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
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?
***
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.
Writing with not a little insight, commentators have observed a deeply intriguing dimension to the protests currently convulsing the United States: percolating beneath the callow progressivism lies a kind of spiritual fervour, which animates a great swathe of the demonstrators. It’s not simply the case that some people have been driven by prior religious convictions to respond to the killing of unarmed African-Americans by police; rather, it’s that much of the outpouring of grief, activism, and even violence triggered by the death of George Floyd is itself quasi-religious in character.
Popular opinion holds that the United States is a bastion of piety within the community of Western nations; although European states long ago settled into an easy secularism, the pulse of vital religion still seems to beat strongly on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s true that the U.S. remains an outlier in this regard, although things are far more complicated than common narratives suggest. Moreover, statistical evidence suggests that the country may be on the same trajectory as the Old World. But while America might be following the Continent down a post-Christian path – busily divesting itself of its religious inheritance – this hardly entails the erasure of all ‘spiritual’ sentiment. On the contrary: that impulse persists, even if at times it’s channeled differently.
From a certain perspective, this is unsurprising. The propensity of humans to devote themselves to comprehensive worldviews is nearly universal. We are a meaning-making species, prone to developing grand existential schemes as a way of buttressing our lives and integrating the sheer welter of events that daily confront us. More fundamentally, it represents an attempt to reconcile oneself with one’s own mortality and finitude.
The largely ineradicable character of the religious instinct means that it persists, even upon the apparently disenchanted landscapes of modern secular culture. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum. And with the demise of organised religion, other claimants have rushed in to fill the void.
Writers such as Tara Isabella Burton have documented the mushrooming of new movements and fashions, which in many ways ape the external features of traditional religious beliefs or practices. Politics is, of course, one such vehicle, supplying the meaning, values, solidarity, identity – even the pretence towards a type of salvation – that were once the preserve of organized religion. Ideological frameworks, whether past or present, offer a pre-packaged means of explaining the world and its ills, claiming to satisfy one’s craving for something beyond the individual and the material. In societies starved of conventional sources of spirituality, those systems – and the mass gatherings they may generate – offer something of a secularised substitute.
And so, we return to the present eruption. The activist zeal that has roiled America and elsewhere may express a yearning, however inchoate, for a kind of transcendence that has survived efforts to extirpate traditional religion from Western societies. True, not everyone involved in the recent protests is driven by such existential concerns; so diffuse and widespread a social movement will attract a conglomerate of participants. But for some, politics as a procedural, incremental, collective enterprise has given way to a deluge of righteous fervour, more akin to various expressions of religious fanaticism that have broken out periodically throughout history.
Witness some of the key moments that have emerged over the past couple of months. The toppling of statues has dominated news cycles, but it also provides a particularly clear window into the types of attitude that have colonised the minds of some activists. The philosopher John Gray has rightly termed these acts of iconoclastic destruction: ‘rituals of purification’, aimed at cleansing society-at-large, and consolidating the protagonists’ moral and spiritual virtue. It is a well-trodden path, one taken by a variety of groups spurred on by a profusion of religious zeal. As but one example, Gray cites the outburst of Anabaptist millenarianism in the wake of the Reformation: the obliteration of artistic and iconic works was part of a wider movement to (violently) wrench the present, and indeed the future, out of the ossified grip of a moribund past.*
Certainly, such actions intersect with more mundane grievances. But this is politics in a cosmic key, focused upon an ‘eschatological horizon’ that promises to trigger a wholesale break with the present course of history. As psychologist and ethicist Aaron Kheriaty has recently written, the iconoclasm on display manifests an effort to create the conditions for ‘an entirely new and historically unprecedented social order’ – the secular analogue to traditional religious longings for the divine kingdom, whose advent would sweep away the moral detritus of both historical and current political systems.
The destruction of secular iconography in towns and cities across the U.S. bears witness to this utopian desire for redemption – an emancipation from the past, which is seen as unbearably corrupt. In fact, it’s an attempt to realize that desire using the tools of political vandalism, which have been harnessed to overturn the sacred symbols of the old order. That the eschatological object of such longings remains opaque and ill-defined doesn’t diminish their potency.
What of other scenes now embedding themselves in popular imagination? Watching thousands of people ‘take the knee’ (as if in prayer) or chant creeds in unison, one is struck by the spiritual quality of such actions. These aren’t merely protests; they, too, are near-sacred rituals, with all the liturgical trappings of a religious service. Although such gatherings occur in ostensibly secular spaces, they are festooned with sacral imagery (including a cloud of slain martyrs), sculpting and guiding participants at a deeply existential level.
Much of this bears more than a passing resemblance to Emil Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, which holds that the gathering of individuals in mass settings for a common purpose can engender a spiritual-like experience. With the right cocktail of social context, shared concerns and corporate energy, participants may be drawn out of themselves into a higher realm of intense, collective excitement. The resulting emotional ‘electricity’ is profoundly generative, creating a profusion of almost sacred meaning that transcends any one person. To observe the brewing protest marches, then, is to witness Durkheimian theory attain shape and body and life.
The protests constitute a key manifestation of the broader creed of anti-racism, which supplies them with whatever intellectual ballast they exhibit. Chief among the ideology’s claims is the totalising concept of structural or systemic racism. It’s true that sometimes-unjust racial disparities are products of broader institutional mechanisms; both progressive and conservative voices have argued as much. But when a concept like structural racism is deployed axiomatically to explain every instance of racial disparity, no matter how minor or contrived, then we have drifted away from sober discourse, and instead migrated into the realm of an all-encompassing metaphysic – a fundamental theory – resembling the dogmatic architecture associated with popular religion.
Casting white supremacy and its crowning achievement, the institution of slavery, as America’s ‘original sin’ functions in a similar manner. For certain advocates, white people bear within their own bodies the near-ineradicable marks of their ancestors’ primal fall – not that of the fabled Adam and Eve, but of the early whites who established and maintained the sordid trade in human flesh. The seeds of racism are said to lie in every white person, even those who explicitly repudiate any notion of racial superiority as a moral cancer. As the black academic John McWhorter has observed, activists have propounded the notion that white Americans are tarred with the legacy of their supposed privilege, from which absolution may be sought only through ceaseless rounds of contrition and repentance.
It’s easy to see how such views complement the utopian – and indeed, destructive – tendencies many protestors have revealed. If society is so riddled with injustice, then reforms, no matter how grand or ambitious, are likely to fail. Deconstruction is the only viable solution. Unwittingly, however, many anti-racist and black rights advocates help themselves to the same cultural patrimony they seek to dissolve. This should come as no surprise: despite assiduous efforts to liberate themselves from history, protestors are, like everyone else, ensconced within it. Try as they might, they cannot avoid completely the overtures of the past.
Activists from Portland to Atlanta have unconsciously imbibed elements of America’s residual Christian legacy, earnestly recycling them within a post-Christian environment. Talk of white people being tarnished by the evils of their ancestors clearly transposes the biblical story of Man’s fall into a secular context. Similarly, the obvious eschatological overtones of the movement appropriate the cosmic and redemptive dimensions essential to the Christian religion.
But even in those convergences, differences remain, with the current movements mimicking some of the worst excesses of populist or millenarian religion (filled out with a noxious blend of warmed-over Marxism and modern identity politics). Universal sinfulness, for example, has been replaced by the accursedness of one particular ethnic group, in a strange inversion of the curse of Ham. Whereas Christianity affirms the claim that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), modern anti-racists, on both the street and in the academy, have radically circumscribed the doctrine, applying it in a selective, highly racialized manner. Ignoring Solzhenitsyn’s warning that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, they have adopted a moral dualism that is fundamentally Manichean in attitude. Absent, too, are notions of forgiveness or charity, which Christianity, at its best, has greatly cherished. Merciless treatment is meted out to anyone who dissents from the protestors’ overarching values, or who isn’t sufficiently seized by the conviction that American society is incorrigibly racist. In their stead lies a purifying fanaticism, aimed at purging every view that fails to reflect the movement’s exacting standards.
And while the current demonstrations manifest a certain Christianised eschatology, protestors eschew the mainstream Christian belief that redemption is something that can only be secured extrinsically, as a result of God’s inbreaking kingdom. Instead, they cast themselves as the specially anointed agents of emancipation, leading the charge towards a claimed racial eschaton. A person doesn’t need to be a Christian to see the dangers inherent in such utopian schemes; a basic grasp of history is sufficient. The idea that flawed individuals can possibly wrought sweeping, epochal progress within the decrepit structures of history has been shown repeatedly to issue in the same injustices against which the vanguard claims to be fighting.
This witches’ brew offers up a potent series of dangers, especially in an anxious, highly fractious society. As Andrew Sullivan has noted, the quasi-religious character of both the protestors and their intellectual benefactors has already seen the substantial cessation of transparent debate around the issue of race, and the growth of an often-vicious intolerance. Thus, does the lifeblood of a healthy political community evaporate. When a political program is transcendentalized in the way this one has been – with only one perspective being imbued with near-cosmic urgency – attempts to explore a complex issue from the point of view of one’s opponents are repudiated as a dance with heresy. It is to debase oneself by engaging those who are regarded, not as fellow citizens with whom one disagrees, but as existential foes whose mere existence may retard the liberationist project.
