Trinity Notes: Comments and Blog Posts on the Trinity

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Comments and Blog Posts on the Trinity

Samples of My Own Complete Blogs on the Trinity:

F[L]air-minded Reinvention of the Wheel (COMPLETE BLOGPOST)
http://gospelcrumbs.blogspot.com/2011/06/flair-minded-reinvention-of-wheel.html

Do Rocks Dream of Ceramic Sheep? OR Jade Runner (COMPLETE BLOGPOST)
http://gospelcrumbs.blogspot.com/2011/06/do-rocks-dream-of-ceramic-sheep.html

Trinity Notes (this blog you're currently visiting)

I also HIGHLY RECOMMEND one of my other blog posts (on a different blog) titled:

Resources in Defense of Trinitarianism
http://misclane.blogspot.com/2013/06/resources-in-defense-of-trinitarianism.html

17 comments:

barryOctober 28, 2019 at 2:03 PM
Trinitarians get around Mark 13:32 by limiting Jesus' confession of ignorance solely to his "human nature". But since one's "nature" is their inherent feature and thus something the person cannot avoid implicating, then if Jesus had two natures, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that BOTH of them were implicated in his confession of ignorance (i.e., the divine side of Jesus admitted being ignorant of something).

The reasonableness of implicating both of his alleged "natures" is not going to disappear merely because you feel forced under biblical inerrancy to automatically favor any view about Jesus that will make sense of the premise that he could both know and not know one single factoid at the same time.

You probably believe that a person's mind is their "spirit", and if so, this would be the case with Jesus who became a "real" human being (i.e., became a higher-order mammal whose mind was capable of operating separately from its body). Ok, was Jesus speaking with his "mind" when he confessed this ignorance? Is Jesus' "mind" the same as his "spirit"? Was Jesus' speaking from his "spirit" by divulging the ignorant state of his "mind" in Mark 13:32? What exactly would be "unreasonable" in saying Jesus' was speaking from his "spirit" in Mark 13:32?

Was Jesus' spirit separate from the Holy Spirit? Mark 3 would seem to disallow this with its warning that accusing Jesus of demon-possession constitutes blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, as it falsely equates the Holy Spirit with demons...which implies that Jesus' "spirit" is the Holy Spirit, there is no lesser "human spirit" in addition to his "Holy Spirit". Jesus also breathes on the disciples in John 20 and says "receive ye the Holy Spirit" powerfully supporting the notion that his spirit is the Holy Spirit, and there is no fourth identity called "human spirit" in existence here.

Therefore, if Jesus was speaking his "mind" in Mark 13:32, he was also speaking from his "spirit" in Mark 13:32, and thus his confession of ignorance constitutes the Holy Spirit's ignorance, which then saddles god himself with this ignorance.

Was the day of Christ's return missing from Jesus' "mind"? Was it missing from his "spirit"?

If you try to get away from this by positing that Jesus had a "human mind" that was separate from "Holy Spirit", you'll end up with 4 people in the Trinity...at least during his earthly life, even if there were only 3 people in it before the incarnation.

Remember, there are only 3 persons you are allowed here, no extras!
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ANNOYED PINOYNovember 2, 2019 at 7:47 PM
There are a number of ways Trinitarians can resolve this problem. I've lost count how many I've encountered. Here's a link to Michael Jones' resolution that I'm open to, but don't prefer: Why Didn't Jesus & the Holy Spirit Know the Hour?

My preferred solution is an appeal to the recent two minds view of Christ. Here's a quote from chapter 30 of the book The Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig:

