Interaltruism

Altruism carries with it the idea of living for others. This is seen as self-sacrificial and not for some sort of gain. When looking at the social dynamic between the three members of the Trinity, I believe we see some sort of Interaltruism. That is, the Father living for the Son and Spirit, the Son for the Father and Spirit, and the Spirit respectively living His life for the others as well. I believe this paints a beautiful picture that finds itself as part of their social unity. It leaves us a great example of how we are to interact with others altruistically.

Locatability

Where's Waldo?

So, I am going through some stuff in a Bible Study that I am leading, and I will share some of the thoughts here...
Locatability...

So when I look Theologically at God's Existence, I find that the discussions usually tend toward the question: How do we know that God exists?
When I look at the topic of Revelation/ Knowability, I find that the question is normally: How much of God can we know?
These things need to be addressed, and they are, but the question I want to challenge is: Where are we to locate God?

The very first thing that should jump to mind is God's Omnipresence, the fact that God is everywhere. If God is present everywhere, maybe He is locatable everywhere? With the right set of eyes, Yes. As we delve deep into God's Creation, we have the possibility to find the Triune God everyplace (Ro 1:18-25; Acts 14:17; Isa 6:3; Ps 19:1-3). This would be enough, if that is all there was, but it isn't. I want to go on...
The second thing that we can look into is the 'throne room' manifestations of the Trinity. When we look in Scriptures we find that along with being locatable everyplace, the Trinity is especially locatable in a second sense, Their 'throne room' presences. This is more concentrated than the first category. God is locatable in a concentrated fashion, I believe the Trinity appears in heaven in a concentrated form of glory. At times throughout Scriptures we even see Them appear before men. What this concentrated form looks like varies, but I believe it was always a miraculous thing. For instance God appeared to: Ezekiel, Isaiah, Abraham, Moses...
The third category of Locatability that I would like suggest is a distributed sense. I believe I see in Scripture and in experience a special sense of distributed locatability at times. I would associate this with any locatability that is less than the concentrated but more than the everyplace. In experience I would associate this with times when in deep prayer or worship, God makes his presence known in a special way. Unless, those experiences resembled the fire on top of Sinai, or the Angel of the Lord in the burning bush,or the whirlwind and Job; then it was likely that it was some sort of distributed sense. I think that awareness of the Trinity's permanent indwelling of believers inside of us can be fruitfully seen to correlate with this distributed sense of locatability.

So... Not so good at consistent blogging..

Heh, umm.... I can try to say I've been busy, which would be true, but I have to be honest that blogging on Philosophical stuff is actually just really difficult because I am not a Philosopher. It makes me all nervous and I am afraid of misrepresenting them and so I am going to scratch the whole trying to summarize Philosophical views on the Trinity. I have been currently making my way through the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. Believe me, it is not that I have given up on Philosophy, but rather that I have grown aware of my own unintelligence in trying to venture into such areas wherein my knowledge is so infantile. I was premature in trying to tackle it and immature for thinking that I could. I will possibly try to return to this whole thing at a future date. For now, I will jump back down to a level that I am more comfortable at, and start talking Theology again...

Brian Leftow's model for the Trinity-3

Traditionally viewed,

The Father is God,
The Son is God,
The Holy Spirit is God,
yet there are not three Gods, but one God.

In the Latin theories of the Trinity God is the instance of the Divine Nature.
so following this logically we should come to the conclusion,

The Father is the instance of the Divine Nature,
The Son is the instance of the Divine Nature,
The Holy Spirit is the instance of the Divine Nature,
yet there are not three instances of the Divine Nature, but one instance of the Divine Nature.

So it begs the question, How exactly are 3 persons 1 instance of the Divine Nature without slipping in to the idea that the Father = the Son? Leftow sets out to explain this...