Activists will be untroubled by this, salved as they are by the righteous demands of their cause. And yet, they are creating the conditions for precisely the kind of coarse, pitiless society they profess to oppose. Witnessing many of the protest marches, or hearing the self-appointed priests of the anti-racist creed, is to glimpse a dark future. It’s a future in which charity towards the other is condemned, violence is valorised as a crucial instrument of progress, and the crushing of all dissent is lauded as a sign of ideological virtue. In short, it’s a future stripped of everything that ordinary, decent folk seek in fashioning a life for themselves and their loved ones. The urban acolytes dominating our news feeds tout their penetrating insight into the ills plaguing society. But by their actions they reveal the bitter harvest of so much chiliastic idealism.
* Of course, the statues themselves could be seen as symbolic incarnations of a rival secular religion, connected to the major narratives generating and shaping American (or at least southern American) identity. However, that’s for another post.
A short piece, critically examining the Australian Government’s plan to reform the higher education sector.
It’s telling that the government’s proposal to radically overhaul university fee structures has been disparaged by figures from across the political map. The Greens have denounced it as elitist policy-making, aimed at making higher education inaccessible to ordinary people. Some columnists observe that the government’s cocktail of aggressive market principles and command-style social engineering is incongruous, to say the least. Others have argued that the proposed measures are counter-productive, and will likely produce short-term effects that are diametrically opposed to the Coalition’s ambitions. Even the right-leaning Institute for Public Affairs has weighed in, lamenting the inadequacy of the government’s efforts to reform the sector. When a policy is subject to such widespread criticism, one is tempted to conclude that it’s irredeemably flawed.
A large share of the controversy has been focused on the announcement that the government plans to dramatically increase the cost of a humanities degree, sending a negative price signal to prospective students. In so doing, the Coalition has exposed its approach to education as leadenly — unimaginatively — technocratic. In attitude, it reflects what Pope John Paul II once labelled ‘economism’: the reduction of (in this case) higher learning to a merely instrumental good, subject to the blunt, transitory logic of contemporary market forces. On this view, knowledge is confined to that which is immediately practical, while universities are transformed into institutional conveyor belts — churning out graduates who’ve been technically equipped for a narrow range of favoured professions.
Of course, trying to predict which industries will enjoy success in future economic environments is a fool’s errand. But there are other reasons for scepticism. Weakening the place of the humanities within the university system is an attempt, however unwitting, to undermine some of the basic principles underlying the idea of tertiary education. Writing in The Guardian a few days ago, writer Ben Eltham aptly quoted the nineteenth-century cardinal, John Henry Newman, who argued that university should stimulate the entire spectrum of one’s mental faculties — aspiring towards ‘universal knowledge’ and a broad ‘cultivation of the mind’. Even allowing for the pernicious influence of identity politics upon university campuses, the humanities remain one of the purest exemplars of that intellectual mission.
At their best, the humanities inculcate a love of knowledge and thought for their own sakes. They nurture the ennobling conviction that an educated mind is of intrinsic — and not simply instrumental or economic — value. In so doing, the humanities tap into the unique capabilities and gifts with which human beings have been imbued. One key strand of the Western philosophical tradition (starting with Aristotle) posits that humans are, by nature, ‘rational animals’, distinguished from other organisms by their capacity for reason. That definition enjoys a venerable place within Catholic philosophy, having been propounded by luminaries such as Boethius and Thomas Aquinas.
The humanities bear witness to that tradition. Philosophy, history, literary criticism — such fields of enquiry are prized, not so much because they can be applied in simple, technocratic fashion, but because they foster and refine what has long been deemed the sine qua non of human beings.
Dan Tehan, education minister and one of the chief architects of the planned reforms, added a biographical codicil to his announcement: that studying an arts degree almost cost him a job earlier in life. The implication here is that the humanities aren’t sufficiently ‘practical’ to assist a person with life in the real world.
It’s difficult to know what to do with Tehan’s personal anecdote, or the wider point he tried to make. Like his colleagues, he evinced a narrow, thoroughly desiccated view of wealth and value. But if it’s practicality one wants, immersion in the humanities has been associated with a stronger propensity for critical and analytical thought, habits of mind that enable someone to engage empathetically with others, and intellectual suppleness — skills likely to be highly sought after in today’s globally connected economy.
Consider the discipline of history. Students of the past are trained to enter into worlds that are sometimes vastly different from their own; the mental apparatus one must cultivate in order to do that produces, in historian Samuel Berner’s words, ‘a heightened sense of complexity’, allowing a person to hold in reserve a bevy of competing truth claims and narratives. Moreover, philosophers have shown how the conceptual precision and logical rigour of philosophical enquiry can aid in the development of scientific research, leading to remarkable breakthroughs that might otherwise have remained elusive. It’s this kind of intellectual cross-pollination — something the science writer, Matt Ridley, has cheekily described as ‘ideas having sex’ — that has created unheralded levels of prosperity in the West. And since the Coalition is seeking to burnish Australia’s scientific credentials, investment in such qualities seems wise. It’s much harder to achieve, however, if the very departments incubating those skills have been drained of both funds and willing pupils.
Coalition ministers are rightly concerned by Australia’s economic future and capacity for wealth-creation. But their planned university reforms will risk impoverishing the country in other ways. The humanities preserve some of the deepest principles of Western culture and learning; for a government that supposedly cherishes that inheritance, it’s making some baffling policy choices.
Author’s note: although this blog post is critical of some of Dr. Mohler’s statements (and the assumptions underlying them), I am grateful for his presence as a public Christian leader. Indeed, his efforts to maintain theological orthodoxy in the face of increasing cultural hostility, and to publicly witness to that orthodoxy, are both brave and deeply encouraging.
Introduction
Dr. Al Mohler, “the reigning intellectual” of American evangelicalism, is a figure often wreathed in controversy. Of course, this is partly a consequence of being a leading conservative churchman in a country busily divesting itself of its Christian heritage. Proclaiming the exclusivity of Christ is bound to scandalize others, particularly when so many people are wedded to modern tropes concerning tolerance and diversity. But the venerable President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary occasionally exceeds the gospel’s intrinsic offence with a statement that is rather questionable, even within the sub-culture of conservative evangelicalism. Recent headlines, in which Dr. Mohler has been roundly criticised for past comments concerning the Bible and slavery, are illustrative.
Controversy arises
Why the commotion? Last month, religion reporter Jonathan Merritt wrote that a TV transcript had been unearthed, featuring a relatively young Dr. Mohler talking with two other guests on Larry King Live in 1998. While the discussion was originally concerned with what Scripture says about wives submitting to their husbands, it turned to the question of slaves and masters. Resting on Ephesians 6:5, Dr. Mohler claimed that although the Bible does not endorse slavery, it does enjoin slaves to remain obedient to their masters. When pressed on the matter, he reiterated his position, arguing that “if you’re a slave, there’s a way to behave”. Even as King tried to tease out the logical implications of what Dr. Mohler had said by raising the issue of runaway slaves in pre-civil war America, he appeared unmoved – arguing there “really” was no “loophole” to the command that slaves submit to their overlords. Dr. Mohler finished by implicitly contrasting this allegedly biblical view with what “popular culture” might say about owning human chattel. A stunned King quickly cut to a commercial break.
We should note, of course, that Dr. Mohler recently repudiated those earlier comments, condemning them as “stupid”. And one mustn’t forget that they were uttered over two decades ago, amidst the cut-and-thrust of live debate. But there seems to be little to account for his apparent interpretive shift; no principled reason why he now rejects his earlier understanding of the relevant texts. Moreover, while Dr. Mohler has written eloquently about the need for a sophisticated theological hermeneutic, a simplistic, literalist reading of Scripture is not, for him, an isolated incident. He has, for example, spent a good deal of energy arguing that Genesis straightforwardly teaches a young earth (presumably by adding up the genealogies in Chapters 5 and 11), and that the book’s first chapter speaks plainly of “days” as 24-hour units of time. In contrast with Dr. Mohler’s performance on Larry King Live, those efforts have come in the form, not of hurried, impromptu rejoinders, but of scripted remarks that reflect a mature, considered position.
There are multiple issues at play here. But I want to focus on what Dr. Mohler’s handling of Scripture reveals about some of the assumptions embedded in his approach to divine revelation. Both his slavery comments on Larry King Live and his premeditated statements on the age of the earth reflect several crucial interpretive and hermeneutical defects.
The problem of naïve biblicism
The crux of the problem is this. Dr. Mohler’s apparent view of Scripture too often verges on what one might call a naïve biblicism. It’s been described as the illusion of a “pure” understanding of biblical truth, shorn of all presuppositions and historical considerations. A naïvely biblicist approach to the text of Scripture tends towards the conviction – often unstated – that the Bible is a uniformly timeless document, communicating self-evident propositions with pristine clarity. The reader, armed with little more than good faith and common sense, is easily able to understand and appropriate those truths.