QUOTE// Some Christian philosophers, such as Thomas Morris, have postulated an independent conscious life for the incarnate Logos in addition to the conscious life of Jesus of Nazareth, what Morris calls a “two minds” view of the Incarnation. He provides a number of intriguing analogies in which asymmetrical accessing relations exist between a subsystem and an encompassing system, such that the overarching system can access information acquired through the subsystem but not vice versa. He gives a psychological analogy of dreams in which the sleeper is himself a person in the dream, and yet the sleeper has an awareness that everything that he is experiencing as reality is in fact merely a dream.
Morris proposes that the conscious mind of Jesus of Nazareth be conceived as a subsystem of a wider mind which is the mind of the Logos. Such an understanding of the consciousness of the Logos stands in the tradition of Reformed theologians like Zwingli, who held that the Logos continued to operate outside the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The main difficulty of this view is that it threatens to lapse into Nestorianism, since it is very difficult to see why two self-conscious minds would not constitute two persons.
If the model here proposed makes sense, then it serves to show that the classic doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ is coherent and plausible. It also serves religiously to elicit praise to God for his self-emptying act of humiliation in taking on our human condition with all its struggles and limitations for our sakes and for our salvation.....//END QUOTE

So, Jesus could have known in His divine mind, but not in His human mind. I've read many Trinitarian books. I'm currently a reading an old work by George Holden which can be freely accessed HERE. Holden addressed the topic on page 265 and following pages.

You need to argue that a mind is necessarily a person. That doesn't necessarily follow. As I pointed regarding dreams in the comments to a blog HERE:
//....I independently came to the same conclusions due to various types of dreams, including lucid dreaming. Other instances came from dreams in which I was talking to other people in deep dialogue. In one instance one of the persons told a joke that was so funny I laughed out loud and woke up. Then I thought, "Who really told the joke?" Barring demonic, angelic or divine communication, I must have told the joke to myself with me simultaneously knowing and not knowing the punchline.

I've also had dreams that ran like a movie where everything previous in the dream perfectly lead up to the denouement. It surprised me even though I must have concocted the intricate storyline subliminally.//END QUOTE

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ANNOYED PINOYNovember 2, 2019 at 9:32 PM
I just realized that barry devoted an entire blogpost documenting his comments at this blogpost of mine. Which is fine. HERE'S THE LINK TO HIS BLOGPOST.
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ANNOYED PINOYNovember 3, 2019 at 2:52 AM
Thomas Morris' two minds view is also briefly discussion in the non-Christian website, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy HERE.

Another way a Trinitarian can answer the question you posed is by pointing out that the same problem might occur in normal human beings. According to most Trinitarians who are usually dualists [rather than physicalists or idealists], not only do ordinary humans have brains, but they have spirits. And so they hold to dualism interactionism, or interactionist dualism, or simply Interactionism. Brain injury can result in the inability to recall information, yet people who claim to have had Near Death Experiences often also claim that their memories and other mental faculties are restored and/or enhanced once their spirits were disengaged from their bodies/brains. Implying human spirits can remember things that one's brain may not be able to remember, recall or have access to. If so, then it's possible for any ordinary human to both 1. remember all things he has ever encountered (i.e. in his spirit), yet at the same time (though in another sense) 2. not remember everything he has ever encountered (i.e. in his more limited brain). If that's true, then something similar could explain how in one sense Jesus did and didn't know the day and the hour.

That would be true whether Jesus did have a human brain and a human spirit [or rational soul]; OR whether Craig's Neo-Apollinarianism is true and the Divine Logos takes the place of the human soul. See Reasonable Faith's Does Dr. [William Lane] Craig Have an Orthodox Christology?. The problem would seem to be relieved all the more if humans are a trichotomy of 1. spirit, 2. soul and 3. body, rather than merely a dichotomy of only 1. spirit/soul and 2. body. I lean toward a bipartite view of man, rather a tripartite.

Though, I'm also open to the possibility of divine idealism given the discoveries of the implications of quantum mechanics. That would imply a monistic view of anthropology. One of mind or spirit rather than of body as in physicalism or materialism. In which case, the problem pops up again since there are not two fundamental natures. Admittedly, I don't know all the implications of idealism on anthropology or Christology. Though, I did earlier link to Michael Jones' InspiringPhilosophy video where he gives two solutions to Mark 13:32 and one of them is an appeal to Christ's two natures. Jones is a Christian theistic quantum idealist. So, that might indicate that he doesn't see a contradiction between divine idealism and two senses in which Christ could and couldn't be omniscient.

Compare Michael Jones' four part video series "The Case for the Soul" where he appeals to quantum physics and idealism HERE.
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Saturday, December 28, 2013

Comments and Blog Posts on the Trinity

17 comments: