Audio only:
Joe examines Dr. William Lane Craig’s view on the second person of the Trinity (the Logos) and how this creates a lot of problems that make many Christians look askance.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And William Lane Craig recently reiterated that he does not believe in the Nicene Creed. And there are actually several areas where he seems to disagree with Nicene theology, but there’s one people are focused on right now. And it’s the fact that he doesn’t believe in what is called the eternal begetting of the Son. It’s the belief that God the Father was always the Father. God the Son was always the son, even before the incarnation, even before the creation of the world, that within the Trinity itself, the Father is Father and the Son is son. Now, Craig stops short of explicitly denying this, but he does make clear that he doesn’t believe in it and that he doesn’t think it’s biblical.
CLIP:
I don’t think you’re going to find very good proof texts in the New Testament that Christ was eternally begotten in his divine nature. Rather, the origin of this doctrine stems from what is called Lagos Christology. This is the Christology or doctrine of Christ that was enunciated by the early Greek apologists, people like Athenagaras, Tatian, and Justin Martyr in the late second century after Christ. From the Gospel of John’s description of the Logos, who in the beginning was with God and was God, they imagined that initially there was just God the father, and that somehow the mind of the Father proceeded and came forth from him as a second person. And this was then the son of God who became incarnate in Christ. So the idea was that the second person the Trinity proceeds out of or emanates out of the first person of the Trinity, the Father.
And this Lagos Christology became extremely influential in the early church and it eventually gets ecclesiastical status as authoritative in the Nicene Creed and then the council of Chalcidon later on. I am skeptical of this doctrine. I don’t want to deny outright a doctrine that has such a strong ecclesiastical tradition, but I refrain from affirming it. I do not confess it. Now
Joe:
You might wonder why does this matter? Why are people accusing Craig of being a heretic over this? Well, first, because Jesus comes to reveal God to us. Even that word revelation means unveiling. Jesus says in the high priestly prayer to the Father, and this is eternal life, that they know the, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom now has sent. So we should care deeply about theology, knowing more about the only true God and about Christology, knowing more about Jesus Christ. And unfortunately there is this popular strand of evangelicalism that can become very functional. It acts as if the only thing that’s important to know is just Jesus as your personal Lord and savior. And the risk of that view is that it can treat as unimportant questions like whether you actually know who Jesus is in any deep and meaningful way. You know simply a function that he serves as savior and redeemer.
And so the questions about Christology and about what’s called theology proper, like the study of the Trinity, those can sound like academic exercises, but that’s only true if we miss the point of Christianity, that we are made to know and love God, to know and love Jesus Christ whom he has sent in this life and in the life to come. It would be like a husband deciding that the important thing to know about his wife is just that she’s his own personal help mate. He doesn’t need to bother to find out anything about what she really thinks or who she is or what she believes or what her life was like before they met. Now, to be clear, I’m not accusing Craig of any of this. He understands the importance of the argument, but many of the people who are siding with him sort of ask why we should even care about this.
Why do we have to figure out if Jesus was eternally begotten or not? And that’s the concern I want to address at the outset. But there’s another reason why we should care about the eternal begetting of the son. Now, Craig says he still believes in the Trinity, but he certainly rejects the Nicene version of the Trinity, the Nicene understanding of the Trinity, what ordinary Christians mean when we say we believe in the Trinity. And that leaves us with a problem. What does it mean to say that you believe in the Trinity when, as we’re going to see, you reject much of what underpins Trinitarian Christianity? Now you might think of the question like this, both Craig and his critics agree that there are three divine persons in one God. The question then becomes how and what does that even mean? In what way are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit distinct from one another?
All of us as human beings are related to one another. We have a common human nature, we have common parents and Adam and Eve, but we’re nevertheless distinct because we each have our own bodies. This is what philosophers mean when they say that matter is the principle of individuation. It’s because we’re different material beings that we can talk about different humans. We’ve got physical bodies. We know what it means to say, for example, that three separate persons might be on the same mission together. But that’s not what we mean when we say that the three persons of the Trinity are consubstantial because God doesn’t have a body, neither do the angels. So what does it mean to say that there are different angels? Obviously they’re not individuated, they’re not separated by bodies. The classical answer is that each angel is its own unique nature. What makes them distinct, what makes one angel different from another is that they’re each a unique act of divine creation.