This basic view generates a cluster of interlocking practices, all of which can be harmful to good readings of Scripture: a belief that biblical statements do not require interpretation, but can be read off the page in unmediated fashion; a failure to properly grapple with the historic Christian tradition, and what it might say on questions of exegesis and theological method; and the assumption that the Bible’s prescriptions can be applied straightforwardly to modern contexts, quite apart from the issue of hermeneutical or cultural “gaps”. As some of Dr. Mohler’s public remarks seem to imply, he is at times guilty of succumbing to all these deficiencies. Sadly, he is not alone: his views are shared by a great swathe of people within (American) conservative evangelicalism.
Dr. Mohler’s comments suggest that the only prerequisite for the good faith reader is direct engagement with the relevant texts; understanding that exceeds the semantic or the syntactical is, on this view, largely unnecessary. Hence, Paul was handing down clear and exceptionless oracles about the relationship between slaves and masters. Hence, Genesis 1 is divided into seven solar days, each one of 24 hours’ duration.
This is Dr. Mohler’s first error. He neglects the need for anything more than a “thin” notion of interpretation, at least in these instances. But “thick” interpretation – that is, genuine, substantial elucidation of a text – is often necessary for two, mutually reinforcing reasons. Firstly, we must reckon with the fact that the text emerged out of a particular thought world, a particular socio-cultural matrix, which is very different from our own. What is foreign requires de-mystifying, and what may seem obvious can require nuancing. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright perceptively observes that all Scripture is “culturally conditioned” from beginning to end – having been produced, not only in, but in many respects by, a particular time and place. Even a simple reference to “day” may conceal an entire cosmology – a mental universe – that is radically different from our own (something Old Testament scholar John Walton has done much to emphasise). Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Bible is so opaque that it cannot be understood. I certainly don’t recommend one abandons the Reformation commitment to the broad clarity of Scripture. But deep cultural and intellectucal shifts over the past 2,000 years provide prima facie evidence that apparently simple biblical references may mask a good deal of ambiguity. Moreover, when both apostolic and denominational tradition suggest that Holy Writ might not always offer a clear window into the mind of the biblical author, we do well to exercise caution.
Any would-be exegete must contend with the fact that comprehending biblical texts requires both internal interpretation (i.e., understanding the internal logic of the passage, and its function within the narrative flow of the book), and external interpretation (recognizing the historical “situatedness” of the passage, its relationship to other biblical texts, etc.).
An analysis of Ephesians 6:5 makes this clear. Several points commend themselves. Far from embodying timeless, universal truth, Paul’s command to slaves in the congregation at Ephesus was intimately tied to his broader aims in the letter. He was not rendering judgment upon the institution writ large, but upon concrete situations as they arose in the church. Moreover, Timothy Gombis has persuasively argued that in Ephesians, Paul sought to articulate the lineaments of a “new humanity” – an alternative arrangement within the politeia of God, which counterposed the harsh, often capricious social order in which the early Christians found themselves. He addresses slaves directly (and before masters), thereby “granting them a place of dignity and honour”. His admonition to masters (v.9) is grounded in the fact that the same Lord presides over both parties. With a few swift strokes, Paul relativises the position of sovereignty a slaveholder might otherwise have adopted. Finally, the remarkable demand that masters treat their human holdings well (cf. Col 4:1) would have contrasted sharply with prevailing cultural wisdom (Aristotle, for one, characterised the master-slave relationship as one of tyranny).
Much of this corresponds to what biblical scholar William Webb has dubbed the “redemptive movement” of Scripture: an ethical dynamic established by the biblical texts, advancing God’s redemptive project (sometimes incrementally) in the face of countervailing forces. Indeed, the apostle’s indirect challenges to slavery’s harsh excesses in Ephesians and Colossians are exceeded by his letter to Philemon, where he speaks of Onesimus, Philemon’s slave, as a fellow “brother” (Phil 16). As N.T. Wright suggests, the note of radical equality resident in the term “brother” “set a time-bomb” beside the entire system. And while one looks in vain for explicit condemnation of slavery in Paul’s letters, it cannot be stressed too often that the early Christians were a persecuted minority, bereft of the kind of power needed to challenge head-on a “ubiquitous institution” (so William Klein). The upshot of all this is that to read a passage like Ephesians 6:5ff as if it were offering abstract commands of an exceptionless character is to miss the point entirely. It also substitutes a mechanical, isolative reading for one that is more sensitive to the text’s literary contours and historical milieu.
Secondly, all of us are ensconced within a certain way of understanding reality. That understanding inevitably acts as a lens through which we observe a text. No one approaching a biblical passage does so unencumbered; we all bring to it certain presuppositions, biases, and so forth. Some have been formed by the ambient culture (and are frequently imbibed unconsciously). Others involve the conditioning of a specific theological or denominational tradition. Thus, a Baptist and a Presbyterian can read the New Testament and derive very different ecclesiological models from it – the one opting for a style of congregationalism, the other for a governing body of elders. To say this is not to counsel interpretive despair: it is still possible to arrive at a robust understanding of scriptural truth, despite the ongoing influence of contemporary context. But the point is that having been catechized into certain patterns of thinking by the secular and religious worlds we inhabit, we may well be predisposed towards certain readings of the Bible – some of which will compel us to patiently engage in exegetical negotiation with the text.
Dr. Mohler has implicitly tried to circumvent these realities by invoking the “plain sense” of Scripture or “common sense” readings of a passage. I’ll say more about so-called “common sense” below. But for now, it’s worth noting that Dr. Mohler’s appeal simply re-locates the problem: what constitutes “common sense” in the first place is likely to vary depending on one’s historical location. Public consensus on all manner of questions inevitably changes. This is as true of scriptural interpretation as it is of slaveholding, or the earth’s relationship to the sun. An ordinary person living in the 21st century will approach these issues in a manner very different from that of a resident of the 1300s – or, for that matter, from someone living in first-century Palestine. Contrary to what Dr. Mohler may think, the unadorned individual, apprehending the message of the text apart from the mediation of cultural frameworks, is largely non-existent.
Put another way, Dr. Mohler’s claims embody an entirely ahistorical view of Scripture – as if it were a product of pure transcendence, unmoored from time, history, and culture. How else does one explain his publicly articulated positions on the contentious subjects under review? They evince little conscious recognition of the historical and contextual distinctives of either Genesis 1 or Paul’s admonitions regarding slavery. Tacitly treating the texts in free-floating fashion, Dr. Mohler has only succeeded in isolating them from the originating environments from which they emerged.
‘Solo’ Scriptura and the devaluing of tradition
This brings me to Dr. Mohler’s second major error. The current of ahistoricism running through some of his approaches to biblical interpretation also underlies his depreciation of tradition and its role in exegesis. This, too, is a consequence of biblicist naivety. As more than one theologian has argued, Christians – and the church at large – cannot avoid dependence on the growing body of critical reflection upon Scripture. Conducting an ongoing dialogue with past voices is an important part of deep biblical knowledge – relativizing one’s own perspective on the text, and exposing the historical contingency of so many “plain” readings. Attentively listening to those voices invariably shapes one’s views; at times, the exercise may even overturn previously untroubled interpretations of a passage. As N.T. Wright notes, if we fail to remember that exegetes of every period have left their “mark on subsequent readings of Scripture”, we will simply fail to realize “why we ‘naturally’ read the text” in the way that we do.
For Dr. Mohler, it seems that simply being in possession of a supposedly “timeless” Bible is enough; evolving historical interpretations of biblical passages are eschewed, or at least muted. Some may wish to call this sola scriptura, or the primacy of Scripture, in a misguided attempt to stave off the influence of tradition upon one’s reading of Scripture. But it’s a departure from the Reformation cry. At times, Dr. Mohler seems to drift towards what might be characterised as ‘solo’ scriptura: Scripture alone and isolated, detached from both its own socio-cultural matrix and the streams of subsequent interpretation that have come down to us through the ages. Of course, Dr. Mohler himself is a child of the Reformation, having been self-consciously shaped by the Reformers and what they achieved. But on certain questions, he reveals a limited horizon, failing to recognize the role tradition inevitably plays, even on putatively unmediated readings of Scripture.
Dr. Mohler’s apparent position is father to several problems, not least of which is a superficial engagement with historical interpretations. Witness his comments regarding Genesis 1. He has claimed that prior to Darwin, biblical interpreters were largely unanimous in their understanding of the oft-repeated reference to “day” (vv. 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). To be sure, he appeals generically to the history of exegesis on this question, but it’s one that appears to be heavily conditioned by the limits of his own biblicism. The reality is far more complex and ambiguous. Robert Letham, for one, has provided ample evidence from a variety of commentators – all of whom lived before the emergence of Darwin’s theory, or the development of modern geological dating – to show that there was hardly a consensus regarding the “days” of Genesis 1. While Reformation luminaries such as Martin Luther adopted a largely literal approach, others like Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas sought different ways of understanding the text. Commenting on the evident variety of exegetical options, Letham concluded that “claims that a literal reading of Genesis 1 is obvious fall down when the history of interpretation is taken into account” (emphasis original).
