reflecting a wider penchant within Judaism and early Christianity for investing numbers with cosmic significance, seven likely represents completeness or totality (e.g., the creation week in Genesis 1; seven-fold expressions of God’s wrath, denoting the fullness of his judicial anger [Gen 4:15; Ps 79:12]).[7] Pressed too far, however, and the notion reduces the churches to mere ciphers, ignoring hints of situational specificity (2:1-3:22).[8] One must therefore account for both historical particularity and the figurative force of seven. As such, John likely wrote to identifiable congregations, even as he construed their concrete experiences to represent all congregations in Asia, and perhaps even the empire (cf. “churches” – 2:7, 11, 17).[9]
Verses 4b-5 include the blessing and its three-fold source. The section brims with theological import, designed to buttress Christian disciples being assailed from within and without. Indeed, the entire passage is probably tailored by the rest of Revelation and the particular historical situation(s) John’s readers faced.[10] Those circumstances included internal turmoil, connected with spiritual and moral compromise (2:14, 20; 3:1, 15-18); and external pressure, spurred by wider pagan or Jewish hostility (2:9, 13; 13:1-18). Some commentators doubt the presence of imperial oppression, arguing that John’s addressees primarily grappled with ethical laxity.[11] But while evidence for systematic, empire-wide persecution may be sparse, textual and historical evidence indicate the reality of intense (if sporadic) eruptions of maltreatment, conditioned by the demands of the imperial cult.[12] χάρις…καὶ εἰρήνη, an otherwise-customary Christian peace wish, reflects that environment:[13] John’s audience requires divine grace to persevere amidst the many temptations and tribulations associated with pagan society; peace, meanwhile, trades on the Hebrew blessing of shalom, and is necessary for the experience of inner equanimity, despite the opprobrium of an unbelieving culture.[14] The two qualities are also causally connected – i.e., divine largesse makes such inward tranquillity possible.[15]
The triadic source for these gifts renders their conferral a certainty (vv.4b-5). Although calling this section Trinitarian may exceed its import, the association of the three figures suggests a heavenly triumvirate.[16] First, ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος (“…the One who is, who was, and who is coming”)[17] is a tri-fold temporal title for the eternal God. It captures his transcendent, unconstrained nature, connoting his mastery over all history. No mere abstract description, however, it ultimately derives from the tetragrammaton of Exodus 3:14.[18] OT and later Jewish tradition are replete with temporal designations for God, whether in tri-fold or bi-fold form. “I am [he]” (Isa 41:4; 43:10) are re-applications of Exodus 3:14 to a new salvation-historical era, while Tg. Ps.-J Deuteronomy 32:29 expands upon it with a title similar to 1:4.[19] Where John differs from them is in privileging God’s present existence. He likely sought to re-assure addressees that their Lord is resolutely with them now, especially as, say, pagan animus may have induced some doubt.[20] Similarly, a polemical edge is probably embedded in the designation, consistent with Revelation’s broader rationale. Underscoring God’s absolute lordship reminded John’s often-beleaguered audience that he, not the self-styled or confected “deities” of imperial religion, remains sovereign.
Some argue that the nominative use of ὁ ὢν… (normally declining in the genitive if following ἀπο) reflects belief in God’s indeclinable name, consistent with his absolute and unqualified being. However, the argument founders upon realization that John also uses the nominative form of ὁ Σατανᾶς, despite it being the object of ἐκράτησεν (20:2).[21] A more cogent explanation is that as a derivation of Exodus 3:14, ὁ ὢν… remains a fixed title. Consequently, John is subtly signalling “solidarity” with OT salvation history;[22] filtering current conditions through the prism of Israel’s emancipation from Egypt, he offers his addressees a view of God’s salvific work that recapitulates – indeed exceeds – that epochal act. It is here that ἐρχόμενος becomes truly significant, not merely as predictive claim, but as eschatological expectation.[23] The term likely implies God’s decisive consummation of history, where those presently enduring travails will enjoy permanent succour (7:14-17; 21:4).[24] Indeed, it reflects his unyielding commitment to his people, “coming” in redemptive power (11:17).[25]
Second, the benediction stems from the “seven spirits before” God’s throne (v.4c). “Throne” is a commonly-used image in Revelation for God’s reign (3:21; 4:2-6; 5:6; 22:3). “Before” (ἐνώπιον) suggests a position of confidence, akin to the status borne by a king’s royal emissaries.[26] The key phrase, “seven spirits”, remains enigmatic. Some argue they are seven chief angels. But although πνευμά(τών) is sometimes used in Christian and Jewish literature to denote angelic entities,[27] occurrences in the NT are both exceedingly rare and plainly signalled (Heb 1:14). Moreover, Revelation 8:2 refers explicitly to seven angels, in apparent distinction from the being(s) of v.4.[28] Arguments of this kind, sometimes appealing to the seven archangels named in non-canonical Jewish tradition (Tobit 12:15; 2 Esdras 4:1),[29] depend on the intrusion of beliefs quite foreign to early Christian faith and theology.[30] Others have equated “angels” with “spirits” by fusing the contents of 1:20 with 3:1, which repeats the relevant phrase. On this view, the “seven stars” – clearly identified with angels in the former verse – are also the “seven spirits”, with which they are paired in the latter verse. But this requires καὶ in 3:1 to be translated epexegetically, not copulatively – a rather unlikely grammatical position.[31]
The traditional interpretation is ultimately more persuasive – i.e., a symbolic reference to God’s Spirit, where seven denotes, not a plurality of entities, but the fullness of his gifts and activities. John has probably grounded the reference in his reading of Zechariah 4:2-10,[32] wherein the prophet experiences a vision of a golden lampstand and seven lamps (vv.2-3). Responding to Zechariah’s confessed ignorance, God (obliquely) identifies the seven lamps with his Spirit (v.6). Drawing in Revelation 4:5 – which identifies the seven spirits with seven lamps, subtly echoing Zechariah 4:6 – seems to reinforce this view.[33] Similarly, Revelation 5:6, where the spirits are imagined as seven eyes inhering in the Lamb, may reflect Zechariah 4:10: there, the seven eyes symbolise God’s Spirit ranging across the earth.[34] Of course, the relationships between these images may not be as unambiguous in Zechariah as they are in John’s work.[35] But given his wider literary dependence on the prophet,[36] as well as textual links that become retrospectively clearer with the compilation of key verses, equating spirits with God’s Spirit seems plausible. Combined with the Zechariah texts and later references in Revelation, the golden lamps could therefore be a metaphor for the fullness (“seven”) of God’s Spirit empowering his churches (1:20; 4:5), while the equation of eyes and spirits in 5:6 could denote divine omniscience, consistent with John’s earlier depiction of God’s sovereignty.[37]
Third, blessings come from Jesus Christ, described in tripartite fashion (v.5a-b). John strategically places Jesus after the Spirit, as this naturally flows into his doxology. ὁ μαρτὺς ὁ πιστός (“faithful witness”) suggests reliable testimony to God’s character and redemptive purposes (1:2, 9). It might also allude to the climax of that witness – i.e., Jesus’ crucifixion. Within Revelation, “faithful witness” is repeated in connection with martyrdom (2:13), and while μάρτυς is not yet a technical term for such an act, the idea seems to be present embryonically (11:7).[38] This functions as both challenge and encouragement for John’s audiences: challenge, because they were being enjoined to pursue the same path of suffering obedience; and encouragement, for Jesus, their exemplar and prototype, had successfully endured it.[39] Aune claims that because John is referring to the exalted Christ – not the historical Jesus – he does not have the crucifixion in view.[40] However, the frequent association of witness and death in Revelation suggests some parallel between the experiences of John’s addressees and Jesus’ own fate. There seems to be no reason why Christ’s earthly history should be amputated from the Seer’s present work, even if dependable transmission of divine truth extends into his exalted, post-resurrection state (3:14).
Jesus is also the ὁ πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν (“firstborn from/of the dead”). With his resurrection, he has become the initial member of new creation. Moreover, if the OT idea of primogeniture – where the king’s firstborn possessed the right of succession – is present, then the title also alludes to Jesus’ privileged position as the exalted inaugurator of that new age.[41] Like his status as faithful witness, πρωτότοκος implies a pioneering role, providing a victorious model for John’s audience. This blends smoothly with the Seer’s third title, “the ruler of the kings of the earth” (…βασιλέων τῆς γῆς). Partly as a result of his resurrection, Jesus has been installed as supreme potentate above all earthly rulers. “Kings of the earth” is typically used in Revelation to denote “antagonists to God’s kingdom” (6:15; 17:2; 18:3; 19:9).[42] Even now, he reigns over them – including Rome’s succession of emperors – even if that presages some kind of subsequent conversion (21:24).[43]
Two points, common to all three of John’s descriptors, stand out. First, while᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ declines in the genitive (consistent with its position after ἀπὸ), the Seer’s identifying phrases are in the nominative, suggesting that they, like ὁ ὢν…, are proper titles. Second, those titles likely echo Psalm 89, reflecting John’s conviction that Jesus fulfils messianic yearnings, expressed by the psalmist, in a kind of eschatological escalation.[44] “Faithful witness” picks up references to an anointed Davidic king, whose royal line will be eternally established (v.37). Jesus’ status as “firstborn”, exalted over the “kings of the earth”, recalls v.27 of the same psalm, which sees the royal Davidide appointed as God’s favoured “son”. It is also possible that John’s tri-fold identification corresponds to the three key stages of Jesus’ messianic career: death, resurrection, and exaltation. Emphasised too heavily, however, and this attractive notion risks artificially segmenting John’s portrayal of Christ’s work – a position incongruent with his inaugurated eschatology, where present and future often overlap.[45]
John moves from Jesus’ identity to his work by way of doxology (vv.5c-6). ἀγαπῶντι, a present participle, denotes Christ’s continuous love for believers.[46] Its chief expression was in the cross – that supreme act of liberation, as Jesus “freed” Christians from bondage to sin. λύσαντι, an aorist verb suggesting a completed act, is an image taken from the slave market. This raises the possibility that John’s subsequent reference to “blood” (ἐν…αἵματι, an instrumental dative: “by means of”)[47] originates with the Passover lamb – a claim that is only strengthened by the presence of other allusions to the Exodus narrative in 1:4-8.[48] Simultaneously, blood is probably an abbreviated reference to Jesus’ priestly work, itself grounded theologically in the cultic observances of Yom Kippur (e.g., Lev 16). While John does not explain the causal mechanism underlying Jesus’ blood and the release of Christians, his composite description is not dissimilar to Hebrews – i.e., Christ as both eschatological priest and perfect sacrifice (Heb 9:11-15).[49]
John crisply summarises the goal of this work for believers (v.6): appointment as a “kingdom and priests” before God, clearly alluding to Exodus 19:6 (cf. the parallel in 5:10). That verse is nestled within a mission statement Yahweh gives to Moses, outlining the purposes for which he redeemed Israel. For John, the formation of the church is the eschatological reality to which Exodus 19:6 pointed.[50] The emancipation of believers was not merely for their own sakes, but was a prelude to their present vocation as royal priests under God’s mandate. And, unlike the Israel-centric text from which he draws inspiration, John probably sees this priestly mission as universal. Consequently, the role of believers is not just Godward – set apart though they were – but radiates outward, towards the nations (21:26).[51] Remarkably given the challenges confronting some of his addressees, John subtly reminds them of their call to mimic their exemplar, representing God before all peoples.[52] How this will be achieved is not elucidated, although clues may be drawn from elsewhere in Revelation (e.g., 2:13).
One lingering question concerns the nature of βασιλείαν – and in particular, the timing of the believers’ reign envisaged here. Although certain verses in Revelation imply a future expectation (5:10b), βασιλείαν, ἱερεῖς probably refers to two, distinct offices, kings and priests, both of which are presently true for Christians (at least proleptically).[53] Of course, the phrase could be read as saying that Christians function as priests within God’s royal house without participating in that reign now. This reflects the original OT text’s ambiguity, where “royal priesthood” or “priestly kingdom” seem equally plausible.[54] However, translating βασιλεία as “kingship” is not unreasonable, while later Jewish renderings of Exodus 19:6 seem to posit distinct functions. Moreover, ἐποίησεν and its cognates can suggest installation to a particular office; the fact that it is past tense could suggest a development that has already occurred in some sense. And since the verb governs both βασιλείαν and ἱερεῖς in v.6, it may be best to see them as two, present roles (rather than one present priestly function within God’s royal domain).[55] In any case, John’s doxology concludes appropriately, according eternal glory and power to God’s eschatological Messiah. Veneration of this kind was normally reserved for God alone, which suggests that John may have been signalling his belief in Christ’s divine status. Carrying further polemical overtones, the verse elevates Jesus to the uttermost, far above any earthly rivals or challengers.
John enlarges on his Christocentric reflections through an apocalyptic-prophetic declaration composed of two OT citations, linked thematically via God’s eschatological defeat of evil (v.7; ἰδου = “indeed”, denoting certification).[56] The first line alludes to Daniel 7:13 and the prophet’s vision of an exalted individual enthroned before a great throng of people (“clouds” imply heavenly origins; cf. 1:13). The remainder of v.7 cites Zechariah 12:10, a text that also imagines history’s conclusion: God punishes Israel’s antagonists while redeeming his people after their contrition for having rejected him and his messenger (“the one they have pierced”).[57] For John, Jesus decisively fulfills these prophetic expectations as the one through whom God is re-ordering his world; with verbal links to v.4 (“coming”), v.7 implies that Christ is the means by which God will arrive eschatologically, having inaugurated that process. True, a final reckoning, to which this line points, still awaits (22:12). But for the Seer, it concludes an ongoing series of such “comings”, whether in blessing or in judgment (e.g., 2:5).[58] Fusing the two OT texts also reveals the paradoxical nature of Jesus’ work, appearing as the conqueror who triumphs through death (5:5-6).[59] This would be of immense comfort to those of John’s audience who struggled to resolve the apparent dissonance between membership in God’s kingdom and ongoing tribulation.