How 3 is 1

Phased Sortals

No infant is a man. But Lincoln was infant and man: "that infant" and "that man" picked Lincoln out at different points in his life... Let me now introduce a technical term, "phased sortal." "Infant" and "man" are phased sortals: they pick out a substance under a description which essentially involves a particular phase of its life... In the Rockette case, "the leftmost Rockette" and "the rightmost Rockette" act as mutually exclusive phased sortals picking out Jane, if we're dealing only with Jane's own timeline. So too, on the account of the Trinity I've been suggesting, "Father" and "Son" are mutually exclusive phased sortals picking out God. (Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, A Latin Trinity, 195)

The persons of the Trinity are likened to Phased Sortals. That is they are basically just 'phases' or 'parts' of God's life. Leftow puts it this way, "Each Person is God in a different 'part' of His life". So...while God is Father, he is not Son. But doesn't this destroy Simultaneousness?

That's where Causal Relationships come in! These are the Processions of the Trinity. The Son being begotten or generated and the Spirit being spirated. In these Causal Relationships something similar to separate timelines is introduced. Now God lives His life in some sort of Private timeline and a Public timeline. In the Private timeline "God is not Father while* He is Son". Although in the Public timeline "it is of course true that while* God is the Son, God is the God who is also the Father." With something like these two timelines both simultaneousness and distinctiveness is preserved. Here is a look at the causal relationships which are basically analogous to the time-machine.

The causal relations involved are those of the Trinitarian processions: the Father "begetting" the Son, the Father and the Son "spirating" the Spirit. Nobody has ever claimed to explain how these work, so I'm at no disadvantage if I do not either. Every Trinitarian has claimed that whatever these relations amount to, they yield distinct Persons who are the same God. I say the same. The time-travel analogy makes this point: causal relations between streams of events going on at once and apparently involving wholly distinct individuals can make them streams of events within a single life. That point applies univocally to the Trinitarian case. Those who hold that the Son eternally proceeds from the Father hold that there eternally is a causal relation between them such that the events of the Son's life and the events of the Father's are events within the life of one single God. They leave the mechanism involved a mystery. The time-travel case shows that there is some intelligible story one can put where the mystery is in a structurally similar case. This does not remove the mystery, but it domesticates it a bit... The The Trinitarian relations of generation directly link entire streams: every maximal event in the Father's stream has or contains a begetting relation to an appropriate event or set of events in the Son's stream. (Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, 183-4)

In the end Phased Sortals, with Two-Timelines through Causal Relations becomes a very beautiful composition. This development presents one of the coherent analogies that can be used to understand the Traditional Orthodox Christian Creeds on the Trinity. It is very beautiful... at least to me!

Brian Leftow's model for the Trinity-2

Ok, so continuation of last time...

     Last time we left off and I proposed 2 questions that I would deal with in this post. I am going to simplify the 2 questions and recast them as statements demanding explaining.

How One is Three..
How Three is One..

These will be the the subject of this post. I will answer the first statement and relate it to Monotheism, and I will relate the second statement to Consubstantiality. This seems to be a good place to start. Monotheism is usually more concerned with how Oneness is maintained, while Consubstantiality seems like an appropriate word to borrow for the task of considering of how Threeness is preserved.

How One is Three in Leftow's model of the Trinity:
Life Stream Monotheism
This will be the term I use to describe what I consider to be the sort of way that Leftow defends the statement 'How One is Three'... But what exactly does it describe?

 Here are some quotes from, Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity.

“If God’s life is at least as free from ordinary temporal ordering as a pastward time-traveler’s would be, it is conceivable and so may be possible that in His life, one substance is three Persons in some form of social relation---as in Jane’s case one substance is (or is present in) many Rockettes. So we need not suppose that God travels in time to draw this moral: God’s life may be free from time’s bonds. If it is, its events may be strangely structured, and this may be relevant to the doctrine of the Trinity.”(p. 180)

“Suppose, then, that God’s life has the following peculiar structure: at any point in our lives, three discrete parts of God’s life are present. But this is not because one life’s successive parts appear at once. Rather, it is because God always lives His life in three discrete strands at once, no event of His life occurring in more than one strand and no strand succeeding another. In one strand God lives the Father’s life, in one the Son’s and in one the Spirit’s. The events of each strand add up to the life of a Person. The lives of the Persons add up to the life God lives as the three Persons.”(p. 180)