Is it “common sense” or Common Sense?
Irony abounds at this point. Although Dr. Mohler seems to appeal to the idea of “mere” readings of Scripture, his position actually represents the incursion of certain philosophical traditions into the American evangelical psyche. Chief among them is what has come to be known as Scottish Common-Sense Realism (CSR). A reaction against Humean scepticism, it rests upon the belief that one’s perceptual apparatus provides direct awareness of objects as they really are. Church historian Mark Noll has traced the influence of CSR throughout conservative evangelicalism in the United States. A “cluster of convictions” associated with CSR, he has argued, “furnished broader habits of mind” and consolidated certain intellectual conventions, especially as evangelical thought evolved in nineteenth-century America. Conservative evangelicals past and present have appropriated CSR’s epistemological naivety regarding perception of the external world, tacitly applying it to an understanding of Scripture and its teachings. The consequence has been an equally naïve understanding of the individual reader’s capacity to apprehend the meaning of biblical texts.
CSR predisposed many nineteenth-century conservative evangelicals to study the Bible in a strictly inductive manner, on the analogy of a scientist studying nature. Hence, Princeton theologian Charles Hodge could liken the Bible to a “great store-house of facts” that one just needed to apprehend and arrange. The biblical scholar or exegete was like a botanist, simply observing the scriptural “ecosystem” before him. CSR has persisted, and its legacy may be discerned in current readings of Scripture within large sections of conservative evangelicalism. Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, wherein the author advocates just such an approach, is perhaps the most well-known example of that legacy. As Noll writes of such readings:
“The most immediate result of this approach to theological construction was to eclipse systematic study of Scripture that relied self-consciously on the insights of theological tradition, or that sought to understand the fullness of the historical circumstances surrounding the actual writing of Scripture” (emphasis mine).
In his apparent approach to biblical interpretation, the status of the individual reader, and even the role of theological tradition, Dr. Mohler is, in many ways, an epistemological heir to CSR. His exposition of the “days” of Genesis 1 as a straightforward reference to 24-hour periods of time is a case-in-point: he reads the chapter as it stands, without interrogating the cultural conditioning reflected in either the text or his interpretation of it. Dr. Mohler’s capacity to perceive the semantic content of the passage is, in good “Common Sense” fashion, sufficient for accurate apprehension. As much as he may wish to lay claim to a direct encounter with the supposedly plain meaning of Scripture, his interpretive decisions have seemingly been shaped by extra-biblical patterns of thought.
A window into a wider malaise
I haven’t time to examine Dr. Mohler’s neglect of the hermeneutical “gap” between our era and that of the biblical authors. Others have made sage observations in this direction, questioning his apparent assumption that some biblical strictures can be applied in the modern world without any need for cultural or historical “translation”. In any case, this isn’t simply about the President of SBTS and his interpretive failings. The simplistic readings into which Dr. Mohler has occasionally fallen reflect a wider malaise within conservative evangelicalism. That malaise is characterised by a flat, mechanical approach to scriptural exegesis, a strictly prescriptive appropriation of biblical texts, and ignorance (often wilful) of the church’s grand interpretive tradition. In its crudest forms, this stance issues in a “concordance” method to the study of scriptural truth (something that Dr. Mohler has, in fact, criticised); as the term suggests, it simply requires the unconditioned reader to collect all biblical passages bearing on a particular subject in order to discover what the Bible, construed as a straightforwardly unified document, has to say about it. Deep methodological flaws notwithstanding, the approach remains endemic to the conservative evangelical world.
As Dr. Mohler’s unfortunate comments on slavery demonstrate, an attitude of naïve biblicism may also yield implausible – as well as morally dubious – conclusions. Not only does this fall afoul of Augustine’s caution against provoking ridicule from unbelievers; it also saddles believers with a series of positions that may collapse under the weight of their own absurdities. Yes, Christian leaders are called to be faithful to the Word of God. However, zeal wedded to impoverished models of biblical truth is injurious to the credibility of the church’s witness. In an aggressively post-Christian society, such harm may prove fatal.
This is the second piece in a two-part series, critically examining Giles Fraser’s recent essay on religious conservatives, sex, and the family. For Part One, see here.
Introduction
For some time now, Giles Fraser has played the role of passionate sponsor for the full inclusion of LGBTI people within the Church of England. Whilst his unflagging advocacy provokes a certain admiration, it also leaves him prone to making rash, gratuitous statements – particularly when they concern his opponents. Previously, I examined Fraser’s attempts to celebrate the emergence and rise of “forged” family groupings by trivializing the concept of the modern nuclear family. Fraser’s claims were as fallacious as they were bold: issuing pronouncements regarding the supposed novelty and unimportance of this particular family type, despite there being almost no evidence to support such confident assertions (and a wealth of data to contradict them).
Being a man of the cloth, Fraser also tried to freight his argument with the imprimatur of Holy Writ, insisting on biblical ambivalence regarding the biological, two-parent family. He went so far as to claim that Jesus himself was vehemently opposed to the idea as (at best) a poor facsimile of the divinely-centred ideal, preferring a kind of “fictive kinship” grounded in shared allegiance to God. Having scrutinised the first half of his recent essay and found it wanting, I now turn to the essay’s second, “theological” stage. Unfortunately, it fares no better – suggesting that Fraser’s grasp of biblical interpretation is just as uncertain as his engagement with social science and history.
Fraser, the New Testament, and the nuclear family
We may begin by scrutinising Fraser’s major theological claim – namely, that Jesus and the New Testament authors were hostile to the idea of the nuclear family. To be sure, there are certain things he gets right. He observes that “membership of this new family [i.e., the family Jesus inaugurated] is not premised on biological kinship but on baptism” – that is, upon confessional faith in Christ as Lord. This is true, so far as it goes: Jesus repeatedly relativised the notion of the “natural” family through his teachings and actions (e.g., Luke 9:59-60). With his epoch-shifting ministry, he created a new kinship group around his own person. Membership within that family was not a token of genealogy or biological inheritance, but was secured through obedience to the Father. The chief expression of this obedience was, of course, devotion to Christ himself.
Matthew 12:46-50, which Fraser cites, captures this sentiment admirably. Jesus’ response to his own family’s entreaties points allusively to the fact that he intended to construct a familial community whose members shared a common commitment to performing the will of God. Other passages in the Gospels, such as Luke 8:59-60, also reveal a man convinced that wholehearted devotion to both him and his mission – exceeding the demands even of one’s biological family – was an individual’s principal obligation. So stringent was this requirement that Jesus employed a familiar form of Hebraic hyperbole to describe the “hatred” one should feel towards one’s family if authentic discipleship within the company of God was to become a reality (Luke 14:26).
At first glance, it would seem that Fraser’s argument is sound. But to relativise something is not to denigrate it, and relegating one’s biological family to a position of secondary importance hardly provides warrant for the dubious conclusions he reaches. Nor does the New Testament always present its readers with a simple binary choice between natural and spiritual families, as if the two were inherently antithetical.
Despite subordinating the natural family within the hierarchy of kingdom priorities, Jesus and his followers nevertheless held in high esteem several key ingredients composing modern “nuclear” kinship types. Take the notion of enduring heterosexual marriage, seen as the bedrock and mainspring of stable, biological families. Far from trivializing the marital bond between a man and a woman, the gospels regard a person’s ongoing fidelity to the “one-flesh” union with their spouse as an important manifestation of Christian discipleship. So clear is this teaching that Richard Hays confidently concluded: “permanent, monogamous marriage is [according to the NT] the norm; Christians are called upon to see their marriages as expressions of discipleship and to renounce divorce…”
A high view of marriage can be gleaned from Jesus’ own comments on the topic. Although the synoptics report Christ’s words with slight variations, they are united in recounting his near-absolute foreclosure on divorce, as well as his grounds for doing so (e.g., Mark 10:1-12). Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have Jesus root his view of lifelong, covenantal marriage in the creation mandate: man and woman were created for each other (Gen 2:23-24), “yoked together in a union so permanent and inviolable that only God has the right to dissolve it” (so Gerald Hawthorne). The depth of this bond was such that husband and wife were seen, not as two discrete parties to a contractual agreement, but as a new, composite entity (Mark 10:8).
Jesus endorsed and re-affirmed this ideal in his confrontation with his opponents; indeed, rooting marriage in God’s founding vision for creation only served to underscore its sacral importance. His appeal to Genesis 1-2 and its evocative “one-flesh” image reveals a belief in the permanency, complementarity, and monogamous character of marriage. It also needs to be stressed that by pointing to those texts, Jesus implicitly affirmed one of the central purposes of marriage, namely, the generation of children. God’s creation of man and woman for each other is viewed as a crucial manifestation of their status as his image-bearers. And as those fashioned in his likeness, they, too, possess the capacity for creation – seen chiefly in their ability to generate new life. Pace Fraser, this is all a far cry from being an “enemy” of the nuclear or natural family. Moreover, one of the more common precursors to the new family types he tends to laud – i.e., the dissolution of an existing marriage – is prohibited as a violation, not simply of the marital bond, but of one’s pledge to follow Christ.
