There is no logical contradiction if you accept the premise that God can assume more than one identity
if He damn well pleases.
I’m not assuming it, I’m asking if it’s what is believed. You’re saying it’s not (I wouldn’t be so confident that “Christians” in general don’t believe it, but you may mean “well educated and doctrinally concerned and orthodox Christians” or something like that.)
So you’re saying the “is” of “The Father is God” isn’t the is of identity, right? So it can correctly be stated, when it is clear that I’m using ‘is’ in the sense of identity, that Jesus is not God, right? (And also “The Father is not God.”)
Not sure what you mean by this.
Unless the terms in the argument are being used equivocally, it is indisputable that they are in contradiction. It was late and I wasn’t being careful, so I failed to note that the fourth statement isn’t even necessary for a contradiction.
Jesus = God
The Father = God
Jesus =/= The Father
This is already a contradiction.
But it may also be an unfair characterization of the doctrine.
Are you familiar with the concept of avatars? Or look at Zeus, who appeared in many forms.
On the story I gave, if you add that as a premise, yes. (Aside; do you have in mind things like “the son died, the father didn’t”?) I was responding to the argument as strictly stated (because you seemed to be going for, “from merely this, logic alone is enough”). With that sort of premise I think one would need to weaken “identity”, or claim that where the trinity makes identity looking statements, “x is y”, “x and y are the same”, they are making a special sort of identity statement.
I think you see this sort of thing in the literature on Aristotle. My memory is that he says things like “Socrates is his essence” and “Socrates’ essence is man”, which means are men are identical, which is problematic. And then you find people trying to spell out how, given the right sort of identity, these claims can be interesting while not leading to a contradiction. So it seems to me like one could make the same maneuver here. This is assuming I am remembering things correctly, and I’m not going to give any more of an exposition of this maneuver, but I thought this was worth mentioning.
I was wondering if you were leaving the door open to other sorts of identity.
Possibly so that it goes together with “=/=”.
Assuming that identity relation is transitive. (One could try and solve identity problems of change over time by arguing for a non-transitive identity relation. I bet this has been done.)
I think the terms are considered unequivocal by all Trinitarian denominations.
The dilemma you pose can be evaded by stipulating that an omnipotent God,
capable of performing miracles, is permitted to be both Father and Son
(and Holy Spirit too).
IMO more difficult to resolve are such dilemmas as whether God can create
a stone too heavy for Him to move, or whether He can cause 1 + 1 to = 3
The mystery of the Holy Trinity, IMO, is not that the concept itself is so mysterious or incomprehensible. As noted above, St. Patrick managed to get the point across to illiterate pagans using a common shamrock. No, the mystery is in the whole point of the thing: Why should God be Three-in-One instead of simply One? I doubt anybody would have conceived of it, if they had not had to try to make some sense of a narrative wherein there is only one God, and Jesus is God, but is also the Son of God, and is also a man, and also prays to God in the second person as “Father”, and then you need a third Person to round the whole thing out, as it were. Christology is really extremely silly in any form it takes. Ask any Jew – the Messiah, when he comes, will not be God, but only a man, and “Son of God” is only a title meaning “Chosen of God” or “Favored of God.” That’s probably how the Apostles thought of Jesus, until they started converting the Greeks with their philosophical habits of mind.
Yes, which is why I said, “Your first three statements are true from a theological standpoint.” Theology is not logic, at least in the sense you are trying to apply it.
Exactly. The whole point of the Trinity is to construct an unassailable mystery – something that defies logic just enough to put it beyond criticism in the minds of the uneducated. I’m not sure there’s much to be gained from rigorous analysis of such things; priests will baldly assert “X and not X!” if they can make it sound holy enough to swindle their flock.
As a non-p[riest who did his best to unscrew the inscrutable for Frylock, I would welcome you commenting on what you consider to be a concept of personal value to you, so that I can mock it in the Pit. Thanks for your anticipated help.
Nah, I’ll retract my “swindle” comment. I apologize if that came of a bit harsh; I tend to be pretty cynical when it comes to religion. I’ll maintain the cynicism with respect to the origin of most organized religious doctrine but I shouldn’t tar all priests with the same brush. But if you still want to follow through, I value kittens very much. 
Suggest thread merger.
To my knowledge, the majority of Christian theologians have struggled mightily to formulate the doctrine in a way that escapes problems of logical contradiction. Your claim that theology isn’t concerned with logical consistency runs counter to everything I’ve read from serious theologians.
BTW after posting the OP I went poking around and discovered there’s actually a very thorough article on the subject in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy!.
Yeah, to be more precise I could have said that it’s indisputable that they’re in contradiction on the standard interpretation of the identity symbol. That’s arguably what a lot of the views are doing in the article I just linked to.
I think it’s totally legitimate to specify a different sense of identity in dealing with this problem. To do so does mean, though, that you have to be willing to affirm that Jesus is not God in the most natural sense of ‘is.’
That people are usually uncomfortable with saying this may not mean there’s anything wrong with the statement itself.
I like the idea that what God is is the multi-personal entity (usually known as the Trinity), while individual persons who exhibit the kind of life lived by that multi-personed entity, as individuals, are also called God–because (as Polycarp put it) when you see those individuals act, you’re seeing God act.
I called it a “multi-personed entity” because I brake for some kind of wild doctrine of Theosis wherein ultimately the idea is for everyone to enter into the same kind of union with God that the three persons of the trinity have with each other. In other words, the Trinity becomes even more manifold…
Thomas Aquinas remains to this day the official philosopher of the RC Church,
and I expect there is little if any dissent from his view by other trinitarians.
Here is the original:
This is true, although not quite in the same way. Basically, the three persons are entirely and completely unlike anything we will ever have experience with in this life. You can see the three most clearly in the function, however.
C.S Lewis put it perhaps better than I can. When on prays, all three spects of God are there with you. The Holy Spirit is actively working inside you, helping you to pray. Jesus, the Son, is beside you, holding you hand as it were. God the Father listens to you, receiving and reflecting on your prayer. There are three Persons involved, and yet only one God. Three minds, yet which share one life and one divine power. There is no conflict between them, because they are the same person. But there is a relationship among the aspects as well. The Son goes before the Father.
Hmm… as an analogy, one might consider thias statement. The Father is the vast ocean. It has vast and mysterious depths, and can be dangerous who those who don’t respect its power. The Son is like the rivers and lakes which flows to the seas; it brings fresh water to dry land and great cities and civilizations spring up around it. The Holy Spirit is like rain which falls far inland, even among people who have never seen the rivers or seas for themselves. The sea, the rivers, and the rain are all water, and water flows between all of them endlessly. Yet they also have their own relationship with humanity. I could take the analogy further but I trust you get the point.
To use a somewhat grotesque analogy, consider Siamese Twins. They are sometimes medically inseparable; their bodies are one on some level. Yet they also are multiple beings who may have different opinions and thoughts. This is, of course, only an analogy - God is not limited in function but instead expanded through this quasi-division.
This is at least halfway true. Christians do not believe that you become God. But it is true that those invited into His presence are believed to join in a much deeper union than anything we can accomplish. It’s usually described as “having the life of God within” or something.
The problem is that if you treat God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit as just three different aspects of a single deity then there isn’t really a Trinity. I, for example, have one aspect when I’m posting here and a different aspect when I’m with my family and a third aspect when I was at work - and these three aspects are even called by different names. But nobody would claim I was three different people.
Nor would anyone claim that I was present in all three aspects simultaneously. But that, form what I understand, is a belief in Christianity - God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit all exist distinctly at the same time.
For example, during the thirty or so years when Jesus was present on Earth as a human being, does that mean that God was not present anywhere else other than here on Earth in Jesus’ human body? But if God and Jesus are the same being and God and Jesus exist simultaneously, then how can you really say Jesus was present as a man on Earth if he was also, at the same time, God the omnipotent omniscient lord of creation?