John has evidently altered the Zechariah text with the additions of “every eye…” and “…on earth” (γῆς, combined with “all peoples”, suggests the entire sphere of God’s earthly creation).[60] Doing so universalizes the scope of God’s redemptive activity through his anointed one, fitting the larger context of Daniel 7 (v.14), and dovetailing with the cosmic canvas on which the Seer paints.[61] Whether he also intends v.7b to connote grief over impending judgment or mournful repentance is debatable. While some ambiguity may be resident in the verse, certain factors marginally favour the latter interpretation:[62] reading it as a prediction of condemnation conflicts with the natural meaning of Zechariah 12:10; the people appear to be mourning, not for themselves, but for Jesus (“because of him”), fitting with the idea of repentance;[63] and this construal better anticipates the mass conversion of the nations (21:24-22:3).[64]
John concludes with a divine self-declaration, thrice affirming God’s supremacy (v.8). “Alpha and Omega”, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, is a merism, stating polar opposites as a way of encompassing every intervening element. In the present context, it suggests the entire course of history, especially as John unfurls it in the rest of Revelation. Complementing that designation is the repeated title, “[the One] who is…”, first used in v.4; by repeating this designation, John deploys an inclusio,drawing the constituents of the passage together within the logic of the Lord’s eternal sovereignty and eschatological coming. Similarly, παντοκρατωρ (“Almighty”) reflects God’s universal mastery: he alone exercises untrammelled control over creation, which has its being in him (4:11).[65] Here, John may be drawing on the theological framework of Isaiah 41-48, in which Yahweh frequently contrasts his own unalloyed power with the panoply of lifeless idols confronting Judah-Israel (43:13; 44:24).
Conclusion: Revelation 1:4-8 and John’s Apocalypse
Although Revelation 1:4-8 permits self-contained examination, its true significance cannot be properly discerned without reference to the rest of John’s work. The Seer’s construction and placement of 1:4-8 is quite strategic: it functions as both theological ante-room and launching-pad for his audience as they embark on the sometimes-harrowing visions of his work. That the passage is preparatory for the rest of Revelation is evident from the many verbal links binding it to what follows: God’s temporal title (vv.4a, 8; 4:8; 16:5), “throne” (v.4b; 4:5-6; 5:6), “faithful witness” (v.5a; 2:13), “kingdom and priests” (v.6; 5:10), Danielic allusions (v.7a; 1:13-6; 5:9ff), and “Alpha and Omega” (v.8; 21:6; 22:13) are all telegraphed here, awaiting further treatment.
Underlying this mosaic of images and descriptors is a coherent theological vision that John has encapsulated in 1:4-8, previewing the primary themes of his apocalypse for his audience.[66] As commentators have long noted, John’s Apocalypse exposes dimensions of reality that remained obscure amidst his audience’s tribulations; the text presently under discussion anticipates many of its key elements. In particular, his emphasis upon God’s transcendent power anchors the rest of the book: it anticipates history’s consummation under the aegis of the world’s true Lord (21:1-4; 22:1-5), reminds Christians that evil will be expunged, and assures them of final vindication. This is buttressed by John’s opening portrayal of God’s victory as an inaugurated reality (11:17) – a heavenly fact that cannot be revoked (Rev 4-5), despite the persistence of unjust or oppressive structures (e.g., 13:1-18). In so doing, the passage also underscores the polemical contrast between God, whose unmatched sovereignty marks him out as true Deity, and the would-be “gods” that have tried to displace him. Finally, 1:4-8 prepares addressees for the various tensions – both internal and external – that the rest of the Apocalypse unfurls. John’s presentation of the Messiah establishes believers’ obligation to commit themselves as elected members of a new, redemptive era. He exhorts his audience to eschew moral compromise (2:14-16; 3:14-20) and follow their pioneer in the paradoxical way of suffering triumph (3:21) – resisting the forces arrayed against them, while faithfully witnessing to God’s truth.
[1] Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2002), 60-61.
[2] Stephen S. Smalley, The Revelation to John: A Commentary on the Greek Text of the Apocalypse (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2012), 26.Mounce’s advice is salutary: “[The]…lack of consensus about the structure of Revelation should caution the reader about accepting any one approach as definitive”. See Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, Revised Edition (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 32.
[3] Tavo argues for what he calls the “consensus” view – i.e., that vv.1-3 stands alone as the prologue of the book, with vv.4-8 connected to what follows. See Felise Tavo, “The Structure of the Apocalypse: Re-examining a Perennial Problem”, NT 47 (2005): 49 (esp. n.9). However, vv.9-10 do seem to mark a fundamental shift in the tenor and narrative focus of the book, while Tavo’s dismissal of alternative views conflates plausibility and popularity.
[4] David Aune, Revelation (WBC 52A; Waco: Word, 1997), 26.
[5] Aune, Revelation, lxxii.See Ernst R. Wendland, “The Hermeneutical Significance of Literary Structure in Revelation”, Neotestamentica 48 (2014): 448, who notes the dual manner in which Revelation begins and ends – i.e., as both prophecy and epistle. Such mirroring suggests 1:1-3 and 1:4-8 be joined together. Cf. Smalley, Revelation, 26.
[6] See Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC; Downers Grove: IVP, 2018), 61, for details on the mix of genres in 1:4-8.
[7] See G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NICGT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 58-59, for biblical and pagan examples. Aune (Revelation, 29) argues the number seven doesn’t represent fullness, but denotes the divine origin and authority of John’s message. This is possible, but evidence adduced from various historical sources (incl. Babylonian traditions) suggests that seven did indeed connote fullness or completeness. See Thomas Edward McComiskey, “The Seventy ‘Weeks’ of Daniel against the Background of Ancient Near Eastern Literature”, WJT 47 (1985): 38 (incl. n.55), for details.
[8] Steve Moysie (The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation [JSNTSS 115; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 25-26), argues that the letters evince knowledge of local conditions.
[9] Beale, Revelation, 58; Osborne, Revelation, 60-61; Smalley, The Revelation, 32.
[10] Beale, Revelation, 187.
[11] E.g., Moysie, The Old Testament, 49-50.
[12] See the impressive array of evidence on this point (as well as able rebuttals of sceptical positions) in Thomas B. Slater, “On the Social Setting of the Revelation to John”, NTS 44 (1998): 232-254.
[13] Aune, Revelation, 29.
[14] Mounce, Revelation, 45. In reality, harassment/persecution and compromise were probably not always separate phenomena – i.e., the former might well have induced the latter at times.
[15] Mounce, Revelation, 45; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (New York: UBS, 1994), 23.
[16] Of course, this depends on the “seven spirits” being an image of God’s Spirit – something for which I argue below.
[17] ὁ ἐρχόμενος, a present participle, is sometimes translated as “the one who is to come” (so NIV). However, “coming” is better suited to Revelation’s depiction of the dynamic nature of God’s relationship with his world, readily conveying the certainty and urgency associated with his (eschatological) arrival. See Osborne, Revelation, 61.
[18] The consensus on this point is near-absolute: Aune, Revelation, 30; Beale, Revelation, 187; Richard Bauckham, New Testament Theology: The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 28-29; Osborne, Revelation, 61; J. Massyngberde Ford, Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB38; New York: Doubleday, 1975), 376-77. Ford has argued the title could echo Psalm 118:26 (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”). However, this seems obscure, while the psalmic reference (unlike Rev 1:4) merely refers to God’s representative. See Ford, “‘He that Cometh’ and the Divine Name (Apocalypse 1:4-8)”, JSJPHRP 1 (1970): 145.
[19] Beale and Sean M. McDonough, “Revelation”, in Beale and D.A. Carson (eds.), CNTOT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 1089. Cf. Greco-Roman examples in Bauckham, New Testament Theology, 28-29; Ford, Revelation, 377.
[20] Osborne, Revelation, 61.
[21] Beale, Revelation, 188-189.
[22] Beale, Revelation, 189; Paul, Revelation, 62.
[23] Bauckham, New Testament Theology, 29.
[24] Michael Gilbertson, God and History in the Book of Revelation: New Testament Studies in Dialogue with Pannenberg and Moltmann (SNTSMS 124; Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 117-118.
[25] Bauckham, New Testament Theology, 30.
[26] Beale, Revelation, 189.
[27] See Aune, Revelation, 34-35 for a list of such references, esp. from the Qumran literature; Ford, Revelation, 377. Aune is a proponent of the idea that the seven spirits are seven angels.
[28] Cf. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies in Revelation (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 162.
[29] Mounce, Revelation, 47. Other NT writers use non-canonical Jewish tradition (e.g., Jude 14). But these seem to be mere object lessons, whereas Revelation 1:4-5 makes core claims about heavenly realities. Cf. Marko Jauhiainen, The Use of Zechariah in Revelation (WUNT 199; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 86.
[30] Mounce, Revelation, 47.
[31] Mounce (Revelation, 47-48) argues that the spirits are members of God’s heavenly entourage. However, this fails for a complete lack of supporting evidence. Cf. Ford, Revelation, 377; Peter R. Carrell, Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (SNTSMS 95; Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 21 (incl. n.113), who argues against the equation of angels and spirits.
[32] Ford, Revelation, 377. Garrick V. Allen, “Textual Pluriformity and Allusion in the Book of Revelation: The Text of Zechariah 4 in the Apocalypse”, ZNWKAK 106 (2015): 137.
[33] Bauckham, The Climax, 163.
[34] Bauckham, The Climax, 163.
[35] So Jauhiainen, The Use of, 88-89, who nevertheless sees elements of Zechariah 4 lying in the background.
[36] Jauhiainen, The Use of, 2-3.
[37] Some argue John was also inspired by the LXX version of Isaiah 11:2, which could be read to list seven gifts of the Spirit (Beale, Revelation, 190). While certainly attractive, the view arguably requires the assumption that John has interpreted Isaiah in highly unique, unprecedented fashion. See Jauhiainen, The Use of, 87. Jurgen Roloff (Revelation: A Continental Commentary [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993], 24) claims the interpretation favoured here is driven primarily by dogmatic concerns, but offers no evidence for this assertion (and fails to grapple with the purported links to Zechariah 4).
[38] Beale, Revelation, 190. Cf. Aune, Revelation, 37: “The term [μάρτυς] occurs…always in connection with those who die for the faith”; Osborne, Revelation, 62, n.20.
[39] Richard B. Hays, “Faithful Witness, Alpha and Omega: The Identity of Jesus in the Apocalypse of John”, in Hays and Stefan Alkier (eds.), Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 78-79.
[40] Aune, Revelation, 37.
[41] Beale, Revelation, 190.
[42] Beale, Revelation, 190.
[43] Smalley, The Revelation, 35.
[44] Beale, Revelation, 191.
[45] Smalley, The Revelation, 35.
[46] Paul B. Decock, “The Work of God, of Christ, and of the Faithful in the Apocalypse of John”, Neotestamentica 41 (2007): 51.
[47] Beale, Revelation, 192.
[48] Smalley, The Revelation, 35.
[49] Decock, “The Symbol of Blood in the Apocalypse of John”, Neotestamentica 38 (2004): 166, who notes that John has probably merged the image of sacrifice with the idea of Christ as redeemer.
[50] Alexander E. Stewart, “The Future of Israel, Early Christian Hermeneutics, and the Apocalypse of John”, JETS 61 (2018): 566.
[51] G.B. Caird, The Revelation of St John the Divine, Second Edition (BNTC; London: A & C Black, 1984), 17.
[52] David Peterson, “Worship in the Revelation to John”, RTR 47 (1988): 72; Stewart, “The Future of Israel”, 566.
[53] Beale, Revelation, 194.
[54] Beale and McDonough, “Revelation”, 1090; Aune, Revelation, 47.
[55] Beale, Revelation, 194-195. Caird (The Revelation, 17) justly notes that whether or not 5:10b is interpreted as a present or future reality, the eventual act of reigning is “immediately consequent on the act of ransom and appointment as kings and priests” (italics mine). Beale’s argument probably isn’t helped with his citation of 20:6b, since this appears to envisage a future state.
[56] Aune, Revelation, 53; Cf. the poetic qualities of v.7 in David R. Seal, “Hearing the Lector’s Voice: The Reception and Delivery of the Oracles in Revelation 1:7-8”, ABR (2020): 94, underscoring its central importance within the passage.
[57] Maarten J.J. Menken, “John’s Use of Scripture in Revelation 1:7”, In Die Skirflig 40 (2007): 288.
[58] Cf. Bauckham, New Testament Theology, 29. ἒρχεται can be seen as a futuristic present, consistent with Revelation’s fluid temporal framework.
[59] Menken, “John’s Use of”, 291.
[60] Osborne, Revelation, 69-70.
[61] Beale, Revelation, 197.
[62] Contra (e.g.) Mounce, Revelation, 50-51.
[63] Beale and McDonough, “Revelation”, 1091.
[64] Beale, Revelation, 197-98. Osborne (Revelation, 69-70) suggests some ambiguity, based on Revelation 18:9.
[65] Ford (Revelation, 379) convincingly argues παντοκρατωρ is a deliberate contrast to the Roman emperor’s use of αὐτοκρατωρ.
[66] Smalley, The Revelation, 39; Gilbertson, God and History, 92.
A slightly different version of this piece was recently published in Online Opinion. Although the particulars of the essay will likely date soon, there are lessons to be had when it comes to critically evaluating media claims.
The team behind the ABC’s Four Corners program has been described as an “elite investigative unit”. The phrase conjures images of intrepid reporters battling vested interests as they unearth the truth about corporate and institutional malfeasance. Think Spotlight – which recounted the Boston Globe’s dogged efforts to expose paedophilia in that city’s Catholic archdiocese – and you get the idea.
I don’t know whether previous episodes of Four Corners are sufficient to justify this kind of esteem. But what is clear is that “The Great Awakening”, the program’s recent probe into the friendship between Scott Morrison and QAnon devotee, Tim Stewart, falls far short of these exalted journalistic standards. Regardless of your opinion of the Prime Minister, I think it’s true to say that he’s the victim of what the industry calls a “hit piece” – a scurrilous example of televisual muckraking, masquerading as sober reportage.
The whole episode reeks of a desperate attempt to subvert Morrison’s reputation – not for incompetence, nor for corruption, but for his long-standing association with Stewart. Reporter Louise Milligan and her colleagues have tried assiduously to cast aspersions over the PM, speaking ominously about potential security threats and Stewart’s possible influence upon his friend. Trying to compensate for a near-total lack of credible evidence, “The Great Awakening” presents a web of insinuations and tendentious claims designed to overwhelm the viewer’s critical faculties. Punctuating these segments are poignant testimonies from Stewart’s distraught family, as they grieve the son and brother believed lost to the fevered world of QAnon.
One of the first things that strikes informed viewers is how much of the information supposedly uncovered by Four Corners has actually been in the public domain for some time. No new documents were unearthed, and any damning testimony proving, say, Stewart’s sway over the PM was conspicuously absent. While Milligan and her associates have supplemented the narrative with more recent events (including senatorial inquiries into the matter), they have failed to add anything of substance.