That’s because angels don’t give birth to other angels, so God created each of them differently from one another. Each of them is unique. Each of them is, if you will, its own species. Now, God might make two angels that are really similar to one another, but even here, they’re not the same nature. They’re not the same thing. They’re not even related to one another. Now, you’ll notice this answer as well doesn’t explain the Trinity because we definitely don’t want to say that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three different species. That would be pure polytheism. So if it’s not either of those, what’s left? Well, as St. Gregory of Nissa explained back in the 300s, what is left is precisely and only the relations between Father, Son, and spirit, that we can talk about there being a first person, a second person, and a third person of the Trinity because the Father is unbegotten, whereas Jesus is the only begotten word flowing from the Father.
And that this is true and in fact must be true from all eternity to be able to speak coherently about three persons in one divine nature for all time. And by the way, this is why the filioque matters. On the one hand, the reason that the spirit is distinct from the son, we could say it’s because the son is begotten and the spirit is breathed or spirated from the father. And that in some sense, the mode of procession is different. That’s a little unclear what we even mean by that. But the more obvious reason that the spirit is the third person of the Trinity is that the first person of the Trinity, the father, bereaved the spirit through the word, the second person of the Trinity. So if you don’t have that in your theology, it’s not entirely clear what the relationship is, for example, between the son and the spirit.
And it’s not entirely clear why one of them is the second person of the Trinity and the other is the third person. But let’s contrast the traditional view of the Trinity with Craig’s own view. How does his theology leave in place three distinct persons who remain nevertheless one God? Now he actually poses this question to himself. What is the difference between three divine persons and just three divine beings? His own solution is the problem is to imagine the Trinity like Cerebrus, the three-headed dog from Greek mythology. He imagines what he calls a single dog containing three centers of consciousness, which he names Rover, Bowser and Spike. But he insists nevertheless, this is one dog. It participates in one canine nature. I think the obvious answer to this is that it’s not one dog. It is three dogs who share part of the same body. After all, we don’t say of conjoined twins that they’re one human being with two centers of consciousness.
We recognize that there are two human beings who are physically conjoined in such a way that they might share certain human organs. And since God doesn’t have a body, it’s also not entirely clear what exactly is fusing the three seemingly distinct divine beings as instead one being and one God. Now, Craig has an answer to this too. He says it’s God’s soul, that we can think of the Trinity as one soul with three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality and volition. But now you’ll notice for Craig’s model to work, you have to reject a lot of traditional Christianity. Not only the eternal beginning of the son, you also have to give up divine simplicity and you have to believe that there are three divine wills and three divine intellects rather than one. Now this creates all kinds of problems because it at least borders on, perhaps it simply is polytheism.
After all, what if the three different persons formed three different divine plans for creation or for redemption? Now, Craig acknowledges that in the classical Trinitarian view, the father is always necessarily the first person of the Trinity. The son is always the second person of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit is always the third person of the Trinity. So there’s no possible world in which the son sends the Father to become incarnate. And this, I would argue, is very much the biblical view. After all, John famously begins his gospel by saying that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, he was in the beginning with God. So you have an insight, a little hint about the relationship between God the Father and the Word, the second person of the Trinity. So there’s no world in which the Father becomes the word and the son becomes the Father, but Craig seems to at least reject this.
He believes that the son could have sent the Father. So if that’s the case, what happens if the three persons of the Trinity all decide to send somebody else? How do you resolve this kind of tension between three different all perfectly good divine plans within the Godhead? Would it just be a two thirds majority? You see the Trinitarian problems that this creates, I hope. This also, by the way, creates serious problems with Christology because in Craig’s view, Jesus only sort of becomes incarnate. That is, he takes a human body, that’s true, but he doesn’t take a human soul or a human intellect or a human will. Craig argues that instead of the kind of soul that you and I have, a truly human soul, Jesus of Nazareth has a fully human body, but his soul was the logos, the second person of the Trinity. Now, Craig insists that you can still call this a human soul in some sense because it is united to a human body.
