Which group denied the doctrine of the trinity

We may truly say, though, that God understands and wills. These divine processes are reflexive relations which are the persons of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity, as they share the divine essence, are related more closely than things which are merely tokens of a kind e. The persons are distinct per relationes as to their relations but not distinct per essentiam as to their essence or being.

In the words of one commenter,. But how may these relations be, constitute, or somehow give rise to three divine hypostaseis when each just is the divine essence? Aquinas holds that it does not follow—that would amount to modalism, not orthodox trinitarianism. To the preceding objection, then, Aquinas says that the alleged consequence would follow only if the persons were the same both in thing and in concept.

But they are not; they are merely the same thing. This move is puzzling. Aquinas holds that the three are not merely similar or derived from the same source, but are in some strong sense the same, but not identical i.

Christopher Hughes holds that Aquinas is simply confused, his desire for orthodoxy having led him into this and other necessary falsehoods. The interpretation of Aquinas on these points is difficult.

See sections 1 and 2. Thus, the persons are related to God somewhat as concrete things are related to the universals of which they are examples Cross , 61— Indeed, the divine nature or essence is a universal, although it is also a substance a. How are the persons related to each other?

They have the divine nature in common. This process is causal, but does not imply, Scotus holds, that the Son and Spirit are subordinate to the Father, or that they are imperfect or less divine than he Cross , —80, —8. Like Augustine, he holds that the persons are distinguished by their relational properties, but he does this on the basis of church tradition, not because he finds anything impossible in the supposition that the persons are distinguished by absolute non-relational properties.

While the relational properties of paternity, sonship, and being spirated constitute the three persons, he denies that those are their only unique properties Cross , 62—7. These properties are supposed to explain why the persons, unlike the divine essence, are not communicable Cross , Is it possible for anything to be related as Scotus thinks the members of the Trinity are to the divine essence?

But the divine essence is the only universal, he holds, which is commmunicable in this way. Scotus gives some perfect-being and other arguments to the effect that there must be two and only two productions within God, and only one unproduced producer the Father, not the divine nature in him. Since the Reformation era, many theologians and philosophers have been impatient with this sort of confident metaphysical speculation, preferring to dismiss it as learned nonsense.

However, Cross has painstakingly laid out its motivations and content. See Thom , ch. Starting in the great upheaval of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation many Christians re-examined the New Testament and rejected many later developments as incompatible with apostolic doctrine, lacking adequate basis in it, and often as contrary to reason as well. Initially, many Reformation leaders de-emphasized the trinitarian doctrine, and seemed unsure whether or not to confine it to the same waste bin as the doctrines of papal authority and transubstantiation Williams , — See the supplementary document on unitarianism.

As history played out, the practically non-trinitarian groups and some of the antitrinitarian groups evolved into trinitarian ones. At the same time, theologians have lamented that many Christian groups are arguably functionally non-trinitarian though not antitrinitarian or nearly so in their piety and preaching. In recent theology, the Trinity has become a popular subject for speculation, and its practical relevance for worship, marriage, gender relations, religious experience, and politics, has been repeatedly asserted.

See section 2. It has fallen to Christian philosophers and philosophically aware theologians to sort out what precisely the doctrine amounts to, and to defend it against charges of inconsistency and unintelligibility. This is probably because some theologians hold the attempt to derive the doctrine from the Bible to be hopelessly naive, while other theologians, many Christian philosophers and apologists accept the common arguments see section 2. Again, the postmodern view that there are no better or worse interpretations of texts may play a role in quenching interest among academic theologians.

Distrust of councils and post-biblical religious authorities has largely evaporated, even among Protestants from historically anti-clerical and non-creedal groups. Ecumenical movements, and anti-sectarian sentiments probably also play a role in deflecting attention from the issues, in that to many it seems perverse to attack one of the few doctrines on which all the main, dominant Christian groups are in agreement.

Supplement to Trinity History of Trinitarian Doctrines 1. Introduction 2. The Christian Bible 2. Development of Creeds 3. Medieval Theories 4. Post—Medieval Developments 1. Introduction This supplementary document discusses the history of Trinity theories. Justin and later second century Christians influenced by Platonism take over a concept of divine transcendence from Platonism, in light of which no one with even the slightest intelligence would dare to assert that the Creator of all things left his super-celestial realms to make himself visible in a little spot on earth.

Justin, Dialogue , 92 [ch. S did action A. For any x , if x does action A , x is fully divine. Therefore, S is fully divine. For any x , if x has quality Q , then x is fully divine. The three Persons are so many qua-objects, while God is not. None of these four is really distinct from God; all are really the same as him.

Yet none of the four is identical to any of the others One may ask why there should be only three qua-objects here, when objects like a human person or an apple, having many properties, might imply hundreds or thousands of qua-objects.

The answer is that not every qua-object of God is a divine Person. Many such, Koons says, are contingent, e. God-as-creator, or God-as-friend-of-Abraham; such would not have existed had God not created.

And any qua-object of God which involves only an essential property of his, e. God-as-omnipotent, is numerically identical to God This last condition is meant to prevent the proliferation of divine qua-objects —6. Koons argues that this account explains why there are exactly three divine Persons. So if the Father loves the Son, this implies that they are numerically distinct non-identical.