What the evangelists chose to include of Jesus’ teachings in their own works is, of course, indicative of their own theological and ethical concerns. For all the ambivalence they evince regarding natural families within the new covenant community, they seem to adhere to positions that many modern advocates of the nuclear family would warmly endorse. Whilst Mark’s critical depiction of Jesus’ family (3:31-34) is consistent with his sketch of discipleship as a journey requiring sacrifice of even the most intimate associations, he is far from anti-family. As New Testament scholar Stephen Barton has shown, Mark, like the other evangelists, upholds the creational ideal concerning marriage, whilst also affirming the Old Testament commandment that children honour their parents (7:9-13) – indication that the ongoing integrity of the biological family was of signal importance to both Jesus himself and the Second Evangelist.
Context matters. The note of scepticism that runs through parts of the New Testament is often directed at what the family had become symbolically within the belief structure of a major strand of Judaism at the time. N.T. Wright observes that the nation (and within that, the family unit) “stood alongside other symbols, sustaining the entire Jewish worldview”. Within the fractious, besieged environment of first-century Judaism, family, food laws, and Sabbath-keeping acquired near-talismanic significance; at least for some sects, the overriding aim was to police the boundaries of the community as stringently as possible, in order to guard against the dilution of its ethno-religious identity. The early Christians didn’t object to the biological family per se, as something inherently “bad” to be discarded, but to the idolatrous importance with which some had imbued it. Whilst Jesus never saw the natural family as ultimate, we have reason to think he viewed it as good and necessary.
What about the Old Testament?
It goes without saying that much of what the New Testament teaches in regards to marriage and the family is, like so much else, deeply rooted in the soil of the Old Testament. That much is obvious from the brief survey of Jesus’ attitude towards divorce and his appeal to Genesis 1-2. But rather than engage with the formative influence of such texts, Fraser seems to prefer the rather facile claim that the Old Testament offers a muddied view of matrimony and the family. Thus, his confidence that the Hebrew Bible is quite “relaxed” about many of its heroes having multiple wives. Whether a series of discrete vignettes about different individuals amounts to a unified attitude is questionable. A much surer case can be made that multiple marriages are, broadly speaking, viewed as a perilous departure from what the Creator instituted at the beginning (Gen 2:24) – one that arises from, and indeed precipitates, moral decline.
It is no coincidence that Lamech, whose sinful arrogance outweighed that of his murderous ancestor, Cain, is also the first recorded person in the Old Testament to marry more than one woman (Gen 4:19-23); as Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton suggests, the association of these two elements – moral cruelty and polygamy – is rather telling. And what of Solomon, to whom Fraser himself refers? One can only conclude that 1 Kings 11:1-13 has been excised from his Bible, for it is there that the biblical narrator forges a fairly clear connection between the king’s voracious appetite for wedded bliss and his eventual apostasy. True, part of the problem lay in the fact that Solomon married women from the surrounding nations (as opposed to Israelite women), but the association with such a prodigious “collection” of wives and spiritual corruption is surely implicit in the text: if one’s priorities are carved up with the addition of a single spouse (cf. 1 Cor 7:32-35), imagine how diluted devotion to one’s Sovereign might be with 700 of them. The upshot of all this is that the Hebrew Bible is, to say the least, far more cautious about polygamy than Fraser assumes. Grudging concession to the mores of the day? Probably. “Perfectly relaxed”? Probably not.
It’s true that the concept of family has changed significantly since the documents of the Old Testament were produced. Levirate marriage, patriarchalism, concubinage, and clan structures: practices such as these, which were simply part of the warp and woof of Israelite culture, have vanished; they are boundary markers between different historical eras, and thus different understandings of family formation. Even so, certain crucial features persist, which genetically links past and present iterations of the family. OT scholar Joel Drinkard has written of the foundational role Genesis 1:27-28 and 2:24 can play in developing an Old Testament conception of family. According to Drinkard, some of the attributes composing contemporary nuclear families – including biological-sexual differentiation, or the establishment of distinct family units (“leaves his father and mother…”) – find strong analogues in those texts. He wisely concludes that despite the many stages of evolution the family has undergone since the era of ancient Israel, “much remains remarkably unchanged over that same span”.
Leaping over logical gaps: an unreliable evangelist for “modern” families
Fraser doesn’t merely use scriptural teachings to argue against the nuclear family; he also seeks to press them into service to argue for modern or bespoke family types, including same-sex kinship arrangements. This is another significant leap in logic. There is no essential connection between a covenant “family” grounded in common faith and one framed by same-sex eroticism; their claimed equality as biblically-viable kinship structures is little more than an instance of free association. We may agree with Fraser that acts of solidarity and mutual care within the gay community during the early-AIDS crisis were expressions of noble human impulses. Who would want to say otherwise? But it’s difficult to take seriously his subsequent conclusion that those relationships and kinship structures are more firmly rooted in Scripture than the natural family – especially when one considers what many of its key passages actually say about family formation, marriage, and sexual relationships.
If anything, the biblical evidence points in the other direction. The Jesus who de-centred the biological family in favour of an eschatological community unmoored from genealogy is also the Jesus whose radicalisation of marriage and divorce would make even many modern conservatives blush. That he did so on the basis of Genesis 1 and 2 would seem to automatically rule out the very relationships Fraser celebrates. The Paul who counselled virgins to remain unmarried, thereby cutting across accepted cultural norms (1 Cor 7:8), is also the Paul who condemned homosexual relationships, not merely as an offence against traditional sensibilities, but as an affront to the cosmic order God has instituted (Rom 1:24-27).
These are only the most explicit corollaries to what is implicit elsewhere in the Bible. Yes, Fraser attempts to link Scripture’s proscriptions against homosexuality with a lack of patriotism, but this remains unconvincing. Even if one accepts this as a rationale for the Old Testament’s sanctions (for to engage in sexual acts that deny the possibility of children is to frustrate the survival of the nation), it makes no sense of Pauline prohibitions against same-sex erotic activity – precisely because the Apostle wasn’t writing to ethnic communities that relied for their persistence on procreation. Fraser, it seems, has simply tried to smuggle in his favoured versions of family formation with the entirely unobjectionable claim that the New Testament recognizes certain forms of extended or fictive kinship structure.
Some concluding thoughts
In no way does my critique invalidate the general notion of “forged” family groups. Many of them remain legitimate – indeed, honourable – manifestations of gospel-leavened kinship arrangements. One of the New Testament’s controlling narratives has God graciously adopting those whom he has called, thus grafting them into the covenant community (Rom 8:15-17, 23; 11:17). Or what about John 19:26-27, and the crucified Messiah’s pronouncement of a new kinship arrangement between Mary and the one whom he loved? A more poignant example of “blended” family formation would, I submit, be difficult to find.
Galvanized by the moral power of this vision, many traditionalist believers have resisted the urgings of modern culture to atomise or isolate family units. At their best, some have even sought to imitate God’s boundless generosity via their own acts of adoption. Meanwhile, the malign suggestion that religious conservatives are predisposed to idolize the nuclear family fares quite badly: traditionalist Christians who daily imbibe the wisdom of Scripture are more likely to warn against the family’s potential to usurp God’s position as the ultimate object of one’s allegiance. This hardly resembles the kind of fetishizing insularity Fraser attributes to those whom he opposes, and reveals a greater depth of insight than charges of “blindness” would suggest.
A final word. One of the themes of Fraser’s essay seemingly implies that the views he criticises have more to do with (right-wing) political calculus than with genuine attempts to grasp reality. Although there is some truth to this, his effort to deconstruct religiously conservative claims en masse as ideologically-driven power plays yields meagre results. The biblical data indicates that however much political machinations may have adulterated these claims, they’re not ultimately grounded in conservative revanchism. Nor are they driven in the main by wistful nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, they are rooted in something far deeper – namely, an (imperfect) effort to “live rightly in the world” according to principles embedded in the created order and revealed in Holy Writ. Fraser’s dismissals notwithstanding, religiously conservative views concerning sex, marriage, and the family embody patterns of thinking whose origins lie at the very core of that sacred testimony.
Introduction
Like many people over the past few months, I have been unnerved by the Coronavirus outbreak. Never in my lifetime have I experienced a phenomenon whose reach has been truly global, even as its effects are felt in the most intimate corners of daily existence. A lingering atmosphere of confusion brims with tales of the virus, abetted by rumour and exaggeration. Signs of its presence have been everywhere: in nations trying to wall themselves off to halt the spread of infection; in the pangs of hesitation one feels over the simplest of social interactions; or in the eerily empty streets of once bustling city centres. An unceasing stream of media reports reveals the apparent power of the contagion to warp social reality – threatening to unravel those dense webs of habit and custom within which a safe, predictable life is made possible. That COVID-19 is a silent, spectral force only seems to add to the prevailing mood of unease.
