Trinitarianism vs Unitarianism Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, you are involved in at least three forthcoming books: one with Peter van Inwagen on numbers, one on various perspectives on the historical Adam, and a Four Views book on the Trinity. Let’s narrow this podcast down to the Trinity, but give us a little preview of these forthcoming books.

DR. CRAIG: The book with Peter van Inwagen is called Do Numbers Exist? Peter van Inwagen is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Notre Dame and one of the most prominent metaphysicians in the world today, and he is an ardent Platonist. That is to say, he thinks that things like numbers and sets and other mathematical objects as well as properties, propositions, even fictional characters like Donald Duck, exist. They're even more real than chairs and tables and sticks and stones and the physical objects around us. I, on the other hand, am an anti-Platonist – I don't think that these things are real and exist. So this book is a debate book between Peter and me responding to each other on this question "Do numbers or abstract objects exist?" Lest our listeners think that this is an utter irrelevancy that's of no importance, the theological value of this is that if these abstract objects like numbers exist then they are plausibly eternal, uncreated objects, and that would mean therefore that God is not the sole ultimate reality. He is not the source or creator of everything apart from himself. Rather, God is just one of an infinite plenitude of eternal, uncreated beings that exist just as robustly as he does. I think that's profoundly theologically unacceptable. So this is an important debate that we're engaged in in this book. Now, the second book is on the historical Adam. This is a Four Views book that is edited by Ken Keithley of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It features four authors. Kenton Sparks who advocates the view that there was no historical Adam – there was no such persons as Adam or Eve. I advocate what is called the ancient genealogical Adam view. That is to say, I'm willing to give up the recency of Adam and Eve in order to preserve their universal progenitorship of all mankind. So I put Adam and Eve way back into the primordial past where they can be the ancestors of all humanity. Then there's Andrew Loke who is a scholar from Singapore, and he defends what's called the recent genealogical Adam and Eve. This view basically says that Adam and Eve were selected by God as an elect couple out of a broader population of hominins that existed at the same time and therefore they can be relatively recent. This view tends to sacrifice universal progenitorship in order to maintain their recency. And then finally, the last view is Young Earth Creationism defended by Marcus Ross which holds to the traditional picture of Adam as the universal progenitor of all mankind but someone who existed only a few thousand years ago.

KEVIN HARRIS: And then the Trinity book. We have some excerpts recorded from an ETS panel discussion from San Antonio Texas with other contributors on the Trinity book which is titled One God, Three Persons, Four Views. I like that. Dale Tuggy's unitarian view is the most controversial, so we're going to focus on that. But first give us a thumbnail sketch of the four views presented in the book.

DR. CRAIG: OK. As you mentioned, Dale Tuggy defends a unitarian view of God. His view would be the closest to the sort of orthodox Judaism that the disciples of Jesus faced following Jesus' advent. He believes that God is uniquely God the Father and that Jesus of Nazareth was just a mortal human being no different than you and I except that God raised him from the dead and exalted him to his right hand to be the Lord over creation. But nonetheless he is still a mere creature and God the Father is the only person that is God. I then defend what I call the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, which is very simply stated that there is exactly one God and that there are exactly three persons who are properly called God – that is to say, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – each of whom is literally and truly God. Then the third view is represented by the Christian philosopher Bill Hasker who defends a view very much like mine but he adds in addition the trinitarian processions. That is to say, on this view the Father is the fount of the Godhead. The Father begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. So this is a more complicated doctrine of the Trinity than the one that I defend. Then finally the fourth view is the most complex and doctrinally rich view of all, defended by Beau Branson who is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher. He defends a full-blown Nicean trinitarianism which includes things like the doctrine of divine simplicity and denies that there are three centers of self-consciousness in God as well as distinct operations of the persons of the Trinity toward the external world. So it is the most creedal of the four views that are represented in the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: All of these books are due out in the early part of 2024?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. They're all finished, and they're all in press so they should be out within the coming months.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is going to be an interesting year. All these books, all these topics, because now it's going to produce all the interview requests, all the responses on YouTube and social media as people begin to read them. It's going to be good. It's going to be interesting.

DR. CRAIG: I think 2024 is shaping up to be a very good year, Lord willing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you think it's a rather radical move to try to overturn the doctrine of the Trinity? I understand that we should scrutinize what we believe and evaluate doctrine, but the doctrine of the Trinity is a major consideration.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, it really is because included in the doctrine of the Trinity is the deity of Christ – that Jesus Christ is not a mere man. Jesus Christ is God incarnate. So I think that a unitarian view of God is, well, it's heretical, frankly. The only way you could preserve the deity of Christ on a unitarian view would be to adopt the position of certain Oneness Pentecostals (as they're called) who say that Jesus was God the Father incarnate, which no New Testament scholar believes. So it does seem to me that Tuggy's Socinian brand of unitarianism (that Jesus was a mere man) is outside the pale of Christianity. It is a heresy and would represent a radical revision.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've addressed a primary issue in this whole debate in a recent question of the week number 866: “The Case for Unitarianism and The Logical Relation of Identity.”^[1] I encourage listeners to read that. It's number 866. You elaborate that the New Testament authors in particular did not have a modern view of the logical relation of identity. Remind us again what that is.

DR. CRAIG: The modern logical relation of identity is the most fundamental equivalence relation holding between an object and itself and no other thing. It is a relation which is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and Euclidean. What that means is, first of all, it's reflexive – that A is identical to A. Everything is identical to itself. Secondly, it's symmetric. If A is identical to B then B is identical to A. Thirdly, it's transitive. If A is identical to B and B is identical to C then A is identical to C. And, finally, it's Euclidian which is to say if A is identical to C and B is identical to C then A is identical to B. This modern grasp of the identity relation was something that the ancients did not have. Aristotle alone, in his Topics, has a couple of sentences on the identity relation where he seemed to grasp this, but his insights were overlooked and forgotten. As a result it wasn't until centuries later that the modern concept of identity came to be expressed. According to William and Martha Kneale in their book The History of Logic, Aristotle doesn't get any credit for discovering this relationship because it was forgotten and not grasped in the ancient world.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go then to the first clip from this panel discussion in which Tuggy is asked a question. Here's clip number one.

QUESTION: I got a question for Dr. Tuggy. How do you explain the fact that there are no credible New Testament scholars who agree with your view that the New Testament uniformly presents a view of Jesus as ontologically human and nothing more?

DR. TUGGY: Well, I mean, you do have PhDs who think that's true of the synoptic Gospels and probably of Acts, too. Why not? I guess people think pre-existence is obvious, and the kind of arguments from Christians like me are just not part of the discussion. As a philosopher, if I'm studying free will or something like that, my first task is to find the strongest arguments for all the different sides. This is not done in academic theology, and so it's just off the table. It's not considered. They're overlooking the minority report from the early Reformation and also from the times of Origen, Novation, and Tertullian who all repeatedly complain about “mere man” Christians in the mainstream churches.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you agree that most scholars disagree with Tuggy’s minority report?

DR. CRAIG: It's not a minority report. All New Testament scholars agree that in the pages of the New Testament Christ is declared to be God just as the Father is God. This is universally acknowledged even by those who don't believe it themselves. No one denies this, not Bart Ehrman, not Paula Frederickson, not Maurice Casey, not even Rudolph Bultmann. All of them acknowledge that in the pages in the New Testament you find clear and unequivocal statements of the deity of Christ. This is a real problem, I think, for Tuggy’s Socinian view. He needs to explain why it is that his arguments are not convincing to the guild of New Testament scholars. And that's why, in my essay in this volume, I attempt to get down and get my fingers dirty in the actual exegesis of the New Testament text to show that the New Testament does affirm the full and unequivocal deity of Christ and invite Tuggy to deal with these texts. But the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars disagree with Tuggy’s view that Christ is portrayed in the New Testament as a mere man.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip. Tuggy is asked another question.

QUESTION: Thank you. A second question for Dr. Tuggy. In John 16:13, Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the disciples into all truth. But on your approach it would seem that the Spirit's efforts have resulted in massive failure on precisely a point that is of overriding importance to unitarians, namely monotheism and the unity of God. What are you to make of that?

DR. TUGGY: Well, this kind of argument from divine providence, I think, takes a lot of guts to urge if you're a Protestant and an open theist because Protestants think that the mainstream, sometimes God allows it to go wrong on very important things for a very long time. I don't think God's Spirit failed because what happened is the mainstream (small-c) catholic tradition actually preserves in its creeds (especially the older ones) all the stuff I think is essential to the Gospel. So I think what's essential to the Gospel is basically what's preached in Acts. So God's not going to get rid of this because it's preserving the truth even while it's layering in all this other stuff.

KEVIN HARRIS: Is Tuggy saying that arguing from divine providence can backfire, especially if one is a Protestant?

DR. CRAIG: Well, you need to understand that this was a question posed by Bill Hasker who is both a Protestant and an open theist (that is to say, he denies divine foreknowledge of the future). So Tuggy is kind of using a “So’s your old man!” argument here saying, “Well, you, as an open theist, must recognize that the Holy Spirit has not preserved the church from error in affirming that God has complete foreknowledge of the future.” Now, that's not a problem for someone like me who affirms divine foreknowledge, but I would offer a stronger formulation of this same argument that Hasker is giving, and it would go like this. In his Gospel, John says that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all the truth and will teach us all things that we need to know. And according to John's Gospel, this includes the teaching that Jesus is God. That is right at the heart of the Gospel of John – John 1:1, John 1:18, John 20:28. So clearly John thought that the deity of Christ is among those central truths that are taught to us by the Holy Spirit. So the person who denies the deity of Christ has to be denying this promise of Jesus that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all the truth.

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