You Are Supposed Not to Know About Trinity

This is the weekly Q & A blog post by our Research Professor in Philosophy, Dr. William Lane Craig.

Question

Greetings Dr. Craig,

I'g a Yemeni Muslim, born and raised in Saudi Arabia, currently studying for a short term in Canada. I came across your work, and highly appreciate your contributions to modernizing and polishing, the scholarship from swell men like Imam Al Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas. As a fairly conservative Muslim (perhaps because of my biases?), I find your arguments specifically for the Christian faith to be overall weaker than those generally for monotheism.

I personally believe that the biggest difference betwixt Islam and proto-orthodox Christianity, is the concept of the trinity. My questions in summary would be:

1. How can you philosophically reconcile the trinity with monotheism?
2. Are the arguments for the trinity philosophical (like the ones for the existence of I God) or based on Scripture?
3. If based on Scripture, would that not necessitate believing Scripture is infallible (why trust it when it comes to the trinity, but not trust it on other issues)?

To expand on the first question:

You country that a person is divine, only when that person is maximally perfect. This is absolutely reasonable in my opinion, so I'm willing to grant it. However, does not the New Testament portray the other persons of the trinity as subordinates, at to the lowest degree in some respects, to the Father?

In terms of knowledge for example, Matthew 24:36 declares that no one except the Father possess knowledge of the hour. According to the statement of maximal perfection, would that then not mean that all other persons (Son and Holy Spirit included) are not maximally knowledgeable, and thus do non qualify to be considered divine?

To aggrandize on the second question:

If you exercise present philosophical arguments for the trinity, are you able to present an argument for only a trinity? As in, would the same arguments not work if we supposed four or five or six persons in the God-head? Can you philosophically argue for a necessarily triune God?

To aggrandize on the third question:

How tin can yous reconcile the infallibility of Scripture, with various errors within Scripture, like numerical contradictions, or scientific mistakes?

Cheers for your time.

Mohamemd

Saudi Arabia

Dr. William Lane Craig's Response

Give thanks y'all for your kind remarks! I've just been teaching my Defenders course nearly Ghazali'south cosmological argument.

I've addressed your questions in my chapters on the Trinity and Incarnation in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, and so my responses here volition be of a summary nature. I hope you'll wait more in detail at what I've written on these issues.

Certainly the deviation between a Trinitarian and a unitarian concept of God is a major issue dividing Islam and Christianity. But, as I've argued in my debates and manufactures, I recollect that the deficiencies of the Islamic conception of God are fifty-fifty more serious than that.

As to your questions:

1. "How tin can yous philosophically reconcile the trinity with monotheism?" In the chapter on the Trinity referenced above, I provide a model of the Trinity that enables us to exercise just that. In a nutshell the model is that God is a soul equipped with iii sets of rational faculties, each sufficient for personhood. This model yields both monotheism (at that place is one soul that is God) and a plurality of persons (that soul has three centers of self-consciousness).

Yes, each person in the Trinity is maximally perfect. "Nonetheless, does not the New Testament portray the other persons of the trinity every bit subordinates, at least in some respects, to the Father?" Here theologians accept helpfully distinguished betwixt the ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity. In my model the members of the Trinity considered ontologically (in abstraction from their relations to the world) are equally and maximally perfect. But in the divine economic system, for the sake of our conservancy the members of the Trinity presume dissimilar roles in the plan of salvation. The Male parent sends the Son into the world; the Son assumes a homo nature and dies a sacrificial death; the Spirit comes in the name of the Son to continue his work until his return. The Son'south voluntary submission to the Father no more implies his inferiority to the Father than my wife's submission to me in the economic system of the family unit implies her inferiority to me.

It is true that many Christians think that there are relations of subordination, not simply in the economic Trinity, but also in the ontological Trinity. Simply biblical scholars agree that this view is not taught in the New Testament, which was the business organisation of your question. And even those Christians would insist that subordination does non imply inferiority or imperfection.