Shattering human illusions
One thing that has struck me about this crisis is the way it has dramatically laid bare many of the illusions that beguile human beings, especially those of us who have been conditioned and shaped by the modern world. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our distorted relationship with nature.
Enslaving nature
Human beings have long sought to dominate the natural world, convinced that it would placidly submit to the hand of man. It’s a conceit to which people in the West are particularly vulnerable, something that has been true since at least the time of the Enlightenment and its immediate precursors. Whether one traces this turn to the early scientific work of Francis Bacon – who sought to expand the bounds of humanity’s imperial enslavement of nature – the Cartesian separation of the mental from the physical, or even the emerging mechanistic picture of creation (for machines can usually be manipulated at will), the Enlightenment has led inexorably to the conviction that human mastery over the natural realm is both possible and desirable.
The development of science was a key part of this attempt to exercise sovereignty. It was believed that through scientific discovery and technological progress, human beings would succeed in wresting nature’s secrets from her, enabling them to predict, channel, and control her course. Beneath this enterprise lay a thoroughly instrumental conception of nature, which held that the natural environment was valuable only insofar as it could be exploited by humanity in its relentless pursuit of advancement; as theologian Michael Northcott has eloquently observed, nature was seen merely as “malleable matter available for reconstitution in the service of human wants”. Any notion that it was a force of independent or intrinsic worth, to which human beings would sometimes have to defer, gradually receded.
Belief in the inevitability of technological progress and its unrivalled ability to tame nature has, of course, seeped into Western consciousness during the succeeding centuries. The expectation that human beings will ultimately succeed in pacifying ever-larger tracts of the natural environment is now an article of secular faith. Similarly, the idea that sufficient application of technical acumen to a particular problem will solve it is now a cherished part of the modern canon.
It is certainly true that scientific advancements have had remarkable success in allowing people to enjoy respite from nature’s onslaught. Nor can it be denied that harnessing natural forces has brought immeasurable gains to vast numbers of people. A mixture of stunned amazement and humble gratitude is often the most appropriate – indeed, the only – response. Of course, one may ask whether this alone justifies the Panglossian predictions made for human capacity. Just as relevant is the fact that as such progress emerged and took root, it inevitably changed the relationship between human beings and their environments. Humans consequently began to view themselves, not as integrated members of the natural order, but as something above and apart from it.
Trying to break out of nature’s orbit
To talk of human transcendence over nature is to highlight a second key presumption inherent in modernity. Its connection with human attempts to domesticate the natural order is one of mutual reinforcement: allegedly sitting above the system of nature in an ontologically exterior realm, humanity came to see itself as free to shape that system at will; meanwhile, the undeniable success of such efforts simply legitimised the expansion of human empire, reinforcing the exalted position they had arrogated for themselves. It is not inaccurate to say that the accomplishments of science both bred and buttressed a metaphysical and ethical position concerning the relationship between human beings and their environment. Whatever the logical defects of that move, it, too, is part of the philosophical foundation of the modern West.
Descartes’ views on the connection between the mental and the physical may help explain these shifts. The Cartesian divorce between the intellectual and material dimensions of human beings had its external analogue in the separation between humanity – the only earthly beings possessed of rationality, the sine qua non of the mental – and nature-at-large. As science writer Alex Blum has observed, Descartes’ metaphysical commitments unwittingly structured modern science so as to conceive of human beings existing “outside” nature. The French philosopher himself talked of humans becoming “masters and possessors of nature”, a phrase which also reflects the highly instrumentalist character he attributed to it. Combined with the objectifying gaze of emerging scientific discourse, the transcendence of the human person over nature was now churning within the bowels of Western culture. With the establishment of this hierarchy, human beings – now metaphysically unshackled from the natural world – could act as its overlords, manipulating their environment “to suit [their] own ambitions”.
Coronavirus and the unseating of modern dogmas
The rapid emergence of COVID-19 over the past three months is a rebuke to such hubris. It is also a stern reminder that for all the confidence we place in human ingenuity, nature cannot finally be tamed. Whatever local forms of control human beings exert over their environments, they remain contingent or provisional – and, more to the point, far more vulnerable to collapse than we would care to admit. Many people in the global South are inured to nature’s caprice, of course; to the devastation it has wrought, whether through a decades-long drought or a deadly Ebola outbreak. It is citizens residing in the developed world – those who often enjoy the luxury of being able to avoid nature’s encroachments – who are now experiencing life in the shadow of something that continues to elude the most assiduous efforts to control it. That vulnerability, long concealed by a seemingly unending conveyor belt of technological marvels, is now being unmasked.
All the economic might and technical sophistication of the modern West has, in many places, failed to stave off the spread of the virus. In fact, it’s precisely those symbols of Western-inspired progress – international travel and trade, ageing societies, industrialisation, and high-density urban environments – that have amplified the threat, contributing to the spread and lethality of COVID-19. Far from conquering the natural world, people are now quite literally retreating in the face of nature’s advance: leaving their cities bereft and empty, and ensconcing themselves in their homes to evade the contagion’s grasp. And even where it has been successfully suppressed, victory has only been secured at the cost of economic ruin.
Yes, human beings have successfully shaped aspects of the natural world. Such will no doubt continue after the present crisis subsides. But the virus has jolted us into recognizing an obvious truth: that nature’s teeming complexity persistently outstrips our ability to fully comprehend – and therefore fully control – its many secrets.
The world of economic networks provides a useful analogy. Philosopher Edward Feser recently wrote about the late F.A. Hayek, arguing that the Anglo-Austrian economist believed that the “deep reason” socialism could not work in practice is that human planners simply cannot hold within their mental grip the “vast aggregate” of human needs and wants composing an economic system. Imagine, then, attempting to firmly grasp (much less dominate) the entire scheme of nature, including its near-limitless ensemble of organisms and ecological cycles. The natural world is a great, roiling cauldron, its various ingredients clashing – sometimes violently – in ways so diverse that they defy human calculation. Moreover, as anthropologist Nicholas Kawa has written (in relation to modern Amazonian farmers), our environments, far from being docile or compliant, frequently exhibit a “robust, defiant vitality” in the face of human efforts to conquer them. COVID-19 is only the latest manifestation of that defiance. What can this mean but that total sovereignty over the natural world will forever remain a vaporous dream – a “chasing after the wind” (to borrow from Ecclesiastes)?
This basic lack of control applies even to that part of nature we know best: our own bodies. Whilst there have been far deadlier pandemics in human history, the Coronavirus is probably the largest mass health event of the late-modern age – an era of rapidly ageing populations, advanced medicine, and the miracle-like defiance of death’s ravages. Although the world’s immiserated past and present have known that life is a delicate gift, modern folk are “culturally insulated…from the notion of death…”. The relentless, exhausting ubiquity of the present outbreak, uprooting and frustrating every dimension of the ordinary, or tearing at communities in highly developed nations, has forced us into a reckoning with our own mortality – the necessary sequel to our finitude and creatureliness. Human illusions have once again been exposed by the pathogen, particularly where they have taken root in cultures that simply expect inexorable progress. Rather than bending nature to the force of our collective will, we are invariably its subjects.
In similar fashion, the contagion shatters the belief that humanity occupies a position of transcendence over nature. That much should be apparent from what I have said about the virus and the human body, with our native fragility exposed in the most intimate fashion. COVID-19 forces us to recognize the sobering fact that human beings, for all their unique capabilities, remain denizens of the natural order. We are not so thoroughly different that we can claim some kind of ontological autonomy; the boundaries between humanity and the rest of the created world remain permeable. Whatever else it is, humanity is ineradicably physical, having been formed by the same material compounds that compose the environments we inhabit and the resources we consume. Not only do we depend on propitious circumstances within nature for our survival; we are also shaped by the natural world to a remarkable degree, even at the level of deep genetic change (as the field of epigenetics is rapidly discovering). Our corporeality means that we are conditioned by the natural world – whether for good or for ill – for we cannot exist as fully enfleshed human beings apart from that framework. As theologian Christopher Benson has rightly pointed out, our embodied state means that we cannot be completely “sealed off”, as it were, from the external world. We cannot avoid the truth that we are integrated members of precisely the same ecological system that produced COVID-19. All of us are bound to a system that not only sustains us, but also leaves us vulnerable to its predations.
Seeking guidance from a more ancient source
The pathogen has surely succeeded in undermining modern pretensions. But might it not also clear ground for new attitudes to take root – attitudes that are more consistent with reality as one finds it?
The Christian Scriptures and the wisdom they have inspired lay out the rudiments of an alternative approach to the natural world. For one thing, the Bible provides clear witness to nature’s untameable power. Whether one envisions the present natural world as an Augustinian corruption from a paradisal state, or as an unfinished project still wrestling with discordant elements, the fact remains that it is replete with titanic forces that frequently issue in destruction. Even a brief glance, say, at the psalms reveals word after poetic word concerning creation’s ferocity. The sea, for example, was often used as a particularly arresting image for the looming chaos that threatened God’s people (e.g., Pss 29:3-10; 69:14-15; 77:16; 104:6-9). Such was its raw, inscrutable, untamed power that it functioned as the perfect embodiment for cosmic evil. Only Yahweh himself, Israel’s covenant God, was able to tame those unruly forces, shutting up the sea and subduing the mythical beasts of Leviathan and Behemoth (Ps 104:7-9; Job 41). These elements resonated as well as they did because people intuitively understood that the natural world is a fearsome, independent power, often exceeding – and even overwhelming – humanity’s capacity to control it.
The book of Job, with its extended meditation on suffering, offers particular insights in this regard. By the end of his confrontation with God, Job himself arrives at a fresh understanding of the limits of his own vision. He recognizes anew his small and restricted place within the grand production of nature: a world that exhibits both comforting regularities and the rude shock of unexpected destruction (Job 42:3b). His sober conclusion comes after the divine speeches, in which the Creator humbles the protagonist with a battery of rhetorical questions about the nature of creation (Job 38-40). Such questions serve to underscore the relative powerlessness of human beings in the face of creation’s apparently unbounded character. The unavoidable implication is, of course, that only the sovereign Creator is capable of bringing to heel the natural world.
The appearance of COVID-19 should provoke us towards a similar change: a re-orientation of our relationship to the natural world, which reflects the sobriety of scriptural tradition. To be sure, the ancients were at the mercy of natural forces in a way that isn’t quite true for many of us today. But with the virus having undercut the modern aspiration of control over nature and her ways, the time is ripe for re-acquaintance with the biblical picture of a dynamic, sometimes unbridled creation – at once fit for human habitation and a place of lurking, unseen risk. Reflecting on the Joban experience, physicist (and practising Christian) Tim Reddish has observed that Scripture often conceives of the boundary between chaos and order in the natural world as an “unpredictable”, porous one: chaos has of course been assigned its place by a sovereign God, who corrals and even uses it. But chaos has not been eradicated.
Seen through the lens of a biblical theology of creation, the Coronavirus provides an object lesson in humility before the sometimes-dangerous freedom of nature, especially for modern people accustomed to its apparent domestication. Re-appropriating a biblical view of the natural world as something that continues to exhibit such independence may also lay the psychological and spiritual groundwork for a new preparedness, a new resilience, in the face ecological calamity. Those who can humbly acknowledge the enduring reality of an untamed creation – consistent with the truth of our own finitude and limitations – will be better equipped to withstand the maelstrom, even when it threatens to thoroughly strip everything away. This isn’t to counsel fatalism or passivity in the midst of disaster; human beings ought to do what they can to mitigate nature’s destructive power, and alleviate suffering wherever they find it. But if clinging to the narrative of complete human sovereignty over nature can lead to existential crisis when it revolts, perhaps the opposite attitude will – paradoxically – anchor us during such travails. In fact, the equanimity won through adoption of a biblical perspective undergirds precisely the kind of existential and moral strength needed if a person is to extend herself in love to others during times of disaster.
Scripture also challenges the idea that humanity somehow sits outside the natural order, bestriding it as an overlord. Of course, this claim is bound to raise some eyebrows: ever since Lynn White, Jr. argued in 1967 that the Judeo-Christian view of the natural world was at the root of the present ecological crisis, many people have assumed as much without question. It’s true that the Bible’s foundational creation stories posit both humanity’s uniqueness and its role over the rest of creation, acting as God’s steward and vice-regent to “subdue the earth” (Gen 1:28; cf. Psalm 8). At least two points, however, must be borne in mind. First, the early chapters of Genesis envision, not the despoliation of nature as a result of human arrogance, but the natural world being harnessed and shaped so that it might flourish all the more. Second, we must also contend with the fact that to tend the earth is, according to Scripture, part of what it means to be made in God’s image (cf. Gen 2:15). Loving husbandry of the natural world is a reflection of God’s own creative character. Christians, moreover, remain convinced that this key vocation is refracted through the person of Jesus, who provides for us the supreme expression of the imago dei. His own life offers the true model for the relationship between human beings and the natural world, for it reveals the posture of humble service – not ruthless exploitation – lying at the heart of authentic humanity (e.g., John 13:1-17).
In any case, whilst Scripture envisions human beings as acting on God’s behalf to bring order to that which he has fashioned, it is under no illusions concerning the place his image-bearers occupy within the natural order. Man may have the breath of life flowing through him, but he is also of the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7). We straddle the ontological “border” between the material and immaterial, but that does not change the fact that we are composed of the same physical “stuff” as the rest of creation. Indeed, humans share a certain kinship with the natural world, given our common “earthiness”. Scripture resolutely recognizes this: it acknowledges that humans remain denizens of creation, participating fully in an ecological order that sustains them (cf. Ps 103:14). As the legendary OT scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, Genesis 2:7 conceives of “the human person [as] fundamentally and elementally material in origin and composition, genuinely an ‘earth-creature’, subject to all the realities and limitations of materiality”. Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once reflected on the same text, “the essential point of human existence is its bond with mother earth, its being as body” (emphasis mine).
The book of Genesis sees humanity as a member of nature’s ensemble of creatures, sharing in the same qualities as non-human animals – and, of course, the same vulnerabilities to disease and death. In fact, it depicts the relationship between human beings and the rest of creation in almost covenantal terms, with a tight causal nexus existing between God’s image-bearers and the natural world. Humanity cannot escape the vagaries of that world, at least not entirely, and certainly not on this side of redemption. Theologian Terence Fretheim suggests that the cosmos is “communal” in nature; “its basic relatedness” means that “every creature will be touched by the movement of every other”. And in this present, discordant reality, those interactions include the lethal effects of a global pandemic, as a microscopic pathogen spreads decay and disorder simply by acting according to its nature. COVID-19, for all the misery it has wrought, has also exposed something important about our relationship with nature. Christian tradition brings that relationship into sharper focus – encouraging renewed respect for the natural boundaries that have been placed around us, as well as our own obligations as participating members of the natural world’s web of life.
Concluding thoughts
Several writers and commentators have termed the Coronavirus “apocalyptic”. In deploying this term, they do not mean to suggest that the end of world is at hand, or that we are soon destined for a cosmic conflagration. Rather, it has been used in its original sense, to refer to an “unveiling” or “revelation”. And so the contagion has proved, exposing many uncomfortable realities that lay just beneath the surface, and overturning previously settled narratives. The ones I have surveyed here are perhaps some of the most deeply-rooted in the modern psyche, having the benefit of centuries to consolidate themselves within Western culture. Nevertheless, a catastrophe like COVID-19, with its capacity to leave people reeling existentially, is enough to call them into question. But the dislocation many have experienced may ultimately bring some good in its wake – auguring a transformed, more wholesome, relationship between humanity and the rest of the nature, and encouraging a far more proportionate understanding of the place human beings occupy within the “robust…vitality” of the ecological system.
Moreover, the Christian tradition offers the resources needed to sustain a more humble, self-effacing engagement with the rest of the natural world, which even now acts as a check on the (illusory) idea of borderless human power. Indeed, that tradition happily acknowledges the persistent fact of humanity’s limitations – its conditioned existence, in other words – living in a pre-established order that does not always bend easily to our whims.
Christians, of course, are compelled to go further. The advent of COVID-19 may also stimulate a re-appropriation of the great fact underlying our true place within the natural world: the reality of divine sovereignty over creation. This has the effect of underscoring our own dependency as beings constituted by finite matter, who only exist as a consequence of God’s gracious sustenance. Far from being the unconditioned masters of nature, we rely, not simply on the panoply of the created order, but upon the One who sustains it. As the Apostle declared, “in him [i.e., God] we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). From a Christian perspective, the pathogen’s advent is a challenge to re-affirm, not the unrestrained attempts of human beings to exploit a passively-waiting environment, but the boundless God’s ruling hand over something that pulsates with his life and power. By deflating the modern ego, COVID-19 has, perhaps, created space for a return to a theologically-centred view of the natural world, in which human beings abide by the natural limits set for them.
Such a journey is both humbling and comforting. It is humbling for two, complementary reasons: first, it requires humans to accept their places within (and not above) a finely-balanced ecological network; but, second, it summons people to de-centre themselves, to abandon the anthropocentric proclivities of the modern age, and to focus on the Creator instead. But in that re-orientation lie the seeds of true comfort, for it encourages trust in Him whose providential control persists, even during the tumult of a global pandemic. Whether one turns to Genesis 1 to read of the Creator assigning places to the sun and the moon (which were worshiped as deities by many ancients), or Psalm 104, which extols God’s dominion over the things he has made, Scripture is unswaying in its declaration of his kingship. Whereas the story of human sovereignty over nature now lies in tatters, Christianity offers an alternative account: of the wise, loving, and ultimately redemptive power exhibited by the One who alone can rightfully claim this world for himself.
The first installment of a two-part critique of Giles Fraser’s article on religious conservatives and sex
Giles Fraser is the type of liberal about whom the conservative commentator, Rod Dreher, has written from time to time: the Anglican priest and writer frequently chides traditionalists for their alleged fixation upon sex, all while providing ample evidence that his own mind has been thoroughly colonised by a modern version of erotic intimacy.
A recent article by Fraser, which appeared on the Unherd website, is a case-in-point. He upbraids “sex-obsessed conservatives” in a piece that once again sees him earnestly trying to push the barrow of homosexuality through the hallowed corridors of the Church of England. Fraser accuses said conservatives of several basic errors, borne (apparently) of their ideological fetishes: a superficial grasp of biblical teaching when it comes to familial ideals; a fixation on apparently recent and peculiar forms of family life; and a stultified historical imagination. The problem is that these charges, like boomerangs, come back to strike the very hand that cast them.
Let me summarise the thrust of Fraser’s argument in a little more detail, before going on to examine the first part of his article. Using David Brooks’ recent essay on the demise of the nuclear family as his launching pad, Fraser insists that (American) religious conservatives have been entirely wrong to “fetishize” that particular family structure. He uses the formative influence of the Moral Majority and Reaganite conservatism in the 1970s and ’80s to claim that traditionalists are in thrall to this supposedly pathological obsession, before mounting a full-scale broadside against the very notion that Scripture upholds the biological, two-parent family as something to which people should aspire. Jesus, we are confidently informed, was an implacable “enemy” of the nuclear family, his opposition stirred and reinforced by a more generous, expansive conception of intimate affiliation as rooted in a common faith in God. Fraser uses his analysis of contemporary culture war tropes and ancient biblical narrative to lay the groundwork for a new vision of “fictive kinship” – which of course includes the many hues and iterations comprising modern “rainbow” families.
Fraser’s historical blunders
The first stage of Fraser’s argument is riddled with deficiencies both multiple and substantial. Take some of his historical claims, many of which are of doubtful accuracy. In one of his opening gambits, Fraser cites the Moral Majority – founded by the fiery evangelical, Jerry Falwell, in 1979 – as evidence of the apparent preoccupation religious conservatives have with sex. It’s certainly true that the coalition devoted much of its energy to combat what it saw as aberrant forms of sexuality, as well as the permissive society that endorsed them. Fraser is also right to criticise the Moral Majority for its slipshod conflation of biblical injunctions and right-wing populism, which climaxed in the unstable marriage between the movement’s fundamentalist version of Christianity and an ascendant Reaganism.
But where Fraser goes wrong is in the significance he attributes to the Moral Majority as an exemplar of conservative hand-wringing over matters relating to sex. The movement, we should recall, was established some 40 years ago; after about a decade of aggressive political activism, its influence began to wane and its internal structures started to splinter. By 1989 – two years before the end of the Cold War – it had ceased to function as a significant religio-political phenomenon. Nothing like the Moral Majority pervades American political life now, and the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric it habitually used to describe the country’s declining moral standards simply doesn’t exist on the scale it once did.
The most generous thing one can say about Fraser’s attempt to summon the spectre of the Moral Majority (he points to no one else) is that it’s an ahistorical view of politicised religion in the United States. The movement has little substantive connection with the concerns of many religious traditionalists today; meanwhile, the coarse, offensive style it represents is commonly repudiated, even by those who occupy roughly the same territory on the religious and political map. Where orthodox members of the major faiths do find themselves talking about sex in the public square, it’s frequently a response to the relentless, protean force of progressive libertinism. If citing a long-defunct political movement is the best Fraser can do to substantiate his charge, then one may fairly ask whether tales of conservative “fixations” reflect instead the fecund imagination of a certain type of liberal advocate.
A similar problem afflicts Fraser’s claim that so-called “reactionaries” have long fetishized the nuclear family – a “very particular” notion of family formation, which in his mind is little more than a post-war “blip” on the historical map.
To be fair, Fraser’s claim is a common one: the notion that the nuclear family is a relatively recent “invention” is invoked so often that it has attained the status of unassailable fact. For all its superficial plausibility, however, the argument is largely innocent of historical truth. Even a brief glance at the late Brigitte Berger’s The Family in the Modern Age should swiftly disabuse a person of the idea that the nuclear family is some kind of sociological aberration. It’s worth quoting her at length:
“This band of scholars [i.e., the clutch of European historians whom Berger mentioned in the previous paragraph] can document with a fair degree of certainty that the nuclear family…was instrumental in the modernization process. In being able to trace the existence of the [nuclear] family as far back as the thirteenth century, they succeeded [in] ‘nullify[ing]’ the widespread assumption that [it] is a product of industrialisation. To the contrary, their studies unmistakably indicate that this type of family unleashed the very social forces conducive to the formation of modern economic and political institutions” (emphasis mine).
Commentary on studies like this one demonstrate that the nuclear family has actually been the predominant way of arranging intimate life since the European Middle Ages – flourishing long before the industrial revolution, the second world war, or any other dubious historical markers to which commentators appeal to marginalise it as a novel “departure from a much older tradition”. According to scholarly study, the nuclear family has not only endured for many centuries; it has also been instrumental for both the socialisation of individuals and the evolution of Western culture. Although Fraser criticises conservatives for their lack of “historical imagination”, his own inability to see beyond the easy assumptions of modern pop-sociology is readily apparent.
Trivializing the nuclear family
Historical ignorance masquerading as superior learning is juxtaposed with Fraser’s attempt to trivialise the whole concept of the nuclear family. A lurking subtext throughout his essay, its unreality is patently obvious: where Fraser seems to think of the nuclear family as a dispensable artefact of late-modern Western culture, the evidence garnered by social science consistently suggests otherwise.
Even if we allow that movements like the Moral Majority politicised family life – transforming the nuclear family into something of a Cold War-era talisman – it remains undeniable that this particular mode of kinship structure has been a boon to both individuals and societies. The experience of children, considered on a broad-scale trends analysis, makes this quite clear. Historical analysis of the sort I have alluded to is buttressed by contemporary sociological evidence concerning the overriding benefit of intact, biological, two-parent families for the social, emotional, and intellectual development of the young. In fact, a genetic link can be drawn between patterns of “concerned cultivation” prevailing within the nuclear family today and practices of nurture and attentiveness that evolved in its earlier iterations.
Kay Hymowitz, for example, has cogently argued that of all family forms, the nascent nuclear family was better placed for the raising of children during the economic and social upheavals of the late-medieval and early-modern periods. Unlike extended kinship groups, nuclear families were often headed by couples who had married later, which normally meant that they had less children. The offspring that were born to such couples therefore benefited from a larger share of attention their parents could lavish upon them. And whereas extended families sometimes functioned as fairly loose coalitions – leading, for instance, to the expectation that older children would take care of younger siblings – children in nuclear families were drawn into tightly integrated “households already steeped in an ethos of hard work, future-mindedness, and ingenuity”. These skills were necessary for a changing economic landscape, and the intimate context within which such modelling occurred allowed such children to flourish.
Recent studies of biological, bonded, two-parent families extend and develop these insights. Sociologists have found, for example, that children raised within a nuclear family structure excel on a number of key developmental indicators, outperforming those peers who have been raised in a variety of other family types. And it’s not just the children born within the relatively secure structure of the nuclear family who benefit, either; society-at-large is enriched, given that this particular family form often acts as the seed-bed for the cultivation of productive, well-rounded citizens.
Lest one thinks that conservative activists are the only ones touting the advantages of the nuclear family, some liberals also recognize its inestimable value. Back in 1999, for example, the late theologian and ethicist Don Browning – no traditionalist he – wrote powerfully of the ongoing importance of the nuclear family, even in the face of progressive attempts to ridicule or abandon it. Browning went on to document the dissolution of biological, two-parent family structures – and in particular, the increasingly common trend of paternal absence – as well as the individual and societal catastrophe that has followed in its wake.
Fraser would doubtlessly lament many of the ills that plague modern society. Even so, he ignores the massive body of evidence tracing several of these pathologies back to the nuclear family’s demise. By reducing its significance, Fraser implicitly denigrates an institution that has long survived as the primary incubator for stable, well-adjusted, and socially conscious individuals. Meanwhile, the modern fictive kinship arrangements Fraser extols are frequently (though not always) the result of the breakdown in more traditional family forms – the collapse of which leads inevitably to the very chaos, pain, instability, and neglect he would rightly decry. In his rush to applaud these so-called “forged” families, he seemingly remains unaware of those studies which suggest that for all their attractions, such groupings lag behind their nuclear counterpart when it comes to the key ingredients of (e.g.) child-nurturing; on the other hand, their rise is often associated with the wider unravelling of social bonds. Substituting glib dismissals for honest engagement simply shields the reader from these widely recognized realities.
Conclusion
Fraser is perfectly justified in critiquing nakedly politicised expressions of religion, whatever their source. But in so doing, he ought to remember that not everything cherished by his opponents should be criticised as an irrational fetish, or lampooned as an ideological heirloom. Swiftly accepting the premise that the nuclear family has been disastrous for many, Fraser has exposed his own anti-conservative animus. If ever he is able to shed this constraint, he would see that the institution has in fact been fundamental to the thriving of countless individuals across the centuries.
A Bagful of insights 