Journalists Christopher Knaus and Josh Taylor, writing for the Guardian Australia, reported on the connection two years ago, in 2019. They revealed the PM’s enduring friendship with Stewart, pre-dating the emergence of QAnon by many years. Knaus and Taylor also divulged details concerning Stewart’s wife and her (former) position on the Morrison family’s staff. But nothing in that article implied an improper relationship between the two men, nor that the employment of Stewart’s wife at Kirribilli House was inappropriate. The Guardian article didn’t so much as hint at any kind of impropriety, and quoted Stewart categorically denying any conversations about QAnon – or public policy generally – with Morrison. True, Stewart seems to have boasted about intimate access to the PM to like-minded individuals. But while that may be somewhat embarrassing for Morrison, such behaviour is more plausibly explained as an all-too-human instance of braggadocio and horn-tooting. The PM, for his part, has simply repudiated QAnon as a “dangerous” movement with which he has no relationship.
In 50 minutes of innuendo and solemn warnings, “The Great Awakening” does little to contradict this basic picture. Milligan and her producers strain themselves as they try and weave a scandal out of otherwise ordinary relationships, dangling a series of dark possibilities before unwary viewers. At one point they draw a link between Morrison’s ill-advised trip to Hawaii in late-2019 and his friendship with Stewart, although it’s difficult to discern their aim. Was this another (contrived) example of Stewart’s svengali-like power over Morrison? It must be said that a holiday between friends and a few personal photos do not a conspiracy make.
A somewhat esoteric connection is drawn between Morrison’s use of the term “ritual sexual abuse” – uttered during a 2018 parliamentary apology to the victims of sexual molestation within various institutions – and the predilections of QAnon disciples. This is about as close as Four Corners get to anything resembling a connection between the PM and the constellation of beliefs to which Stewart adheres. Reproducing a text message Stewart sent to his wife at the time, Milligan alleges that he sought to persuade Morrison to include the phrase in his speech because of its status within QAnon networks; that the PM used it is cited as evidence that he offered a coded signal to Stewart and his allies, indicating sympathy with their cause.
Activist zeal has again run ahead of logic and facts. It’s certainly true that members of QAnon talk incessantly about sexual abuse, especially of a ritualised nature. Indeed, their entire theology is founded on the belief that an international cabal of Satanic paedophiles, manipulating events from the shadows, has engineered the great crises of our age for the purpose of global domination. But a single text message, expressing one man’s hope that his powerful friend would use a phrase of his choosing, is a very thin reed on which to hang the theory that Morrison may well be a fellow-traveller.
More importantly, Four Corners failed to mention that tales of ritual sexual abuse are hardly confined to the benighted margins of the extreme Right. The feminist Brisbane Rape and Incest Survivors Support Centre (BRISSC) freely uses the term on its website. Similarly, the Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse (now known as the Blue Knot Foundation) explored the concept of ritual abuse, sexual and otherwise, in a comprehensive report produced some 11 years before the first appearance of Q. And what about survivor testimonies given at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses Child Sexual Abuse? Many of them go into harrowing detail, as brave souls disclosed memories of sexual violence during ceremonies that can aptly be described as “rituals” (monstrously perverse though they were).
All these statements are in the public realm, a mere click away for the curious – or simply competent – reporter. Having found its way into a royal commission, the use of “ritual” to describe certain types of sexual abuse is hardly uncommon. A subsequent statement released by the ABC has, of course, tried to claim a semantic distinction between “ritual” (which devotees of Q supposedly favour) and “ritualistic”. This is spurious: aside from the fact that various bodies – entirely unrelated to QAnon – have used the former word in their advocacy, the difference is likely to be lost on the uninitiated. And in the relevant sense, Morrison is one of the uninitiated. While it’s not impossible that he used “ritual” at the behest of Stewart and his allies, there’s every reason to believe that he uttered the word – like so many others – while remaining ignorant of its allegedly menacing connotations.
Aside from watching the evident distress of Tim Stewart’s family, perhaps the saddest part of “The Great Awakening” was the implied suggestion that Morrison should cut his friend adrift. Stewart’s sister even evinces incredulity that the PM would want to be “seen” with someone holding such bizarre convictions. But shunning people merely for embracing strange beliefs is a notion that should appeal only to those whose lives remain untouched by tolerance or sympathy. More to the point, heeding such counsel is bound to reinforce a person’s conspiratorial thinking. As many voices have suggested – including those at the ABC – isolation acts as a breeding ground for the cult-like fervour that acolytes of Q routinely exhibit.
Numerous stories of immense public interest are waiting to be found in the wreckage created by QAnon. Although “The Great Awakening”gestured in this direction, the program’s efforts were largely inhibited by the overriding attempt to discredit Morrison. While this episode will soon fade from popular consciousness, it provides a salutary lesson on the way that bias and partisanship can corrupt the journalistic enterprise, often under the guise of fearless inquiry. All media outlets remain vulnerable to this scourge – even the nation’s trusted public broadcaster.
Like so many, I was appalled by the now-infamous events in Washington, D.C. two weeks’ ago. A bedraggled mob of amateur insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building in defence of Donald Trump, briefly – though violently – occupying it before authorities managed to bring the siege to an end. Tragically, five people died as the heart of the American political system was ‘engulfed in chaos’. A sense of relative order may have returned to the Capitol, now affirmed by President Biden’s uneventful inauguration. However, the trauma caused by such a brazen assault on this citadel of democracy is likely to linger for some time.
People will draw any number of urgent lessons from such a searing experience. However, it occurs to me that we are witnessing the emergence – or perhaps the consolidation – of a new phase in American politics. While moral responsibility for the assault on Congress must be laid at Trump’s feet, it’s apparent that broader forces, which now elude the control of any one person, are also at work.
***
Put simply, a window has been opened onto the potent religious dynamic driving both a broad swathe of the rioters and the wider movement that inspired them. Indeed, the disturbing, almost cult-like behaviour of Trump’s acolytes since November – draping him in near-religious acclamation, repeating his fanciful claims of electoral fraud as revealed truth, extirpating alleged apostates from the tribe, or fomenting seditious behaviour through apocalyptic, blood-soaked language – has unveiled a surfeit of fervour running through the American populist Right, impervious to all reason.
As Jeffrey Goldberg has recently noted, a merely political prism is insufficient to properly comprehend this latest eruption; his own conversations with marchers around the Capitol just prior to the assault on January 6 suggested to him a deeply ‘theological’ undercurrent to the movement. We are not looking at politics as a mundane occupation, subject to a spirit of compromise and cooperation. For many people occupying both extremes of the political spectrum, the whole enterprise has been transcendentalized, taking on the sacred, absolute quality that was once the exclusive domain of traditional religion.
Commentators have already written about the way last year’s BLM protests embodied quasi-religious characteristics. Far from being a rejection of humanity’s instinct for the religious, they expressed, however unconsciously, a desire for the transcendent (albeit in a progressive, secular key). Some of those features are mirrored in the activity of the far-right. But the differences may be even more telling. Where the anti-racist movement has been a leaderless, largely anarchic phenomenon, those challenging the election have advertised their fealty to Trump – messianic avatar of the populist Right – without reserve. Where progressives last year condemned the past as a tableau of unyielding depravity, right-wing populists have enthusiastically ransacked iconography and symbolism of America’s martial history as a way of framing and justifying their actions. And where BLM activists were animated by a merely inchoate religiosity, many Capitol insurrectionists (like the recent Jericho Marchers) consciously fused a crude, misshapen version of Christianity with an abrasive nationalism.
My point is that although the ‘spiritual’ energy running through these campaigns may seem similar, it is channelled according to very different schemas. For members of the Right (including those at the margins), religion exerts its influence in a far more overt and systematic manner. Moreover, in their language and goals, the current crop of right-wing partisans reflects the all-too-frequent union of faith and bellicosity. Understanding what could lead a rancorous mob to besiege the Capitol requires, therefore, an alternative analytical lens. I submit that the concept of cosmic war provides a measure of clarity.
***
First developed by the political scientist Mark Jurgensmeyer, cosmic war captures a religiously-inflected ideology that has emerged on the world stage over the past four decades. As Jurgensmeyer has recently argued, the idea ‘touch[es] on a transcendent sense of moral and spiritual war’. It suggests an existential struggle: no longer the bargaining and moderation of everyday political discourse, but an elemental conflict between good and evil. While most religions contain such elements in their traditions, certain sub-cultures – battered by social exclusion or the loss of status – are more amenable to the notion of cosmic war as an all-encompassing worldview. For them, it is a vehicle of resistance against forces perceived as fundamentally oppressive. The battle against one’s adversaries is invested with religious significance, elevating it to the realm of the sacred. Cosmic war thinking offers the initiated an overarching template of meaning; seemingly disparate events are interlaced as episodes of a broader saga, enduing adherents with a sense of order and destiny in what may seem a chaotic, suffocating world.
A deep moral duality is thus woven into the worldview of cosmic war: the forces of light are divine agents, while their adversaries are possessed of near-universal malevolence. Cosmic warriors often imagine themselves to be a beleaguered minority, fighting for their survival against unremitting – even suprapersonal – hostility. Concrete demands for desired change are either non-existent or have been eclipsed by the tendency towards the absolute. Sixty years ago, Palestinian activists were motivated by mostly secular demands for an independent state; decades of radicalism have seen the current cadre of militants in the occupied territories embrace a hardened Islamism – demonizing Israel as evil’s embodiment and source – that can neither yield nor compromise.
The basic myth of a sacred, spiritual battle naturally creates a militaristic atmosphere; movements in the grip of this worldview invariably exhibit violent tendencies. Aggression is oftentimes confined to the realm of the rhetorical, although the past three decades have shown how easily words can mutate into action. Violence is doubly justified by the logic of this basic scheme. First, the unabating corruption of the enemy, coupled with its alleged omnipotence, means that force is considered one’s only recourse; at times it may even be explained as a defensive measure against the threat of the enemy’s magnified perfidy. Second, participants in the conflict may appeal to the divine will to legitimate their deeds: by grounding their conduct in the very paradigm of the good, they absolve themselves from things they would otherwise condemn. The introduction of God (however conceived) also means that loss in the struggle is, for many cosmic warriors, unthinkable. Where defeat may be on the horizon, the conflict is often re-located to a trans-historical plane, in which the prospect of victory lies in the hands of the divine. Of course, making that move doesn’t entail human passivity; the elect may still engage in battle, but ultimate success does not depend on them.
***
The spasms of violence at the Capitol on January 6 were in part a concrete expression of this ideology. As an interpretive grid, the notion of cosmic war explains both the explicitly religious character of many of Trump’s defenders and the movement’s growing militancy. Taking account of the wider universe many of the rioters inhabit only seems to confirm that view. True, some people who stormed Congress weren’t driven by such apocalyptic concerns (at least consciously). Nor would it be right to say that every individual who has denounced the electoral results would condone the assault. But all the caveats in the world cannot obscure the guiding role of an ecosystem of beliefs, in which lumpen Christianity, nativism, conspiracy theory, and belligerency-cum-violence are often deeply intertwined. If Trump’s speech was the match that sparked the blaze on January 6, then this bizarre conglomeration was the fuel.
Consider some of the campaign’s major players. For instance, several Christian figures have thrown their weight behind Trump’s allegations, asserting prophetic insight into the inner workings of what they describe as a spiritual war. Standing in the dubious tradition of Christian nationalism, these leaders traffic in what writer David French has dubbed ‘enabling lies’ – consistently portraying themselves and their followers as the last line against a campaign of unrelieved hostility, with the country’s very survival at stake. So great is their perceived authority in some circles that a wide variety of believers are willing to credit their solemn claims.
Eric Metaxas, one of the key organizers of the Jericho March and a major evangelical leader, exemplifies many of these convergences. With his views now increasingly divorced from reality, Metaxas’ fidelity to Trump has entered a new and disturbing phase: he refuses to countenance the idea that the former President was defeated, and continues to cling to the ‘stolen election’ narrative. Fusing a kind of dime-store charismatic spirituality with hyper-partisanship, Metaxas has gladly admitted that he has no evidence on which to base these claims, preferring instead to rely on heavenly visions that allegedly confirm Trump’s victory. For him, the only response is to ‘fight to the death, to the last drop of blood,’ since anything else risks the future of the entire nation. Anyone who demurs is, in his opinion, under the sway of Satan.
Metaxas and others like him didn’t call for the violent overthrow of Congress. But it’s a mere step from his bellicose rhetoric to the events of that fateful day. More to the point, his fanatical views closely track the cosmic war script. All the familiar elements are present: vast schemes of malevolence; a fear of systemic or near-apocalyptic collapse; a call to arms; and an overriding desire to endow events with religious significance.
Then there’s the foetid domain of conspiracy theories. Chief among them is QAnon, which has been instrumental in mobilizing pro-Trump protesters. Since emerging on the internet a few years’ ago, this tapestry of the macabre has developed a cult-like following, and now encroaches upon the political and cultural mainstream. Adherents ardently believe that Donald Trump has been selected to resist, and ultimately defeat, a global cabal of Satanic child molesters. His opponents, from Hollywood to the Democratic Party, will allegedly stop at nothing to thwart him – a conviction that naturally feeds into the narrative that Joe Biden fraudulently won the election.
Some academics have formally categorised QAnon a new religious movement, with its own cosmology, founding myths, saviour-figure, and moral strictures. So-called ‘Qdrops’ regularly demonize alleged enemies, elevating the conspiracy to the cosmic realm. There is also a growing body of evidence indicating enmeshment between evangelical churches and QAnon networks. Whole denominations have been established that revolve around the ‘teachings’ of Q – immersing themselves in a protean mixture of end-times predictions, current conspiracy theories, and militaristic language. Whether functioning alone or in conversation with fringe Christianity, QAnon paints a stark, Manichean picture of the world, whose tribulation will only cease when the initiated – led by Trump himself – cleanse it of evil.
This ideological cocktail has been well-represented on the ground recently, often mingling with the backwash of various far-right and anti-government ideologies. Several commentators noted that both the Jericho March and the protests on January 6 were liberally garnished with a variety of Christian and other religious paraphernalia. The ubiquity of religious practices and iconography before and during the insurrection was plain: flags declaring ‘Jesus Saves!’, a giant wooden cross, and participants urging the throbbing masses to shout their support of Christianity’s central figure. ‘Conflati[ng]…Trump and Jesus was a common theme’ throughout the day of the assault, with several people claimed that unfolding events were prophesied in Scripture. Some protesters proudly wore religious symbols on their clothing; others carried Bibles in plain view, almost like shields in battle. The blood of Christ was pled over the riotous proceedings, while one man reported that he consulted God before entering the Capitol – indication that some insurrectionists experienced the comfort of divine permission.
Nor have ordinary participants been reticent in combining their religious devotion with key military campaigns in biblical or American history. This, too, reflects the kind of bellicose spirituality lying at the heart of the cosmic war narrative. At the Jericho March a month before the Capitol assault, some marchers followed a woman around Congress as she carried a flag emblazoned with the slogan, ‘An Appeal to Heaven’ (a nod to John Locke’s argument that individuals retain the right to ‘appeal to heaven’ as justification for revolution against an oppressive government). This kind of revolutionary image dovetails with what one QAnon insurrectionist later said when he declared that the assault on the Capitol was ‘our 1776’. And who could miss the militaristic echoes of the name, ‘Jericho March’ – an obvious reference to the Old Testament story, where the army of God marched around the city of Jericho as a prelude to war?
QAnon posters and banners, like Christian symbols, have dotted recent pro-Trump and ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies. Moreover, some of the more tragic stories to have emerged from the Capitol siege involved people in thrall to the conspiracy theory. Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the insurrection, had become a zealous acolyte of Q. One also thinks of Christine Priola, who resigned from her position as a school therapist on January 7 to ‘expose the global evil of human trafficking and paedophilia, including in our government and children’s services agencies’. Like the now-notorious QAnon ‘shaman’, she was captured on Capitol building cameras in the speakers’ chamber, and is now being investigated by police for her role in the assault. For dutiful foot soldiers like Babbitt and Priola, the Capitol insurrection was a chance to strike a blow against their oppressors and liberate their country.
Vignettes like these suggest that many people who agitate for Trump are now convinced they are embroiled in a totalizing conflict against a vast program of near-demonic malfeasance. Embattled and fearful, they have turned to religion – not merely as a form of solace, but as a strategic blueprint. From rhetoric to action, from the internet to the streets, the notion of cosmic war has thoroughly permeated large sections of the pro-Trump and extremist Right. The Capitol siege was but the latest scene in this grim and paranoid drama.
***
Where do we go from here? While predictions are always subject to revision, it’s quite possible that what we witnessed in Washington, D.C. will further open the door for the use of politicized violence in American society, as armed factions employ brutal methods to advance their interests and highlight their grievances. This isn’t a new phenomenon, either: the growing militarization of U.S. politics (especially on the extreme and anti-government Right) has been documented by more than one seasoned analyst. The advent of Trump has only encouraged such groups. Moreover, we saw how violence infected many BLM rallies across the country last year, as urban zones in places like Portland, Minneapolis, and Atlanta were overwhelmed by crime-ridden mayhem. It’s difficult to dismiss the argument that the destructive activism unleashed by many such protesters has lowered the threshold for the legitimate use of violence as a socio-political tool. Far from being an isolated incident, then, the Capitol insurrection may be another step in a spiraling cycle of violence between the reactionary Right and the radical Left. The sad paradox is that these forces are locked in a kind of perverse symbiosis – each sustaining the fears of the other, even as they both seek total victory.
Recognizing that American politics has been largely transcendentalized for those on the ideological margins only intensifies these concerns. The baleful power of cosmic war thinking has convinced many on the extreme Right that their actions – however bloody or seditious they may be – enjoy the imprimatur of divine approval. Successfully challenging that worldview is likely to be a long and arduous task. If someone fervently believes that his religious duty requires him to purify his country and wage an existential war against evil, then arguments about the integrity of voting systems, or the dangers of idolizing morally brittle men, are bound to seem petty and jejune. Who, after all, can gainsay the Almighty? And what are contingent historical details in the face of the absolute struggle?
We may be thankful that inauguration day marked a peaceful transition of power. But the dark currents the swelled over January 6 have not ebbed, despite Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. The pessimistic conclusion from all this is that outbreaks of sanctified violence may well be a feature of American political life for some time – and with it, the subversion of the country’s cherished democratic culture. That is a sobering thought.
NB: at around the time this essay was being completed, I discovered that Professor Jurgensmeyer himself had drawn similar parallels between his theory and the events of Jan. 6 in an article for Religion Dispatches. I have included an embedded link to that piece in my post.
Victorian Labor likes to boast that it’s the country’s most progressive government. The obverse of this reality, however, is that it has consistently enacted an agenda that collides with, and often encroaches upon, the concerns of traditionalists — especially those of a more religious bent.
The past six years of Premier Daniel Andrews’ government are replete with examples of such confrontations. Restrictions on pro-life protesters, forcing Catholic priests to break the confessional seal, euthanasia, removing CRE from school classrooms, or the introduction of the ‘Safe Schools’ initiative: each policy represents a victory for Labor’s rapidly advancing program of progressive thought, and a corresponding loss for the state’s diminishing band of religious, moral, and social conservatives.
***
The latest skirmish in this smouldering culture war has been triggered by the state government’s proposed Change or Suppression Practices (Conversion) Prohibition Bill 2020. With its unwieldy title, the bill is designed to outlaw so-called ‘conversion therapy’ that seeks to change or supress a person’s same-sex orientation or gender identity. It is largely aimed at techniques grounded in religious ideology, and to that end, makes more than one reference to such things as to prayer-based practices. However, it appears that others — medical practitioners, counsellors, psychologists, and the like — would also be captured by the legislation. If it can be shown that certain efforts to elicit a change in someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity lead to serious physical or mental harm, the offender is liable to up to ten years in prison or thousands of dollars in fines.
Were the legislation seeking only to protect the vulnerable from manifestly coercive or injurious practices, Victorian government ministers would hear no objection from most conservative religious folk in the state. No mainstream faith group endorses the archaic and barbarous techniques that were once used to ‘cure’ people wrestling with same-sex attraction. Similarly, no church that isn’t already languishing on the fringes of society would defend their legitimacy. This isn’t to say that forcible or harmful conversion therapies have entirely died out — merely that they are so vanishingly rare that one could be forgiven for thinking the government is pushing on an open door. In any case, I think journalist Barney Zwartz is correct: whatever horrors occurred historically, nothing in present Victorian society can ‘justify legislation of this magnitude’.
But, of course, the aspirations of Premier Andrews and his colleagues are more ambitious, as suggested by scrutiny of the act’s articulated objects and intentions (a point to which I will return). Behind its bland, bureaucratic text lies an expansive project, which goes beyond the goal of shielding people from serious and demonstrable injury. Indeed, the bill leaves anyone but the most glassy-eyed activist with a battery of urgent questions about the practices captured by the bill’s wording, as well as implications for freedom of religion and conscience. These issues have featured most prominently in recent critical commentary.
***
Consider the disturbingly vague language the legislation uses to proscribe certain conversion techniques. Some practices, like aversion or electro-shock therapy, are both clearly delimited and inherently objectionable. But caught in the bill’s drag-net is prayer, a common religio-spiritual discipline, and one that Christians exercise in a variety of contexts. Referring to ‘prayer-based practices’ (among other techniques), the text baldly promises serious punishment for demonstrable and ‘serious harm’ flowing from a person’s attempt to change or suppress another’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Leave aside the notion of harm for a moment. How should prayer be construed in this context? What is its scope? Is the bill referring to a formal, twelve-step program grounded in systematic, scripted petitions, or something more informal and ad hoc? Suppose a minister of religion agrees to pray with a parishioner struggling with same-sex attraction. In the process, he entreats God to transform — indeed, ‘heal’ — that person in a manner consistent with orthodox Christian views of sex. Perhaps he asks God to give that person the wherewithal to remain celibate. Is this considered unlawful conduct? Does it fall under a prohibited attempt to ‘convert’ someone out of same-sex attraction? Several commentators have asked similar questions, but have been unable to satisfactorily answer them.
In all honesty, it’s hard to see how the bill wouldn’t capture such an example. In a statement that will worry religious conservatives, Jill Hennessey, the state’s (former) Attorney-General, said in a speech last month that prohibitions will be based on a ‘broad definition of change or suppression practices’ (emphasis mine). The Explanatory Memorandum attached to the legislation also states that ‘informal practices’, including prayer, are covered by the definition. This is far removed from former government-funded psychiatric programs, or even the organized, pseudo-scientific ministries of now-defunct bodies like Exodus International. Such a capacious approach to the notion of conversion therapy would, it seems, encompass even a series of private, fleeting encounters between a pastor and a congregant seeking help for their same-sex attraction.
***
It’s not simply that certain types of prayer may come in for censure; religious statements to the same effect seem to be prohibited, at least according to the relevant commentary. Once more, the Explanatory Memorandum is instructive, for it tells readers that ‘conversations with a community leader’ may well be in the legislation’s cross-hairs. In the same speech she delivered to parliament when tabling the bill, Jill Hennessey declared that the legislation is specifically designed to capture a pastor telling a same-sex attracted person that they are ‘broken’, and that they should ‘live a celibate life for the purpose of changing or suppressing their sexual orientation’. It’s not clear whether this means a pastor would have to explicitly try and change a person’s sexual orientation through the medium of celibacy, or whether encouragement to live chastely would itself constitute evidence of such an attempt.
The former attorney-general tried to re-assure people that such legislation would not infringe on one’s freedom of religion; ‘not captured’, she intoned, are statements from religious leaders that merely convey an interpretation of the relevant biblical teachings — suggesting, for example, that same-sex attraction is inconsistent with one’s faith. Yes, but pastors aren’t there to mechanically dispense information, like members of some religious advice bureau; they are charged with the sacred responsibility to teach, preach, urge, cajole, and exhort people to live holy and righteous lives before God. In the case of sexuality, orthodox Christians hold that outside of heterosexual marriage, celibacy is the only legitimate path. But that draws discussion back to the initial question, namely, whether the exhortation to practice chastity should be seen as a form of conversion therapy. That Jill Hennessey would mention celibacy in precisely this context — long the recommended recourse for the unmarried faithful, and a mainstay of Christian sexual ethics — is deeply troubling for those wanting to remain true to biblical teachings.
***
Setting these statements (as well as the questions they generate) within a wider frame of reference does little to temper the religious conservative’s disquiet. In the report that informed the government’s anti-conversion therapy bill, Preventing Harm, Promoting Justice, the authors explicitly classify certain therapeutic and theological models as forms of conversion therapy, even where a fundamental change of identity is neither sought nor recommended. For example, the report criticises the ‘welcoming not affirming’ approach adopted by many modern churches seeking to navigate the tension between fidelity to biblical teaching and compassion for those who are same-sex attracted or gender diverse. The authors appear dissatisfied with this approach, going so far as to single out the so-called ‘celibacy requirement’ for ongoing membership in such communities. It’s important to underscore this view, for two reasons: first, it clashes directly with the practical implications of a biblically orthodox position on sexuality (in a way that condemnation of stereotypical conversion therapies does not); and second, it supplies the framework for the government’s disturbingly ambiguous legislation. As with Jill Hennessey’s remarks, so with this report: if it is to function as the intellectual lodestar for determining what constitutes ‘conversion’ or ‘suppression’ practices, then religious conservatives have every reason to be alarmed.
It must also be emphasised that the concept of suppression is a contested one, in so far as debate continues on how widely it should be defined. For many LGBTIQ activists, there is an intrinsic connection between one’s sexual orientation and its expression; the one simply bleeds into the other. On this view, praying that someone be given the strength to live celibately — not change of orientation, but abstention from certain types of sexual behaviour — is ipso facto to induce the suppression of that person’s enduring romantic and sexual affections. If ministry of this kind is informed by the spirit of a verse like Matthew 5:28, that might simply make the effort to ‘suppress’ a person’s sexual orientation seem all the more egregious.
***
To be sure, criminal prosecution will only be triggered if serious injury is generated by conversion or suppression practices. This would seem to preclude dignitary harm or deep offence. But as some commentators have noted, that hardly settles the matter. Suppose a person, struggling with their sexual orientation, decides to engage in acts of self-harm after a conversation with a religiously orthodox minister she perceived as distressing. Suppose, too, that this person attempted to commit suicide. Significant harm has obviously occurred, and the person who sought advice may well want to draw a link between those acts and the meeting(s) held with the pastor.
Is the minister liable? It’s extremely difficult to predict, given the apparent ‘looseness’ of the causal relationship between psychological distress and subsequent acts of self-injury. Still, the mere possibility — exploited, perhaps, by willing activist groups keen to make an example — leaves the unsuspecting minister in a rather precarious position. Compelled by his faith to at least encourage the individual to live chastely, he runs the risk of falling afoul of the legislation and being accused of causing serious, even long-lasting, injury. Moreover, the pastor cannot rest on the claim that the person sought him out of their own free volition, for the bill explicitly precludes consensual practices as a legitimate defence, even among adults (itself a serious impost on personal liberty). Even if such fears do not materialise, it’s likely that the legislation will have a chilling effect on the activities of pastors: cowed by the possibility of prosecution, or simply investigation, there’s every chance a minister will censor himself, truncating what he might otherwise see as vital Christian counsel. Indeed, the bill creates a concerningly large grey area, composed of possible topics and conversations of dubious legality; afraid of the potential consequences, the harried pastor may well avoid those pitfalls altogether.
***
By tabling this legislation, the government has arguably set the stage for future interference in what are ultimately private and personal religious practices (as Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Peter Comensoli, remarked, what he prays for, and with whom, is no business of any government). This exceeds previous forms of Victorian Labor’s progressive activism: while many conservatives were upset when CRE was removed from school classrooms, it was still the case that Christians could freely practice their beliefs; the government’s decision, while representing a minor act of marginalisation, did not actively proscribe religious expression. The current bill, however, threatens to do exactly that, reaching into the realm of the sacred, which under a liberal democratic regime has traditionally been seen as verboten. Any intrusion into the religious sphere undercuts a long-recognized freedom, and violates deep-set principles against government meddling in something for which it has little competence.
For Victorian Labor, however, this may be the bearable cost of prosecuting its progressive agenda: instead of engaging with religious groups in a good-faith manner, the government has recently dismissed their concerns as thinly-veiled bigotry. To return to the act’s preamble, it seems reasonably apparent that Premier Andrews and his ministers are interested, not simply in protecting people from specific mental or physical harms, but in propagating a much broader narrative. Soothing assurances that LGBTIQ people aren’t ‘broken’, or the promised goal of ensuring that all people may live ‘authentically’ in a state that ‘welcomes’ them — regardless of identity or orientation — betoken the dramatic expansion of a government’s traditional remit. No longer is Victorian Labor a neutral arbiter of basic rights in a pluralistic society. Rather, Premier Andrews and his allies have consolidated the state’s position on one side of what are ultimately questions about anthropology: what is the human person? What is the relationship between the self and the body? Are maleness and femaleness tied to our embodied state? And just how are we to use our sexual capacities? It’s impossible, of course, to explore these issues in any depth here. Suffice it to say, having rejected all pretence to impartiality, the government now advertises itself as the standard-bearer, the vanguard, for a peculiarly modern understanding of human identity — one that is starkly at odds with the convictions of orthodox Christians and other metaphysical traditionalists.
People will, of course, laud the open expression of a person’s identity as a heartening example of societal evolution. Goodness knows that a mere generation ago, many LGBTIQ people were imprisoned by silence and opprobrium. The problem lies in the fact that under the present government, the Victorian state hasn’t merely arrogated to itself the power to constrain the free exercise of conscience and religion; it also touts its capacity to offer the balm of affirmation — inscribed into legislation, no less — as a surrogate therapist, advancing a contentious doctrine of what it means for human beings to live rightly in this world. It’s the triumph of the therapeutic in modern law, reflecting the extent to which government activity now revolves around validation of the psychological self as the primary locus of identity, value, and moral order. Buoyed by the authority their cause brings, Victorian Labor figures are set upon discharging their duties — even if that entails infringements upon those who are deemed to threaten this goal. Ironically for a government claiming to oppose ideology (in this case, of the religious kind), it is clearly driven by its own ideological commitments.
Conventional wisdom holds that Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated catastrophe – a tragi-comic carnival of unrelieved bombast, crude machismo, and clumsy statecraft, all punctuated by empty photo opportunities substituting for genuine diplomatic engagement.
Certainly, the hungry detractor can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of strategic blunders made by the Trump Administration. But while I myself have been critical of the (former) president’s mercurial approach to matters of state, I don’t think the consensus is altogether just. Neither does Tim Lynch, professor of political science at Melbourne University. In a recent piece for the Fairfax press, Lynch argued – rightly, in my view – that ‘a new dark chapter of American foreign policy failure and crises…started much earlier’ than Trump’s confirmation almost four years ago. In his short essay, Lynch makes the case that dysfunction in American foreign and defence policy emerged shortly after the end of the Cold War. He highlights a series of critical decisions American leaders have made over the past three decades – most notably the country’s many wars of choice – and argues they reflect pathologies that became engrained in U.S. strategic thinking long before Trump’s advent. To the extent that the current occupant of the White House can be linked to crisis and chaos on the international stage, Lynch insists it is often by way of inheritance, not creation.
Going against the grain though it does, there is some merit to this line of reasoning: for all his impulsiveness and lack of personal restraint, Trump hasn’t commenced any new wars, and hasn’t presided over a foreign policy disaster like the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But whatever validity Lynch’s basic argument possesses, it is marred by more than one extraordinary – not to say, implausible – claim.
Two claims in particular stand out, both of which are critical of past presidential inaction: first, George H.W. Bush’s decision in 1991 not to topple Saddam Hussein after evicting the Iraqi military from Kuwait; and second, Barack Obama’s refusal to offer anything more than token support to so-called ‘moderate’ rebel forces during the Syrian Civil War (2011-). Let’s take these events in sequence.
Was Bush Senior wrong not to topple Saddam?
Lynch begins by castigating George Bush Senior for refusing to remove Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 – going so far as to draw a controversial causal connection between that decision and the ‘penury’ ordinary Iraqis subsequently suffered. Many, of course, will remember Bush’s determination to oust Saddam’s armed forces from the tiny oil sheikdom of Kuwait in February of that year. But what people may not realize is that there was some debate within the American administration as to whether the U.S.-led coalition should extend operations to include regime change in Iraq proper.
Bush and his advisors ultimately decided to limit the campaign to its original mandate – and with very good reason. This is where Lynch’s objection strains credulity. For one thing, the coalition simply did not enjoy UN-sponsored consent to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq in order to vanquish Saddam. While the United Nations Security Council had authorized members to enforce resolutions against Iraq militarily, it did not permit action beyond the liberation of Kuwait. As political scientist Stephen Zunes noted some years ago, had the U.S. invaded Iraq, it would have become the aggressor according to the norms of international law. Lynch doesn’t deal with this. Moreover, his criticism trades in unintentional irony; just a couple of paragraphs later, he condemns the Clinton Administration’s decision to bomb the former Yugoslavia because the president did so without the sanction of the UN Security Council. It’s far from clear why Clinton was wrong to attack Serbian forces under such circumstances, but Bush – had he chosen to invade Iraq – would not have been.
But it wasn’t just the absence of institutional authority that prevented the U.S. and its allies from extending the war to topple Saddam. The coalition that Bush and his administration had sedulously cobbled together remained a fragile creature. Other Western allies (including the U.K. and Australia) were adamantly opposed to the idea of an invasion. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were already nervous about the consequences of aiding a foreign power in a conflict with another Arab nation. Their disquiet was only deepened by the thousands of ‘unbelievers’ already stationed on soil Muslims regard as sacred. Both the Mubarak regime and the Saudi monarchy prudently surmised that popular discontent would have boiled over had the war been expanded. Again, Stephen Zunes is well-worth hearing on this point: having interviewed Arab state officials at the time, he concluded that there was absolutely ‘no support’ for the toppling of Saddam. Had the U.S. attempted to do so, the alliance – and the operation’s fig-leaf legitimacy – would have collapsed immediately.
Then there is the question of conducting such a war, even if it had been possible to win international and allied support. Although the U.S. and its partners won the Gulf War with embarrassing ease – taking just four days to rout the elements of the Iraqi military stationed in Kuwait and South-East Iraq – this was achieved on a conventional battlefield between clearly defined national forces. Geography and environment were crucial: because Saddam’s army was concentrated in flat, sparse, open desert, the American-led coalition could take full advantage of its superior firepower and technology, bringing them to bear on an opponent which, despite its size (Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world in 1991), was relatively feeble.
Contrast this with what a full invasion – and indeed, an occupation – of the country would have entailed. Instead of say, large-scale tank battles ranging across the spartan terrain of southern Mesopotamia, coalition soldiers would have been forced into ‘bitter, house-to-house’ fighting in Iraqi towns and metro areas, as they engaged in the far messier task of urban penetration. Combat in urban environments is notoriously tricky, given the layered, pulsating complexity of large (and even small) cities. As scholars of warfare have long noted, military interactions with and in those environments invariably trigger a series of rolling consequences, many of which are impossible to predict. Dense networks of buildings and infrastructure; the presence of large numbers of civilian residents; the use of unconventional guerrilla tactics by defenders; the fragmented, staccato nature of fighting forced upon attackers; and the often-blurred lines between combatant and non-combatant: all these features of urban conflict form additional burdens to the already-difficult phenomenon of war. This much would have been true had Bush attempted to dominate Iraq after removing Saddam. Even allowing for the presence of a substantial number of anti-Saddam partisans in the country, coalition forces would still have had to contend with both regular and irregular loyalists in a little understood setting.
Moreover, the logistical problems associated with occupying another state rarely subside. In the case of Iraq in 1991, the U.S. would have been confronted with two unappealing prospects: direct administration of the country, or the equally laborious project of creating a new government to midwife a measure of stability. With the prospect of mission creep lurking on the horizon, those options would have risked an unstable mix of bloody counterinsurgency operations and broader nation-building exercises. A critical danger at this point for any invading force is that whatever the local population’s initial estimation of their presence, a long, grueling occupation will inevitably arouse widespread nationalist hostility – undercutting the trust and legitimacy required to effectively change a regime. Bush and his team grasped the truth that a ‘quick and surgical’ strike against Saddam could easily have turned into a quagmire, similar to what previous administrations had encountered in a sliver of South-East Asian jungle 25 years earlier. Aware of the public’s distaste for a repeat, they wisely chose to draw combat operations to a close.
One doesn’t have to strain imagination to recognize just how difficult, exhausting, and protracted attempted regime changes are likely to be. After all, it was only 12 years later that Bush’s son, George W. Bush, led the United States into a catastrophic war against Iraq (much of which took place in urban centres like Baghdad and Fallujah) in order to overthrow Saddam. The ensuing decade saw the country plunged into a cauldron of fire and blood, as a welter of armed factions battled American forces and each other. As James A. Baker, Bush Senior’s former Chief of Staff, wryly said in 2006: “I am no longer asked why we did not remove Saddam in 1991”. Lynch rightly condemns the invasion of Iraq, but fails to connect the dots in criticising Bush Senior for refusing to do what his son did.
Should the U.S. do more to support moderates in Syria?
So much for Lynch’s analysis of the 41st President of the United States. What of his critique of the 44th Commander-in-chief – namely, Barack Obama’s decision to limit American support of the so-called ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition during that country’s civil war? While I’d argue the situation here is more ambiguous, Lynch’s implied objection overlooks a number of serious issues that would have complicated a policy of deeper intervention.
To begin with, the notion that there has existed a substantial ‘moderate’ opposition is, at the very least, contestable. ‘Moderate’ is an elastic term, used in a minimalist sense by, for example, British intelligence officials to designate any group in Syria that had formally renounced terrorism. What ought to be obvious is that this definition is broad enough to encompass any rebel faction animated by Islamic extremism, even if they don’t practice terrorism per se. While such groups might claim to abjure targeted attacks upon civilians, several of them have nonetheless employed a variety of unsavoury tactics. Many groups vehemently reject the fundamental principles of modern Western societies, and cannot be called ‘moderate’ in any meaningful sense. The relative absence of religious zealotry is also no guarantee of moral rectitude: diverse elements within the rebellion have been dogged by allegations of corruption, abuse, and warlordism. Indeed, local and rural Syrians have been ‘relieved’ when moderate factions were expelled from their communities by Islamist forces, such was the former group’s brutality. Anecdotal reports are complemented by survey data, which suggest that many refugees fleeing Syria were not simply escaping the Assad regime, but rebel groups — not all of have been driven by religious extremism — as well.
This isn’t to say that more temperate opposition forces are entirely absent in Syria. Nor would it be true to claim that every group arrayed against the Assad regime has been an Al Qaeda- or ISIS-like franchise. However, to the extent that they remain relevant on the battlefield, genuinely moderate factions are diminished, having long been marginalised by more radical elements in the country.
Alliance structures and group formation have exhibited a high degree of fluidity during the war, which means that international backing for one particular faction (or cluster of factions) has long been a risky prospect. The ephemeral nature of coalition-building is something that has afflicted so-called ‘moderate’ forces since the early days of the war. Far from being a unitary phenomenon, the opposition is deeply fragmented, riven by competing interests; even when groups are backed by states that are notionally allied with each other, the danger of bitter infighting is still quite real. While rebel groups have proliferated during the course of the war, some have rapidly collapsed into each other. This has led to significant – and often unwelcome – changes in the profile, aims, and tactics of the resulting progeny. The swift creation and disintegration of such factions suggests that today’s friends can quickly become tomorrow’s enemies.
Academic research substantiates this point: Fotini Christa, for example, has argued that the anarchical situation prevailing in civil conflicts leads to ‘inherent commitment problems within alliances’, for the simple reason that the parties to those alliances enjoy very little trust. ‘The result’, she says, ‘is a process of constant defection, alliance reconfiguration, and group factionalisation’, with some individuals and elements spinning off into ever-more radical spheres of belief and action. When such an unstable, Hobbesian environment prevails, it is difficult to see how an external actor such as the United States might build a credible, enduring opposition.
Many of these realities have occurred repeatedly throughout the Syrian war. Former Free Syrian Army soldiers have in the past thrown in their lot with militant jihadist groups, and evidence suggests that the FSA – itself a fairly ‘loose confederation’ with no central command structure – has at times coordinated with Al-Qaeda offshoots; as but one example, FSA soldiers joined elements of Al-Nusra Front in 2015 to capture the Southern city of Dara. Meanwhile, parties favoured by the U.S. have ended up aligning themselves with ISIS. American weapons supplied to other groups have ended up in the hands of violent extremists (whether willingly or not). In more recent years, the FSA has morphed into the Syrian National Army, and now seems to be leavened by a strong thread of jihadism. Some commentators have confidently touted the capacity of U.S. intelligence officials to properly vet potential beneficiaries of American military largesse. But this process – a highly specialised task at the best of times – remains only partially successful. It’s not just a case of imperfect knowledge about the identities of recruits (though this is highly significant); the war’s intrinsic dynamism means that one cannot be certain that even genuine moderates won’t eventually be drawn into the orbit of violent radicalism.
One shouldn’t be surprised by this devilish complexity, given the deep and ineradicable fissures that prevail in the Middle East. But the kaleidoscopic nature of the Syrian civil war is a function, not only of the country’s prevailing anarchy, but of the cross-cutting agendas that state and non-state actors have prosecuted. Even when external agents, like the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, are broadly aligned in their goal – i.e., the destruction of the Assad regime – those agendas persist. Countries in the region are also arming and training different rebel factions, and have been for some time. How does the United States control events on the ground when nominal allies may be advancing interests that cannot be easily merged with its own? How can a coherent opposition be forged – surely a condition for any reconstruction effort – when so many of its constituent parts are violently at odds with each other? Consider the Kurds of northern Syria. Both the U.S. and Turkey have been seeking the removal of Assad since 2011, and in that sense have been on the same side in the war. But Ankara also wishes to eliminate what it sees as an acute Kurdish security threat on its southern border. The problem is that the Kurds have long acted as reliable local partners of American forces in the region. Even if regional and international opponents of Assad were to successfully topple him, how would such irreconcilable differences be dealt with in a post-conflict Syria?
The sad reality is that intervention by external actors in a civil conflict often fails to end the fighting. Quite the contrary: the available evidence suggests that by doing so, other countries succeed only in making internecine war longer and bloodier. In the case of Syria, the financial and material support provided by regional powers – Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia chief among them – has fueled rivalry and competition between rebel factions within the country. As some observers contend, the entry of external forces has helped to sustain the war, with each party to the conflict bolstered by ongoing assistance from actors keen to ensure their proxies prevail. The result is a deadly stalemate, as the escalatory actions of one group trigger similar (albeit reactionary) behaviour in its opponent. As recent history demonstrates, the advances made by rebel groups in Syria eventually persuaded Russia and Iran to expand their support to Assad; such actions in turn led the Gulf states to increase their aid to opposition forces. And while some yearned for substantial American involvement earlier in the war, the truth is that military action likely would have drawn Assad’s allies into the maelstrom sooner. Naïve interventionists notwithstanding, the enduring character of Syria’s civil conflict – a crowded battlefield comprising multiple actors pursuing divergent goals – was always going to stymie the effectiveness of opposition support.