As for your instance, I agree that Christ, as the 2nd person of the Trinity, knew the date of his 2nd coming. But as I explain in my affiliate on the Incarnation in Philosophical Foundations, not everything known by Christ in his incarnate country was consciously known to him. Most of it was subconscious. And then in his man nature he did not know the date of his return; that is to say, it was non part of his witting knowledge nor available to him.

2. "Are the arguments for the trinity philosophical (like the ones for the existence of One God) or based on Scripture?" The doctrine of the Trinity is derived from the teachings of Jesus and from Scripture.

I do think a plausible philosophical statement tin can be offered against a unitarian concept of God such as we find in Islam. Every bit I argue in Philosophical Foundations, God, as the greatest conceivable being, must be perfect.

At present a perfect being must exist a loving being. For love is a moral perfection; information technology is improve for a person to be loving rather than unloving. God therefore must be a perfectly loving being. Now it is of the very nature of dear to give oneself abroad. Love reaches out to some other person rather than centering wholly in oneself. So if God is perfectly loving by His very nature, He must be giving Himself in love to another. Simply who is that other? It cannot be any created person, since creation is a result of God's free will, not a consequence of His nature. It belongs to God'southward very essence to dear, but information technology does not vest to His essence to create. Then we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and notwithstanding no created persons exist. Then created persons cannot sufficiently explain whom God loves. . . . Information technology therefore follows that the other to whom God's love is necessarily directed must be internal to God Himself.

In other words, God is non a unmarried, isolated person, as unitarian forms of theism like Islam hold; rather God is a plurality of persons, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms. On the unitarian view God is a person who does not give Himself away essentially in beloved for another; He is focused essentially but on Himself. Hence, He cannot be the virtually perfect being. But on the Christian view, God is a triad of persons in eternal, cocky-giving dear relationships. Thus, since God is substantially loving, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than whatever unitarian doctrine of God.

Equally you observe, this statement will not give us exactly 3 persons—simply hey, who's complaining? It's plenty to make the Christian concept of God more plausible than the Islamic conception.

3. "If based on Scripture, would that not necessitate believing Scripture is infallible (why trust information technology when it comes to the trinity, but non trust it on other issues)?" My answer above would require u.s.a. to think that Jesus is a reliable and authoritative teacher virtually God, his Heavenly Father, and that Scripture is also reliable and authoritative when it comes to theological doctrine.

You ask, "How can you reconcile the infallibility of Scripture, with various errors within Scripture, like numerical contradictions, or scientific mistakes?" This is the aforementioned question that the Muslim faces with respect to the mistakes and contradictions within the Qur'an. Ane might try to resolve the contradictions and show that the mistakes are only credible. But in my opinion no such heroics are needed.

First, even treating the documents of the New Testament as fallible sources, ane is able to make a plausible case for Jesus' resurrection in vindication of his radical personal claims, for which he was sentenced to decease by the Jewish Sanhedrin. That shows that Jesus was who he claimed to be, the unique Son of God and Son of Homo, and that we can therefore trust him when it comes to our doctrine of God.

Second, when it comes to the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, we need to learn humbly from Scripture itself what is entailed by divine inspiration. The Bible is non intended to be a science book, and ancient biography did not aim to achieve the accurateness of a police report. Many of the authors of Scripture may have believed geocentrism, for example, simply they did not teach geocentrism. The authors of the Gospels would take been surprised to learn from moderns that their editorial activity in retelling the life of Jesus in different means would count as errors on their function. Nosotros may trust the authors of Scripture to deliver to usa correct doctrine about God without demanding or expecting from them data on science or modern historical accounts.

---

William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig is a visiting scholar in philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. He lives in Atlanta, Ga., with his married woman Jan and their two teenage children Clemency and John. At historic period 16, while a junior in loftier schoolhouse, he first heard the message of the Christian gospel and yielded his life to Christ. He has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Kalam Cosmological Statement; Assessing the New Attestation Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Disbelief and Big Blindside Cosmology; and God, Fourth dimension and Eternity, equally well equally over a hundred articles in professional person journals of philosophy and theology. In 2016, Craig was named past The Best Schools equally one of the fifty most influential living philosophers.

glennbeffectrall.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2015/questions-from-a-muslim-about-the-trinity