I don’t think that actually solves the problem. After all, if a demon, a demonic person, a spiritual being possesses a human body, we wouldn’t say that the demon now has a human soul because it’s united to a human body in some way. And so if the second divine person from the trinity is merely operating through a human body, we might say that in some sense he has a human body, but we certainly wouldn’t say he has a human soul. A human soul refers to the created spiritual center of man, the seat of his human intellect and his human will. And in the traditional Christian view, Jesus necessarily has that because Jesus is fully God and fully man. And we are not just bodies. We are body and soul. So for Jesus to share our humanity, he shares the experience both of having a human body and the experience of having a human soul.
This is what I mean when I say Craig leaves Jesus sort of half incarnate. Hebrews four says of Jesus that we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sinning. But Craig thinks Jesus never had a fully human soul in the first place. And what does it even mean to say that Christ’s soul is the logos, the second person of the Trinity? The logos isn’t something Jesus possesses. The logos is who Jesus is. Christ is the word. He is the logos. That’s who he personally is. The word, the logos becomes flesh in the incarnation. So all of that I think is quite grave on its own. To reject the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus, to reject the traditional understanding of God, these are grave problems. But I’d argue that in many ways we’re really just looking at the tip of the iceberg because there are actually quite a number of Christian doctrines that Craig rejects and his reason for doing so is built on a simple premise that I think we should be taking seriously.
His argument is that as a Protestant, he is not bound to agree with even a creed that he doesn’t think gets it right. In his words, Protestants bring all doctrinal statements, even conciliar creeds before the bar of scripture. And so Craig’s argument is that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura means Christians should not trust that the Nicean creed is right on the Trinity. In fact, he himself uses sola scriptura to call into question huge areas of theology, not just the two we’ve looked at so far. And his argument is just that all the views that he rejects, these traditional Christian views, he regards them as unbiblical. You
CLIP:
See, the Roman Catholic church has on its own authority added all sorts of doctrines that are not to be found in the scriptures. For example, in the doctrine of God. They’ve added the doctrine that God is impassable and simple. In the doctrine of Christ, they’ve added that the son derives existence from the Father. In the doctrine of man, they’ve added that the guilt of Adam’s sin is imputed to every one of his descendants so that you are guilty for the sin that Adam committed. In the doctrine of salvation, they’ve added the doctrine that by God’s grace, we are enabled to perform good works, which in turn merit salvation. In the doctrine of the church, they’ve added that the Bishop of Rome is the head of the visible church, that the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin and ascended into heaven. In the doctrine of the last things, they’ve added that Christians whose sins have been completely expunged by the atoning death of Christ and forgiven by God will nevertheless be punished for those sins in purgatory after death.
Those who accept such doctrines do so on the basis of ecclesiastical authority without scriptural warrant. They don’t accept them on the basis of the Bible, but on the basis of the church’s own authority. As
Joe:
I’ve said, he names nine different areas there, divine impossibility, divine simplicity, the eternal beginning of the son, adamic guilt, the guilt of Adam that we receive in original sin. I’m going to get back to that in a moment. Meritorious good works, papacy, the immaculate conception of Mary, or the conception of Mary without original sin, the assumption of Mary and purgatory. Now, some of those are areas in which a lot of other Protestants are likely to agree with him, but I think anybody paying attention should notice that he takes these Protestant tools, tools like sola scriptura, and he goes further with them than most Protestants do. He uses them to reject classical theism and to reject divine simplicity. And if you reject divine simplicity, you have to believe that God has parts or that God can change, and that’s going to raise all sorts of other deep theological problems I’m not even going to get into today.
So I’m not going to look at all nine of the areas that he rejects because I think we can get pretty far just by looking at one of them. I’m going to take the guilt of Adam, this idea of original sin. Now, to be clear, the Catholic view is actually not that we are each personally guilty of the sin of Adam. The catechism explicitly rejects that idea. While you can find some versions of that in certain Protestant theologies, that’s not actually the Catholic view endorsed by the Catholic church. Instead, what Craig seems to mean here, and it’s not entirely clear, he seems to at least reject or at least seriously question the idea of original sin itself. He asks, for example, the doctrine of original sin is true and he answers, “I don’t know.” And he argues that biblically faithful believers may adopt any of a variety of views on the question of original sin.