Taken together, the evidence on hand should give one pause before confidently advocating American intervention in Syria’s civil war – or, for that matter, criticising those who adopt a more restrained course. Unfortunately, Lynch fails to exhibit this virtue. He assumes without argument the efficacy of military involvement, and fails to reckon with the likelihood that such action would worsen an already savage conflict.
Mopping up
It’s time to conclude. While Lynch may rightly warn against sweeping denunciations of Trumpian foreign policy, his position ultimately fails to properly cohere: he praises Trump’s non-interventionist instincts, all while castigating previous presidents for obeying similar impulses. More importantly, his argument still bears traces of the kind of thinking that has frequently propelled the U.S. into destructive, self-defeating foreign engagements. This matters a great deal. For the past three decades, the country has prosecuted a litany of ruinous wars, encouraged by the misguided belief that it is destined, as if by Providence herself, to shape the world according to its own vision of reality. Nor has that vision been consigned to history: President-elect Joe Biden has promised to continue America’s calamitous legacy of military activism by vowing to apply greater pressure to the Assad regime upon taking office.
Lynch is surely correct when he condemns egregious examples of the mission the United States has assumed since the end of the Cold War – a mission that has all too often visited misery and chaos upon the objects of the country’s claimed benevolence. He is also right to highlight Trump’s departure from a conceit that has long commanded bi-partisan support* (even if that departure is often no more than rhetorical). One only wishes that the Melbourne University academic were more consistent in his criticisms, and did not offer residual comfort to the disciples of interventionism.
*The prominent IR theorist, John Mearsheimer, has said that on questions of foreign policy and military intervention, Democrats and Republicans are ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum’. Indeed, one could easily argue that a Hillary Clinton is just as hawkish as a Dick Cheney.
The recent senate confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, the newest member of SCOTUS, were festooned by a wealth of commentary on her judicial record, legal philosophy, and religious beliefs. All three dimensions have been picked apart relentlessly by a ravenous throng of journalists and opinion-makers. But it’s Coney Barrett’s conservative faith – particularly as it intersects with her public and professional life – that seems to have generated far more heat than light.
This is something of which progressives are frequently guilty. Indeed, reading self-identified leftists speak darkly about the alleged consequences of having yet another religious conservative on the supreme court is to be engulfed by a miasma of ignorance, predictable assumptions, conceptual sloppiness, and outright fearmongering.
A recent article from The Guardian illustrates the problem well. In it, writer Arwa Mahdawi takes aim at Coney Barrett’s ‘regressive’ faith and the allegedly baleful implications our intrepid pundit argues will flow from her role as a high court justice. Mahdawi’s tone is set early on. Striking a distinctly Atwoodian note, she decries the reality of a 6-3 conservative super-majority on the bench of SCOTUS: ‘Goodbye civil rights, hello Gilead’ is a pithy smear against Coney Barrett’s religious conservatism, as cheap as it is shallow. Mahdawi follows this up with a series of rhetorical questions, each one marking a step towards the summit of Mount Hysteria. The apogee of this frenzied panic is reached when she asks, with all the gravitas she can muster, ‘Are we going to look at The Handmaid’s Tale and realize it was a documentary?’
It’s easy to demonize traditionalists as would-be agents of a religiously totalitarian state. But what evidence does Mahdawi actually possess for these (implicit) claims? On what grounds does she justify her fears concerning the supposed emergence of a patriarchal dystopia — one where women are reduced to mere incubators and marital ornaments?
In all honesty, the evidence Mahdawi tries to marshal is rather inflated. Take her depiction of People of Praise, a charismatic, ecumenical (though largely Catholic) community of which Coney Barrett and her family are members. Mahdawi first attempts to draw a rather ominous relationship between Coney Barrett’s involvement in People of Praise and any future judicial rulings the learned legal scholar make. Seemingly convinced that People of Praise is really just a bizarre, fledgling Gilead, Mahdawi would have us believe that Coney Barrett is an agent for some kind of Christian dominionist agenda. At the very least, she apparently thinks that Coney Barrett’s personal spirituality will, of its nature, spill over into her professional life. That indeed is the insinuation, as one reads of Mahdawi’s doubts that Coney Barrett ‘would leave’ her personal faith ‘out of her work’. For our correspondent, this link bodes ill for (e.g.) free access to abortion and those concerned about LGBT rights.
What Coney Barrett’s confirmation will mean for these progressive articles of faith remains uncertain. But like other such broad-sides, Mahdawi’s argument is littered with a series of insults and caricatures, all held together by a wilful incuriosity about something with which she is obviously unfamiliar. A small aside offers a sharp glimpse of some of these flaws. Describing Coney Barrett’s faith commitments, Mahdawi sarcastically suggests that ‘handmaid’ – up until recently, a term used by People of Praise to denote female leaders – is ‘not-at-all creepy’. Little does she realize that this has nothing to do with the Margaret Atwood novel, but is rather a biblical reference to Mary’s declaration of servanthood before God in Luke 1:38 (It shouldn’t be forgotten that Luke’s Gospel esteems humble service, not simply for women, but for men as well [e.g., 2:29]. Additionally, the evangelist presents Jesus himself as the servant par excellence, whom all Christians are called to emulate [cf. 22:25-27; Phil 2:5ff] – hardly a blueprint for religious despotism.) This kind of well-poisoning tactic may delight tribal allies, but it does almost nothing to advance genuine understanding of the so-called Other.
It’s certainly true that People of Praise, as Mahdawi notes, prohibits both abortion and same-sex relationships among its members. Moreover, those covenanting with the group maintain traditional gender relationships, both within its institutional structure and their own marriages. But none of this should be surprising or unfamiliar; in fact, opposition to abortion and homosexual conduct is part of the warp and woof of Catholic dogma, having been elements in the church’s doctrinal architecture from its inception. And while the notion that men are to have authority over their wives is contested within Christian denominations, it has long been part of mainstream traditional belief. Such has been true whenever a practising, orthodox Catholic has been nominated for public office – and without the sort of nightmarish vision imagined by Mahdawi coming to pass.
Mahdawi’s lack of proportion leads her into other errors. Consider her seeming inability to distinguish between the nature and purpose of People of Praise (on the one hand), and the American body politic (on the other). One shouldn’t have to point this out, but I’ll do so anyway. There’s a key conceptual difference between a voluntary religious association composed of freely covenanting individuals, and a secular, pluralistic political community constituted by a diverse array of people. Mahdawi’s fears concerning the group’s preparedness to discipline any members found engaging in illicit sexual practices rest on a non sequitur. As with all such associations, the moral strictures that People of Praise upholds – and any disciplinary action that may follow a member’s failure to abide by them – apply only to those who have elected to submit themselves to the group’s covenant; they bear no relationship to broader American society, which functions according to a very different register of laws and obligations.
As such, while a judge may remain a committed member of a religious assembly, even a highly conservative one, it simply doesn’t follow that she will seek to impose the group’s values writ large across the country as a whole. In a liberal democratic state, this would signal a fundamental transgression of the private-public divide: that is, the illicit extrapolation of highly specific norms and principles to encompass the broader community. One might as well claim that because a certain judicial officer is an atheist and belongs to a humanist society, her views would see her try and prevent religious institutions from engaging in acts of worship. Any judge aspiring to complete impartiality before the law – and indeed, anyone with a modicum of legal competence – will reject such hypotheticals as anathema to the role and spirit of the law in a given society. Whatever judgements Coney Barrett makes from the bench of the supreme court, her lodestar will be the Constitution and its contents.
Mahdawi is likely to dispute that last claim, to be sure. But this would just reveal her own ignorance. While Mahdawi would have us believe that Coney Barret will allow her supposedly sinister personal convictions to guide her jurisprudence, the judicial record paints a rather different picture. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that her decisions are likely to be grounded in an originalist approach to the Constitution – not prior or extra-legal faith commitments.
Certainly, many progressives would be deeply unhappy with the conclusions originalists, including Coney Barrett, often reach. Some have criticised originalist methodology as ultimately incoherent or unachievable. It’s also true that Coney Barrett may decide upon the constitutionality of, say, Roe v Wade at some future point (should a challenge be brought against it) in a way that draws Mahdawi’s ire. But the point is that she will in all likelihood be guided by a time-honoured tradition of legal exegesis, independent of religious dogma or personal morality. Coney Barrett is, according to that tradition, bound above all by the text of the American national charter. Moreover, her own writings reveal a balanced, sensitive, nuanced approach to the question of conflict between a jurist’s personal views and the demands of the office they hold. For instance, on the issue of capital punishment – a penalty many Catholics reject, despite the Constitution tacitly permitting it – Coney Barrett has discussed in fine-grained detail the circumstances under which an observant Catholic would have to recuse herself from cases that may require cooperation with evil. Pace Mahdawi’s fearmongering, the supreme court’s newest member is evidently capable of restraining the reach and potency of her personal views as she applies the law.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with interrogating someone’s deeply-held convictions, and whether (or how) they may shape her professional output – especially when that occurs in a position of great consequence. No justice approaches their profession as a tabula rasa, for such is impossible. Conservative or progressive, religious or irreligious, pro-life or pro-choice: all alike will bear the imprint of personal experiences, and will carry convictions that may incline them towards one decision or another. There is a very real sense in which everyone, supreme court justices included, adopts a ‘confessional’ stance to certain fundamental questions. For those charged with applying the law, their presuppositions will at some level frame their assessment of specific moral and legal questions. Indeed, as former Chief Justice William Rehnquist once noted, members of the court – who normally ‘come to the bench in their middle years’ – will have formed at least some ‘tentative notions’ which might influence the way they read the Constitution’s ‘sweeping’ pronouncements. Anything less would be evidence, not of a ‘lack of bias, but of a lack of qualification’.
Mahdawi is interested in none of this. She makes no effort in trying to charitably determine what orthodox Catholics like Coney Barrett believe, or why they believe it. Nor does one get the sense that the subject of Mahdawi’s diatribe is an esteemed legal expert, whose success is built in part on deft navigation between her personal and professional selves. No, our correspondent would rather try and discredit Coney Barrett by implying that the mere possession of a religiously conservative faith renders her incapable of fulfilling her role in a restrained and dispassionate manner. The implied double standard is telling: only traditionalists, it seems, struggle to impartially apply the law, hobbled as they are by the dogma that ‘lives loudly’ within them. By contrast, their liberal counterparts enjoy an objective, unvarnished view of both the Constitution and reality-at-large.
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Let’s adopt a wider lens for a moment. Mahdawi’s piece is a fairly recent entry in an increasingly large catalogue, one characterised by a malign assessment of religious conservatives and their convictions. But although Mahdawi portrays Coney Barrett’s elevation as a harbinger of religiously-sanctioned tyranny, the truth is quite the opposite. To the extent that one may speak of ‘sides’ in current cultural conflicts, the forces of secular progressivism probably have the upper hand. Churches and denominations of all stripes are haemorrhaging numbers, and in most of the Western world – the United States included – younger generations are identifying less and less with organized religion. Broad swathes of people already dismiss it as something bizarre and outmoded (at best), or pernicious and hateful (at worst). Furthermore, several recent events reveal an underlying antipathy towards conservative Christianity – part of a wider ‘cultural backlash’ against communities clinging to values condemned as recondite or regressive. Even where secularists hold to a more charitable view of traditional spirituality, they nevertheless approach it as one would a mere curiosity: a museum piece, fit for display in a glass cabinet, but hardly a vital phenomenon that one must strive to preserve.
And while the elevation of Coney Barrett to SCOTUS is far from insignificant, it has occurred amidst the ongoing revolution in values sweeping much of American society. Indeed, for the past two generations, the country has been drifting inexorably towards a more liberal outlook on such questions as divorce and homosexuality, which repudiates the distinguishing features of religious and moral conservatism. Meanwhile, as legal abortion continues to command majority support in the country, the incidence of pro-life convictions is falling among self-identified Christians. Despite the somewhat paradoxical fact that 15 of the last 19 supreme court justices have been nominated by Republican presidents, these trends persist unabated.
All this is to say that the cultural (as opposed to the merely political) influence of traditional religion is rapidly ebbing in the United States. For all her fretful hand-wringing, Mahdawi’s fears concerning Coney Barrett are therefore ultimately exaggerated. More than that, her article helps create the very conditions by which the broader ghettoization of religious conservatives may be authorised. Of course, it’s true that not all Mahdawi’s contemporaries share her stigmatizing views. But the ambient secularism by which they have been shaped – often issuing in a benign ambivalence towards organized religion – means that meaningful opposition to the kind of activist hostility she reflects is unlikely to materialize.
Introduction
The Victorian Liberal Party, like state Labor before it, is facing a crisis of its own making. As with many political scandals, the details are tortuous and byzantine. But allegations concerning an array of unethical – even illegal – behaviour have been aired, including branch-stacking, improper use of electoral staff (and taxpayer funds) for party recruitment purposes, and political skulduggery. It’s said that much of the rot can be traced to former Liberal powerbroker, Marcus Baastian, who recently resigned in the face of explosive media reports regarding the Liberals’ internal woes. His departure has brought little comfort to the party, which has commenced a review to purge itself of corrupting influences.
Caught up in the controversy is Karina Okotel, a former vice-president of the Liberal Party, erstwhile ally of Baastian, and devout evangelical Christian. She was suspended in late-August, pending the outcome of the review, particularly as it focuses on what, if any, role she played in a plot to jettison seven upper-house members of parliament deemed far too moderate (as evidenced by their voting record on Victoria’s euthanasia bill). Okotel has also been heavily criticised for a memo she wrote in relation to those MPs, which has been described as ‘scurrilous’. All this follows revelations that she composed an email to Baastian in 2015, outlining an aggressive recruitment strategy that targeted people from religious – and especially Christian – communities in an effort to transform the party into a far more conservative beast. Although Okotel has not been directly implicated in the branch-stacking scandal, reports suggest that her agenda became the driving force and framework for actions that are now harming the party of Menzies.
A salutary lesson for Christian politicians
There are many hard and painful lessons to be learned, I’m sure. But Karina Okotel’s role within the Liberal Party’s ongoing saga also functions as a cautionary tale for Christians seeking to enter the political realm.
One of the more obvious aspects of Okotel’s reported actions is the way in which they mirrored the kind of unsavoury tactics political operatives employ from time to time as they seek to accumulate power. Arguing for a recruitment drive that verges on branch-stacking is something that most politicians would deplore, regardless of their convictions. Okotel seems to have entered public life driven by idealism. But in this case idealism became entangled with hard-nosed power politics – a suspicion strengthened by the realization that the highly conservative Okotel is now factionally allied with moderate Liberal members, having fallen out with other right-leaning figures in the party.
Of course, it’s almost impossible for a Christian in public life not to be shaped to some degree by their political milieu, while the lure of temporal power inevitably vies for the faithful believer’s allegiance. Moreover, believers living modern democratic societies face unique moral hazards when it comes to politics, enjoying as they do relatively open access to the levers of government.
But all the caveats in the world cannot obscure the fact that Okotel’s reported actions offer a poor example of how to conduct oneself Christianly in the public arena. They reveal the troubling marginalisation of Christian character, seemingly for the sake of political gain. Where both Scripture and Christian tradition extol personal humility as a key, distinguishing quality of the believer (Matt 18:1-4; Phil 2:3-4), Okotel regrettably drifted towards its opposite. Pauline admonitions against overweening ambition and towards self-relinquishment have, it seems, been muted by the tantalizing invitation of secular authority. And while the prudent exercise of influence in public life may be seen as a mark of biblically-sanctioned wisdom, Okotel’s foray into the swamp of factional politics lacked both moral restraint and strategic foresight.
Political power and the Christian: in search of an adequate model
Karina Okotel’s predicament illustrates the ongoing tension that exists between faithfulness to Christ and worldly political success. In so assiduously pressing for influence, she apparently lost sight of the very different – and, from a secular perspective, antithetical – way in which believers in public life are called to pursue and wield power. However, this extends beyond the question of individual character. The problem, as I see it, is the absence of a adequate theological model for Christian participation in public life. It has left an aspiring believing politician susceptible to the corrupting forces of secular politics, all while sullying her public witness and contributing to institutional disorder.
An authentically Christian vision of politics should be composed of several fundamental principles, taking their cues from the sweep of the biblical narrative. These run deeper than an individual’s position on any one issue, instead furnishing a basic platform upon which Christian political engagement may be built.
Two principles in particular strike me as germane in the case of Karina Okotel: what we might call the Christian’s dual citizenship; and the paradoxical conception of power in service. Unfurling them requires a degree of biblical exploration, so bear with me.
Believers are confronted, firstly, by the bedrock truth that they possess twin, albeit unequal, loyalties: citizens of whatever political community of which they’re a part, while at the same time bearing ‘heavenly’ membership. While the former may make (legitimate) claims on the believer’s attention and moral energy, the latter remains decisive and paramount. In other words, one’s allegiance to God outweighs and relativises all other commitments within the secular sphere – including, of course, those that attach themselves to the political realm. As Peter Weiner has written, ‘our interest in the temporal should never overshadow our longing for the eternal’, for it is the everlasting that constitutes our true telos.
Understanding the place of believers in the world as one of residency in two ‘cities’ has a long and distinguished pedigree; Augustine’s distinction between the City of Man – destined always to decadence and decay – and the City of God is only the most celebrated rendition of that idea. But the seeds of this principle lie in Scripture itself. Writing to the church in Philippi, Paul declared that a Christian’s final citizenship lies in heaven, God’s realm (Phil 3:20). The Apostle deployed the Greek term politeuma, which can variously mean ‘citizenship’ or ‘civic body’, and cast the little Christian community to which he wrote his epistle as an outpost – a facsimile, of sorts – of the divine kingdom that had come and was now coming.
Significantly, the Philippian church existed in what was then a colony of Rome, which had been founded as an imperial outpost by ex-soldiers in the previous century. With colonial status under the aegis of the Eternal City came all the rights and privileges of being a Roman citizen. It’s no accident, then, that Paul should have described the Philippians in similar fashion; by doing so, he implicitly contrasted the fledgling Christian community with the city in which it had been planted. Like Philippi itself, the church there was a ‘colony’ – a franchise of the kingdom it represented. It was an extension of a greater realm, a ‘heavenly’ realm, one that remained sovereign over every manifestation and instance of temporal power, transcending all earthly enterprises. And while the believers of Philippi were residents of a secular polity, they bore the higher, more enduring citizenship of the Creator’s kingdom.
Paul’s Philippian epistle provides an entrée into the rudiments of Christian political thinking. Understanding oneself as a member of two realms – with the claims of one realm being heavily circumscribed – ought to be part of the basis of the believer’s public witness. Certainly, all Christians, regardless of status or station, are warned to be alert, lest earthly concerns succeed in seducing them. But two reasons mean that this admonition is especially relevant to believers drawn to public life. First, the highly political matrix within which Philippians was written suggests that from a Christian perspective, there exists an important fault-line between the divine kingdom and the earthly power of the state, especially as the latter realm so often purports to be the bearer of an often-rival form of salvation. Second, since a Christian politician’s career places her so close to the levers of earthly power, the temptation to eagerly sup from Caesar’s table – thereby allowing temporal concerns to obscure a vision of the eternal – is, I think, particularly strong.
In any case, however important or worthy the vocation of politics may seem, it, like all other secular pursuits, is thoroughly subordinate to the pre-eminent demands of the covenant community. And although wielding earthly authority is a necessary condition for the establishment of a just order (cf. Rom 13:1-7), a Christian politician’s quest for public influence can never be elevated above the requirement to faithfully discharge one’s obligations as a citizen of heaven. Anything else smacks of idolatry.
The second principle flows from the first. One of the key distinguishing characteristics of the ‘heavenly’ community is the paradoxical nature and exercise of authority — paradoxical, precisely because it locates true power in what is often deemed a mark of relative weakness. A return to Philippians illustrates the matter well. Exhorting the church in Philippi to cultivate the same humble attitude that characterised Christ (Phil 2:5-9), Paul waxed lyrical about Jesus’ radical self-abnegation in service of others: though bearing the status as the only God, and enjoying ‘equality with’ him (v.6), Christ did not attempt to manipulate or exploit that favoured position. Instead, he relinquished it entirely, adopting the ‘very nature of a slave’ (v.7); he divested himself of every claim to (earthly) power or prestige, swapping it for a life spent in service of others.
In an ancient milieu obsessed with honour, Paul declared that the true king – the one in whom all authority rightfully resides – ‘made himself nothing’ and ‘humbled’ himself to the point of bearing the ignominy of unjust execution (v.8). Here was power transcendent, surrendering all rights, all prerogatives, for the sake of others. Moreover, it was at the apogee of such surrender that true power – in this case, salvific power – was revealed. Where emperors relentlessly sought the prize of apotheosis (a cynical political tactic, to be sure), the trajectory of Christ’s transformation was precisely the opposite. And where Roman culture esteemed status and hierarchy, the values embodied by Jesus’ life could not have been more different. That the Apostle’s call for emulation could be directed to Christians living in a Roman colony – itself pre-occupied with prestige and social rank – simply underscored its subversive nature.
Even a cursory glance at the rest of the New Testament shows that Paul’s claim can be multiplied several-fold. Consider Mark 10:45. In response to a presumptuous request posed by two of his disciples, Jesus declares that in contrast to earthly rulers and potentates, ‘[he] came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’. Christ’s vocation and the manner in which he executed it represented a sharp rebuke to temporal expressions of power. Furthermore, while Mark clearly articulates an atonement theology, it is housed within a definite political theology – one that overturns prevailing hierarchies and pithily distills a counter-vision of power-as-service.
Luke, too, makes much of this theme, drawing it to a climax in Christ’s declaration at the last supper that his disciples dedicate themselves to the exercise of authority through humble service (Luke 22:24-27). Jesus, of course, provided the model in excelsis, wholly submitting himself to the cross as the clearest demonstration of his kingly, messianic work (cf. John 13:2-5, 12-15). Jesus chose to express his sovereignty, not by way of self-advancement or dominance (like so many temporal rulers), but by way of selfless sacrifice. The upshot is that he triggered the emergence of a radically new and contrary ethos, thereby crystallising the true pattern of leadership for all those occupying positions of power (cf. Rom 13:1-4).
Karina Okotel and the pitfalls of Christian political engagement
Let’s circle back. What does all this mean for Karina Okotel and the controversy in which she has become embroiled? Measured against the principles I have laid out she has, it seems, fallen short. This isn’t to say that Okotel has deliberately flouted them, or behaved with self-conscious Machiavellian flair. It seems clear, however, that she inadvertently veered away from ideals that ought to underwrite a Christian’s engagement in public life. Her actions, taken together, provide adequate testimony. By trying to expel moderate Liberals from the party, only to ally herself with their faction (having sabotaged her relationship with fellow conservatives), she evinced a willingness to prioritise political manoeuvring above principled service – negating both Scripture’s subordination of Caesar’s domain and the subversive conception of power that Christ epitomised.
Similarly, Okotel’s efforts to aggressively recruit new members from religious communities – while understandable in an age where party membership has collapsed – represented a desperate ploy that threatened to subordinate the sacred realm to the demands of temporal power. Her sedulous attempts to prove her value to the party had the effect of instrumentalising the value of religious faith and the churches that nurture it. This is in sharp conflict with the Pauline vision of a ‘heavenly’ citizenship that lies beyond, and eventually outweighs, secular concerns. Or, to put it another way, such actions depreciate the significance of membership within the redeemed community, reducing what is meant to be an end (albeit a penultimate one) to a mere means.
Again, the political realm – highly visible and capable of driving consequential change – contains special dangers for any Christian who seeks to wield influence for virtuous ends. Theologian Alastair Roberts has rightly observed that the egocentric accumulation of power (often at the expense of other people) is a ‘fundamental theme’ in our politics, to which even the most idealistic remain susceptible. This is just as true for progressive Christians as it is for those who are more conservative in temperament; no one is entirely immune. A robust theology of political engagement is the best prophylactic against the intrusion of moral compromise into the life of a believing politician. Earnest though she undoubtedly is, Karina Okotel’s recent experiences show us just what happens when that theology is lacking.
Cancel culture is a flippant term for an often-ugly reality. Originating within the black Twitter subculture, the idea of ‘cancelling’ someone came to prominence a few years ago, capturing collective efforts to marginalise celebrities deemed to have violated the norms and values of ‘respectable’ society. Notwithstanding its conceptual fluidity, cancel culture’s imprint may be identified whenever attacks are launched on someone’s reputation and economic livelihood over opinions or actions ‘alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying’.
Rightly or wrongly, many of the elite targets of cancel culture have been rehabilitated, their banishment proving to be temporary. But the practice of trying to socially extirpate a person as a result of perceived transgressions has metastasized, encroaching upon the world of everyday folk – people who rarely have the means to engineer a return into the good graces of others, and who lack the social cachet upon which celebrities may confidently rely. In the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death in May this year, the frenzied urge to boycott, shame, or vanquish the ‘disgraceful’ (whether flesh-and-blood individuals or statues wrought in stone) has at times taken on a Salem-like quality.
Consider the progressive owner of a Colorado yoga studio. He saw his business collapse because he was considered insufficiently attuned to the plight of minorities, despite labouring to create a highly inclusive and ethnically sensitive workplace. Or what about Sue Schafer? Her admittedly ill-advised decision to dress up as a black person for a party eventually saw her ousted from her job years later, after a Washington Post exposé ‘outed’ her. Such is the potency of cancel culture that a large newspaper could devote 3,000 words to dissecting the past actions of a person with no public standing whatsoever, thereby ruining her career.
These are just two examples in what is becoming a depressingly extensive catalogue. Quite often, they are a consequence of spurious accusations made long after the event in question, or what reasonable observers would deem a simple difference of opinion. Regular people, who depend on networks of social trust to carve out a life for themselves, have suffered mercilessly at the hands of those who believe that social exile and professional destruction are forms of just recompense.
While it’s important not to overstate the magnitude of this issue (writer Bonnie Kristian has insightfully argued that cancel culture is mainly tied to the professional class), it remains a genuine problem, particularly for its victims. As Ross Douthat notes, the goal is not to try and punish every alleged transgressor, but to ‘shame enough people’ so as to coerce everyone else into conforming. And although some of the targets of modern-day mob action can be justly criticised for genuine moral error, pettifogging absolutism – fuelled by the same social media platforms that magnify the original offence – has given license to the scurrilous and the vindictive.
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How might the church respond to the scourge of cancel culture? What resources does it possess to resist — and indeed, challenge — one of the more alarming manifestations of our social media-saturated age?
To answer these questions, consider the words of the Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Colossae:
When you were dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us (Col 2:14).
And later in the same letter:
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you (Col 3:13).
The idea that the church is composed of forgiven sinners – those who live free in the knowledge that their liability against God has been expunged – is part of the bedrock of Christian faith and practice. If there exists a way of life believers should appropriate — one that offers an antidote to the toxicity of cancel culture — then this passage admirably distils it. It provides a sharp counterpoint to the stern, unrelenting attempts to exorcise a person from mainstream society.
To be sure, genuine forgiveness by which the church should be animated hardly reflects popular conceptions, which are often little more than shabby facsimiles. Those thoroughly psychologized versions, which prevail in today’s therapeutic age, seek to erase past hurts (and the wrongs that caused them) through the power of individual fiat. On such views, ideas of repentance and contrition – indeed, of the moral injuries that breach relationships in the first place – are conspicuously absent.
The writers of the New Testament will have none of this. Take Paul: he talks of God’s gracious and decision to welcome into his fold those who were genuinely guilty of sinning against him. He cancelled this ‘legal indebtedness’, decisively dealing with the otherwise condemnable actions of his image-bearers through Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice (Col 2:14b). With the Son’s accomplishment, of course, has come the end of every accusation levelled against the faithful, penitent believer (Col 2:12). She has been released from her past, the moral rift between her and God having been repaired.
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While God’s lavish, unmerited grace towards sinners blossomed with the incarnation of the Son, the Creator’s determination to cancel sin has deep roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah spoke eloquently of Yahweh’s covenantal promise to redeem his people after a period of exile. Despite Israel’s unfaithfulness, despite its manifold failures to embody the wisdom and justice of her Sovereign, he nevertheless deigned to restore her. Isaiah 40-55, in particular, is replete with references to Yahweh’s redemptive power; let one passage stand for many:
But now, this is what the Lord says – he who created you, Jacob; he who formed you, Israel; ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine’ (Isaiah 43:1).