“God’s life always consists of three other things which count as entire ongoing lives. While the disruption between Jane’s personal timeline and the sequence of events in ordinary public time had a special cause, God’s life just naturally runs in three streams...God always lives in all three streams. God’s life always consists of three non-overlapping lives going on at once, none after the other, as the series of positive numbers consists of two non-overlapping series, the positive rationals and irrationals, “going on at once” within the series, neither after the other.”(p. 181)

This post is getting too long, so I'm going to save 'How Three is One' for next time.... 

Brian Leftow's model for the Trinity

found: here

       Brian Leftow has presented what he considers a Latin view of the Trinity. To be honest, I really like this model because I feel that it very well may tie in the most Scriptural aspects of the Trinity that I know of, at least out of all the models I have studied. I am still working on how to explain this, but I find in Scripture 3 general categories of things which point to divinity. They go as follows: Identity (related to eternal relations), Constitution (kind of like structural make-up), and some sort of Social Unity. To go into these three groups will have to be saved for a different day, but listing at least a quick reference point for identity and social unity will make me feel better for now (identity-Jn. 5:18; social unity-Jn. 17;). Constitution could be referenced with the same verses used in the presentations of attributes such as Eternality, Omnipresence and others such like. (I don't have the verses memorized off the top of my head...)

Anyway, moving on... 

Leftow gives an analogy that goes like this:

"All the Rockettes but one, Jane, called in sick that morning. So Jane came to work with a time-machine her nephew had put together for the school science fair. Jane ran on-stage to her position at the left of the chorus line, linked up, kicked her way through the number, then ran off. She changed her makeup, donned a wig, then stepped into her nephew's Wells-o-matic, to emerge in the past, just before the Rockettes went on. She ran on-stage from a point just to the right of her first entry, stepped into line second from the chorus line's left, smiled and whispered a quip to the woman on her right, kicked her way through the number, then ran off. She then changed her makeup again..."(Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, 175)

I believe this analogy can help present a consistent view of Three Persons in One God. But just how exactly does it do this?

I want to look at two things to see how it works: 

How does it secure Monotheism? 

And how Each Person exemplifies the Divine Nature.

...but I'll do that next time.

Why look at the current Philosophical work on the Trinity?

image found here

This seems to be a really good question to address. Similar topics keep popping up around me, and I have just begun to realize how much tension there can be between Philosophers and Theologians. This came about in particular through a discussion over at Trinities.

I have come up with, hopefully, three decent reasons to look at the current Philosophical work going on about the Trinity.

1. To find non-contradictory ways in which these things could be possible.

- I don't know that we will ever figure out the solution to the threeness-oneness problem. Not that I am saying that it is impossible, but that I am skeptical and have my doubts. Still nonetheless, I think it is VERY profitable to look into ways that show how this 3 in 1 problem could be solved.

2. To acquire better illustrations, analogies, or pictures if you will...

- While the Philosophers very well may be looking for solutions, we can benefit from their analogies. The analogies they present us with may draw beautiful pictures that help us imagine what 3 in 1 could look like. God uses pictures to present His truth throughout Scripture, and we do well to open up our imagination and to think productively on what our God is like. If so many of us are comfortable with the Preacher Sunday morning using illustrations to help us better understand truth, why are we so uncomfortable when a Philosopher tries to give us a better one. ESPECIALLY THE ONES THAT ARE FOLLOWING THE CREEDS... 
- The Trinity serves many practical uses. No one can remove the social application that exists in God's interaction with the world. Theologians, No one can make the Economic Trinity anti-social... At very bottom, as our minds open up to be enlarged with various complexities about our God, we will be impressed with a greater wonderment of how great is our God.

3. To gain Clearer, more ACCURATE, Consistent speech.

- The way we talk about God matters. Philosophy can help us learn the parameters of what we can and can't say while following the creeds.