Now, as an aside, I would just say if Craig is going to reject original sin, I can’t fathom why he would also object to the idea that Mary was conceived without original sin. On his model, seemingly all of us are immaculately conceived. But in any case, Craig is simply wrong to claim that these doctrines like original sin are argued for without scriptural warrant. The scriptural warrant is clearly there even if he disagrees with it. For example, St. Paul teaches that for as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead, for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. And he says that once we were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. So there’s clearly some sense in which Adam has brought death into the world, not just for himself, but for all of us in such a way that has harmed our nature such that we can be called in some sense children of wrath.
Now I understand Craig reads those passages differently than the early Christians did, but it’s not as if his opponents aren’t citing to scripture. So the question isn’t simply not whether you trust the Bible or the church. It’s not whether you trust the Bible or the creeds. It’s not whether you trust the Bible or tradition. Those are naive straw men, because in fact, as both sides believe the Bible supports their particular view, the entire question is whose interpretation of the Bible is right? Whose interpretation of the Christian message is the correct one? As Keith Matheson admits in his book, The Shape of Solo Scriptura, the problem that people making arguments like this haven’t seemed to notice is that any appeal to scripture is in fact an appeal to an interpretation of scripture. The only question is whose interpretation? After all, Matheson writes, “When we are faced with conflicting interpretations of scripture, we cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve our difference of opinion as if it were a Ouija board.
In order for scripture to serve as an authority at all, it must be read, executed, and interpreted by somebody.” So no one is saying, “Reject the Bible and listen to the church.” Let’s get past those kind of straw men if we’re going to have a serious conversation, because the argument people are making in response to Craig is that your own personal interpretation of the Bible might be wrong. After all, consider for a moment just how novel Craig’s views are. He calls his own views neo-apolinarian on his Christology because he rejects not only the traditional view of the Trinity and of Christ, he doesn’t even fully agree with any of the ancient heresies. Instead, he takes little smatterings of different heresies and adds to them his own views in such a way that the result seems to be completely novel to himself. That’s the neo part of Neopolinarianism.
So it really is his own personal version of Jesus and his own personal version of the Trinity that he argues is the right one. I want you to stop and consider that for a moment. If you believe that God is mighty and has chosen to reveal himself, how can you also believe that he has apparently failed to do so in a way that was clear to anyone prior to William Lane Craig? After all, can we understand where Craig is coming from in terms of could you read the Bible in that way? Of course. Craig’s a smart guy. He’s spent a lot of time with scripture and he has found a way that makes sense to him of interpreting these different biblical texts. But the idea that this is the right way would require you to believe that seemingly no one else had ever understood the Trinity or no one had understood who Jesus was at this deep level until Craig arrived.
And I think that should give us all serious pause because while Craig is very smart, while he has spent a lot of time with scripture, while he spent a lot of time studying philosophy and using the best parts of philosophy to enhance his understanding of theology, he’s by no means the only one to do that in the last 2,000 years. And seemingly everyone else who’s done so before him has come to a different answer, both Orthodox Christians and even other heretics. So on some of these points, Craig will defend himself not only by appealing to scripture, but by appealing to modern scholarship. Now this is a common move that I’ve seen other Protestant apologists make. He
CLIP:
Cited John 1:14 quoting, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth.” So Bill, what’s your response to that specific text?
CLIP:
Unfortunately, this just reverts to citing the very passage that most New Testament scholars and Johanna and commentators agree does not contemplate the eternal generation of the son from the father. But
Joe:
Craig offers us no reason to trust that the modern scholars, instead of the early Christians, properly understand the meaning of the New Testament here or that we should trust their interpretation over the older accepted ones. So here’s the impasse, which I think Protestantism is facing right now. On the one hand, you’ve got Protestants who want to argue that you must believe in the Creeds and that those who reject the Creeds who don’t believe and what the Creeds are affirming are heretics. On the other hand, you’ve got people like Wayne Lane Craig who argue that this is inconsistent. After all, if you’re going to reject the second Council of Nicaea on icons, how can you demand everyone else except the first Council of Nicaea on the eternal begetting, or for that matter, the Trinity? And the truth is in the history of Protestantism, that’s precisely what we see.
Take some examples from what’s called the Radical Reformation. The Polish Reformed Church started out pretty Calvinist, but it quickly gave rise to the Unitarian Church of Transylvania that rejected the Trinity. The Puritans in England, the low countries in the United States set up these congregationalist churches that in many cases quickly turned Unitarian, rejecting the Trinity for the same reason they’d rejected any number of other Catholic doctrines. And if you can’t trust that the church got theology right, on what basis can a Protestant object to this? Simply that this isn’t how they personally read the Bible? I don’t think that’s a particularly persuasive or effective tool to argue against heresies. And Craig is tuned into this issue. He points out that Martin Luther himself, listen to Martin Luther’s own arguments on Eucharistic theology.
CLIP:
As a Protestant, I regard scripture alone as infallible and authoritative. And therefore, if some credle statement lacks biblical warrant, then I don’t think we’re obligated to believe it. And just yesterday, as I was reading in ecclesiology, I came across this wonderful quotation from Martin Luther in his essay, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Luther is speaking here of the Catholic doctrine of transsubstantiation, that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper literally turn into the flesh and blood of Christ. And Luther was skeptical of the doctrine of transubstantiation. And he writes, “I reached this conclusion because I saw that the opinions of the Tomists, whether approved by Pope or by counsel, remain only opinions and would not become articles of faith even if an angel from heaven were to decree otherwise. For what is asserted without the scriptures or proven revelation may be held as an opinion, but need not be believed.” And that’s exactly the position that I have enunciated.
Joe:
Transsubstantiation was dogmatically defined at an ecomenical council, the fourth council of Latter, but Luther argued that you are allowed to hold either transsubstantiation or Luther’s own sort of consubstantial view of the Eucharist. And we might ask, “Allowed by whom? By Luther? Who gives him the right to decide such things?” Now, maybe you’ll say, “No, no, no. Luther’s not saying that. He’s just saying that the text could be read in either of those two ways.” But if that’s your standard, surely you realize the text could be read any number of other ways as well. Think about Calvinists who believe in a spiritual presence view. Think about memorialists like Zwingli who think it’s all just a symbol. Those readings of the Bible are certainly possible. Millions of people believe them. So are they permitted? Is our standard simply you can believe any interpretation of the Bible that makes sense to you or is there some actual meaning of orthodoxy and heresy that we all have to agree on?
So that’s the problem in a nutshell. The Bible can in fact clearly be read in multiple seemingly plausible but incompatible ways. Well meaning would be disciples of Jesus read the same biblical texts and interpret them in radically different ways on important questions like the Trinity, Christology, the Eucharist, the structure of the church and many other issues. How do we handle that? Well, in the New Testament, when a dispute like that arises, the church assembles out of council. We see this in Acts 15, and it settles things with authority. But if you don’t think the church has that capacity or has that authority anymore, where does that leave Christianity? So that’s the challenge I want to leave you with. If we can trust that the Holy Spirit leads the church in properly understanding scripture, since the church is after all, the pillar and foundation of truth according to the Bible, then I think we should logically reject the theology of William Lynn Craig, but also logically reject the theology of Martin Luther.
But on the other hand, if we cannot trust that God continues to protect his own teaching from being corrupted and misunderstood or continues to protect his own church, then on what basis can we insist on any Christian doctrine as Orthodox and its rivals as heresy? Now, ultimately that’s going to relate to a question I’ve been asking for a while now. We can all agree that Christians should agree on essential doctrines, but we should be allowed some liberty of conscience on secondary matters that are not essential doctrines. But how do we know which ones are which? So for more on that question, looking at William Craig among others, you can check out this video right here. For Shamus Popour, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.