Later in the chapter, Yahweh declares that although Israel failed to spend itself in service to him, he has blotted out the nation’s transgressions, engaging in a covenantal act of ‘forgetting’ as he sets the stage for his people’s salvation (vv.24-25; cf. Ps 103:12). Even in their rebellion and idolatry, God reassures them that they are his treasured possession: chastised for a time, yes, but not abandoned permanently; suffering temporary alienation, but only as a prelude to eventual restoration.
This is of a piece with other parts of the Old Testament’s prophetic corpus. Jeremiah, for example, relayed the same message of hope to a nation burdened by moral corruption: Yahweh was going to transform his wayward people, choosing no longer to answer their grave misdeeds with the stern voice of justice, but with the merciful decision to pardon them. So complete, so epochal, was this act of mercy going to be that Jeremiah could, like Isaiah, describe it in terms of God remembering Israel’s sin no more (Jer 31:34).
That determination, of course, was embodied climactically in Jesus Christ himself – ‘God with us’ (Matt 1:23). He not only unveiled the loving, gracious heart of the Father; as the second Adam, he also gave his followers a living portrayal of perfect humanity. Jesus’ life was characterised by a fundamental turn towards broken, sinful people, particularly those who, in their own day, were victims of a similar kind of cancel culture. For Pope John Paul II, this was the very ‘incarnation of [divine] mercy’, embodying in excelsis God’s richly forgiving heart. Consider, as just one instance among a multitude, Christ’s decision to welcome the hated Zacchaeus into his company. Such was the depth of his mercy that he went so far as to practice open commensality with someone who, despite his personal wealth, had been shunned by the moral gatekeepers of his society (Luke 19:1-9). The diminutive tax collector had been marginalised by his contemporaries for engaging in acts far worse than many of the peccadilloes sparking outrage today. But in his confrontation with divine forgiveness, he enjoyed both social and moral rehabilitation (v.8). For Jesus, the possibility of mercy, of redemption, was a persistent reality that he consistently disclosed in his own person. His call to Zacchaeus wasn’t an isolated act; rather, it reflected a life that, in its essence, mirrored the Creator’s enduring forbearance.
God’s character, unveiled so beautifully in his Son, acts as the foundation and pattern for Christians as they seek to live rightly in the world: ‘be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:48). His compassionate decision to forgive the sinful in Christ, even in the midst of their sin (cf. Rom 5:8), is therefore paradigmatic for believers.
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The church needs to assiduously cultivate this kind of culture for its own internal health. If God’s people fail to cherish and transmit a robust understanding of forgiveness, they will lose the very heart of the Gospel, leaving themselves vulnerable to methods of dealing with conflict and difference that have been stripped of all winsomeness and humility. With cancel culture’s ‘moral vigilantism’ insinuating itself into various arenas of social life – academic, commercial, governmental – cleaving to a model of deep-set charity within the church (both divine and human) becomes ever more vital.
If the dangers seem overblown, then consider the propensity of God’s people to abandon a forgiving spirit, trading it for false, spurious forms of righteous purity. My own tradition, evangelicalism, has produced plenty of churches whose penchant for legalism and exclusion – often based on cultural mores masquerading as the fundamentals of orthodoxy – would rival anything conjured up by present-day cancel culture. Much the same could be said about certain vestiges of contemporary American religion, where political tribalism has supplanted genuine neighbour-loving faith. Christians who wish to ‘own the “libs”’, or who shun MAGA-hatted relatives, betray an attitude that is insensible to the deep mercies of God. This isn’t to say that one abandons key convictions for the sake of some ersatz social harmony. But my point is that each generation of God’s people must learn afresh to both prize and practice the gift of divine grace, lest it succumb to harsher, less generous modes of organizing and regulating communal life.
In contrast to the severe and alienating force energizing cancel culture, Christians are called to adopt a posture of indefatigable grace: first towards their brethren (Matt 18:1-22), and then towards the world-at-large. ‘Forgive as the Lord forgave you’, wrote Paul, thereby drawing a direct link between the Gospel message and the Christian’s way of life (Col 3:13; Eph 4:32-5:1; cf. Matt 6:12). The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once observed that the Gospel message is not only good news for sinners; it also functions as an ethical warning against treating anyone as ‘unforgiveable’, permanently beyond the reach of human compassion and restoration. The connection is clear enough, something Martin Luther noted when he wrote: ‘There is nothing but…uninterrupted forgiveness of sin, both in that God forgives us, and in that we forgive, bear with, and help each other’. The sacred testimony of Scripture encourages a fundamentally transformed orientation towards others, militating against the practices that purveyors of cancel culture regularly vaunt.
This is no mere sentiment; as Anthony Esolen wrote, turning towards the other – even those who may be despicable or despised – reckons seriously with the fact that we ourselves desperately need forgiveness. The principle of enemy-love functions in much the same way, obliging Christians to eschew the destructive wheel of mutual recrimination as they mimic the cruciform paradigm set by God in Christ (Matt 5:43-48). ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’, according to the Apostle (Rom 3:23). He recognized with searing clarity the sobering truth that each of us has participated, sometimes gleefully, in moral corruption. The self, as L. Gregory Jones noted, is neither a substance of unadulterated good, nor one of unrelieved evil. It is, rather, a perennial ‘battlefield’ between virtue and vice, in which everyone is a willing conscript. If the spotless Creator, the very standard of the Good, can pardon us amidst that ongoing tussle, how much more should Christians be able to forgive the sins of one’s fellows?
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Far from being a bare, judicial practice, in which believers are enjoined merely to acquit the penitent from afar, Christian forgiveness contains an active, extravagant, open quality. In describing God’s act of cancelling our debt against him, Paul sometimes used the verb charizomai, a word that means ‘to be generous’ (Col 2:13; cf. Rom 8:32). It captures the manifold reality of God’s having actively given himself to us in Christ (as opposed to simply acquitting us as an impersonal judge). L. Gregory Jones had it right when he observed that full-orbed forgiveness is not simply absolution from sin; it doesn’t simply cancel out another’s wrongdoing. Rather, it creates the necessary conditions for the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness, between two parties. This begins, again, with other believers, before extending outwards to the wider world. Jones’ reflections capture both God’s benevolence towards us and the type of actions we are to practice as his people. Paul’s words, meanwhile, distil our holy obligation to reach beyond denuded conceptions of forgiveness in order to grasp a much richer understanding of what it is to live faithfully and graciously with each other. What this means is that Christians aren’t simply admonished to pardon those who have wronged them (itself a contrast with cancel culture’s narcissism over small differences); they’re behooved to go the extra mile by labouring, where possible, towards the renewal of relationships.
Christian forgiveness isn’t merely a narrow stricture, to be trotted out mechanically at particular moments of wrongdoing. There’s a lavish, overflowing spirit to it, designed to wend its way into the very marrow of the believer’s way of life. It’s a spirit that actively seeks ways of living at peace with others, even the obnoxious, the offensive, and the coarse. A spirit that wills the good of others, even in the context of deep social differences or ideological antagonisms. And a spirit that does not condemn, but holds out (where necessary) the possibility of reconciliation. Those who humbly and gratefully recognize the magnitude of divine grace in their own lives are more likely to embrace such a supple, generous approach in their dealings with others, even in the face of grievances, uncomfortable misunderstandings, or sharp disagreements. Their souls suffused with divine charity, such folk are to a great extent inoculated against the current temptation to indulge in angry, pitiless reaction. Instead, their equanimity extinguishes all bitterness, and exhausts the power that animates feuds and quarrels.
One shouldn’t be surprised by this, for the basic moral vision of the New Testament ought to condition believers against offence-taking and grudge-nursing. And instead of morally performative displays, which seek to magnify the transgression and advertise the outraged person’s superiority, Christian forgiveness is ultimately a de-centring process: encouraging someone to offer clemency unheeded to the penitent and sorrowful. This represents a much harder road, given our native pride and thirst for vindication. Moreover, there will be times where forgiveness (much less reconciliation) will be precluded by the magnitude of catastrophic, unrepentant sin. But it offers the world – or at least those sections of it blighted by cancel culture – an alternative means of dealing with our differences and hurts. More of that anon.
To be sure, the antidote to our current excesses isn’t always an act of strict forgiveness, precisely because so many ‘offences’ don’t rise to the level of legitimate transgression in the first place. But the timbre of the absolved life remains just as relevant in a world where the grifters of cancel culture exploit the rough edges of social discourse. Certainly, God’s gracious acquittal is the wellspring for an array of cognate virtues: not just forgiveness itself, but a wider ethic of compassion, marked by patience, gratitude, and charity. A genuine acknowledgement of one’s forgiven state generates a profound humility, which contrasts sharply with cancel culture’s rigid hierarchies and moral arrogance.
One sees this, too, reflected in the church’s sacred texts. Calling on the church in Rome to live at peace with others and forego revenge at every turn, Paul urged his audience to practice hospitality and acceptance in disputable matters. Using once more the prior reality of God’s acceptance as a backdrop for his instructions (Rom 14:1-15:3), the Apostle summoned Roman Christians to a way of life that transcended sharp divisions over acceptable religious practices. According to him, there were no hierarchies dividing the weak from the strong, for their basic identity in the God who’d welcomed them relativised every other marker. While forgiveness per se may not have been called for, the reality of one’s graciously acquitted state may stand behind this vision, inculcating an entirely new way of viewing one’s fellow believers and relationships with them. In all these things, Paul saw that divine exoneration was the foundation-stone for an entire ethos, underwriting other virtues that are essential to a genuinely Christ-like existence. So fundamental is this character that the nineteenth-century Anglican minister, J.C. Ryle, could say that ‘a spiteful, quarrelsome Christian is’, despite his professed belief in forgiveness, ‘a scandal to his profession’.
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Such qualities reveal something that is ultimately far more nourishing, elegant, and wholesome than what our present moment has served us. Embracing and nurturing the holy virtues generated by forgiveness is therefore important for the church’s external witness, and can only have a beneficial, enriching effect on the surrounding culture.
We should recall that the Gospel has often succeeded in taming the brutish tendencies of human beings, even when its theological claims have not been embraced. As legal scholar Bruce Frohnen has written, Christ’s invitation to forgiveness – and indeed, the New Testament’s broader summons to an ethic of grace – has had a civilising effect on those portions of the human race that have been substantially influenced by Christianity. If the rise of cancel culture is but one manifestation of that receding legacy, should not a renewed, prophetic witness at least be mounted to try and ‘leaven’ society once again?
That influence doesn’t simply occur on an individual level; it requires the creation of an alternative culture, which inevitably entails an important role for God’s church. Writing some years ago about the socio-political implications of forgiveness, South African theologian J.M. Vorster observed that the church has been created to be an ‘exemplary community’: symbolizing a new reality with every act that chooses charity over its opposite. His description isn’t far removed from the Pauline vision of a Christian politeuma, or civic body (Phil 3:20), which the Apostle used to denote the idea of covenant communities as outposts of the kingdom – a kind of challenge to an agonistic culture, grounded in the complete self-giving of the Messiah (Phil 2:5-9).
This is one way that God’s people can, as it were, function as salt and light in an environment that is increasingly polarized and fractious. Present in the world, and yet distinct from it, the church in all its myriad forms can offer a counter-narrative to the Manichean assumptions of cancel culture, defusing or interrupting those roiling cycles of mutual recrimination. To be sure, such a call may sound naively optimistic, especially in a vigorously post-Christian context. Perhaps it is. But what is the shining city on a hill meant to represent, if not the radiating edifice of truth that can be seen for miles around (regardless of one’s beliefs)? And why did Jesus describe his disciples as ‘salt’, if not to suggest that their pilgrimage through the world would have a preserving effect – arresting moral decay by inhabiting and advancing an alternative way of being?
No one pretends, of course, that Christians are entirely immune to the stirrings of dissension or back-biting. Let 1 Corinthians stand as an enduring testament to that lamentable fact. God’s people have repeatedly proven themselves to be just as vulnerable as non-believers to the exclusionary spirit lying behind cancel culture. Nor will a society permeated by Christian principles embody them faultlessly. It is simply the natural consequence of living in a fallen world, which warps even the noblest of human impulses.
But even when they are translated into a secular idiom, these verities can still resonate, for they harmonise with what is true of people as divine image-bearers. Imagine what may have happened to Patrick Harrington if his earnest efforts had been met, not with puritanical zeal, but with people whose ‘social imaginaries’ were informed, however distantly, by the kinds of values to which Luther drew attention. Imagine, too, if Susan Schafer had been offered the grace to repent of her moral error, instead of stern, unyielding calls for her to be cast out like a pariah. And what of this man, who lost his job over an article he wrote 33 years prior? What if his contemporaries had, despite their own personal views, chosen the path of ‘forgetting’ or ‘bearing with’ – characteristics that owe much to Christian notions of forgiveness and forbearance (cf. 1 Cor 13) – over professional and economic exile?
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In many ways, cancel culture is actually anti-culture, proceeding by way of negation and social death. By fuelling outrage and glorifying ostracism, it threatens to erode precious social capital that communities have painstakingly accumulated over many years. Writer and priest Giles Fraser lamented that cancel culture turns everyone into a potential liar, for fear of the consequences of being exposed. Under such a merciless regime, untempered by forgiveness, one might conclude that it’s better to engage in soul-crushing hypocrisy than embrace personally ruinous honesty. But while that ensures protection from the self-righteous throng, its cost – for both individuals and societies – is very steep.
By contrast, a culture that places the idea of forgiveness at its core – itself grounded in God’s decisive cancellation of sin – yields something that is far more enriching, as well as far more truthful. In order for a society to thrive, its members must be able to depend on at least a modicum of trust and openness. Journalist Elizabeth Oldfield recently made the important point that ‘a healthy citizenship’ requires the virtue of forgiveness; failure to practice this craft – to nurture it tenderly as a fundamental habit – leaves us without the capacity to heal ‘our social wounds’. Indeed, even in its secular form, a forgiving, merciful attitude allows people to honestly examine themselves and others, without fear of permanent censure or unrelieved condemnation. This is the stuff of vibrant, robust, generative communities. Whereas cancel culture is utterly corrosive to this enterprise, the restorative character of forgiveness – advertised, one hopes, in the church’s rival vision – upholds it. Does this fall short of what the Gospel requires? Undoubtedly: only under the full lordship of Christ does forgiveness in its complete sense become a reality. But for all that, a society that esteems it as a vital principle still reflects the beauty of that message, and reminds us of its power. That is no small achievement.
A Bagful of insights 