It also implies that they are really distinct and not really the same. In specifying what he means by real distinctness Koons writes,. The distinction between these qua-objects Father and Son is intrinsic to their ultimate base, God the divine nature because he is the intrinsic yet relational property of love —9.

Koons argues that this theory has many advantages over some rivals. Against the constitution based three-self theory of Brower and Rea see section 2. And their theory requires three different odd and hard to explain personal attributes Koons recognizes that many will object that this theory is tetratheism; it features four realities, each of which is divine; prima facie, these would be four gods.

Koons believes that the real sameness of each of the Persons with God should rule out any polytheism and rule in monotheism. He offers this definition of monotheism:. Thus the meaning of this definition can be restated as:. Put differently, one may count things by identity. One may wonder here how the four realities can be equally divine. It would seem that whereas God the divine nature would not exist because of any other, and so would exist a se , each of the qua-object persons would exist because of God, their base.

Again, on this account each of these four is intrinsically and essentially divine, yet the Persons can love, while God can not. How then can all four be omnipotent? Some will judge this theory to inherit all the problems of the traditional divine simplicity doctrine it assumes.

Others will consider its fit with simplicity to be a feature and not a bug. Koons points out that it also assumes constituent ontology, a Thomistic account of thought, and the claim that the divine nature is an intentional relation The view is that God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all improper parts of one another, while none is numerically identical to any other.

This is shown in the following chart; the lines represent the symmetrical and transitive improper parthood relation. He argues that this change is not merely theologically motivated, but may be applicable to other issues in metaphysics —3. Molto discusses a problem for the model which arises from the transitivity of parthood and the axiom that things which are improper parts of one another must have all their proper parts in common.

In response, he adds three further elements to the model, as shown here:. As before, the lines with arrows on each end represent the symmetrical improper parthood relation. In this illustration the one-arrow lines represent the asymmetrical proper parthood relation. Thus, the divine nature of the Son and the human nature of the Son are proper parts of the composite Son, and the human body is a proper part of the human nature and thus, also of the composite Son.

Molto leaves it up to theologians whether this sort of theory is orthodox —7. His suggestion is only that this may be a simpler and less controversial solution to the logical problem of the Trinity, that is, to showing how trinitarian claims do not imply a contradiction. Mysterianism is a meta-theory of the Trinity, that is, a theory about trinitarian theories, to the effect that an acceptable Trinity theory must, given our present epistemic limitations, to some degree lack understandable content.

In this extreme form, mysterianism may be a sort of sophisticated position by itself—to the effect that one repeats the creedal formulas and refuses on principle to explain how, if at all, one interprets them.

More common is a moderate form, where mysterianism supplements a Trinity theory which has some understandable content, but which is vague or otherwise problematic. Thus, mysterianism is commonly held as a supplement to one of the theories of sections 1—3.

Again, it may serve as a supplement not to a full-blown theory i. See section 3. Unitarian views on the Father, Son, and Spirit are typically motivated in part by hostility to mysterianism. But the same can said of many of the theories of sections 1—3. Mysterians view their stance as an exercise of theological sophistication and epistemic humility. Some mysterians appeal to the medieval tradition of apophatic or negative theology, the view that one can understand and say what God is not, but not what God is, while others simply appeal to the idea that the human mind is ill-equipped to think about transcendent realities.

It is most common for theologians to combine the two views, though usually one or the other is emphasized. Sophisticated modern-era mysterians include Leibniz and the theologian Moses Stuart — Antognazza ; Leibniz Theodicy , 73—; Stuart , 26— The negative mysterian holds that the true doctrine of the Trinity is not understandable because it is too poor in intelligible content for it to positively seem either consistent or inconsistent to us.

The Persons of the Trinity, in this way of thinking, are somewhat like three men, but also somewhat like a mind, its thought, and its will, and also somewhat like a root, a tree, and a branch. Some recent studies have emphasized the centrality of negative mysterianism to the pro-Nicene tradition of trinitarian thought, chastising recent theorists who seem to feel unconstrained by it Ayres ; Coakley ; Dixon The practical upshot of this is being content to merely repeat the approved trinitarian sentences.

Thus, after considering and rejecting as inadequate multiple analogies for the Trinity, Gregory of Nazianzus concludes,. Opponents of this sort of mysterianism object to it as misdirection, special pleading, neglect of common sense, or even deliberate obfuscation. They emphasize that trinitarian theories are human constructs, and a desideratum of any theory is clarity. Negative mysterians reply that it is well-grounded in tradition, and that those who are not naively overconfident in human reason expect some unclarity in the content of this doctrine.

That is, the doctrine seems to contain explicit or implicit contradictions. So while we grasp the meaning of its individual claims, taken together they seem inconsistent, and so the conjunction of them is not understandable, in the sense explained above. The positive mysterian holds that the human mind is adequate to understand many truths about God, although it breaks down at a certain stage, when the most profound divinely revealed truths are entertained.

Sometimes an analogy with recent physics is offered; if we find mysteries i. Orthodox belief about the Trinity, Anderson holds, involves believing, for example, that Jesus is identical to God, the Father is identical to God, and that Jesus and the Father are not identical. Similarly, one must believe that the Son is omniscient, but lacks knowledge about at least one matter.

These, he grants, are apparent contradictions, but for the believer they are strongly warranted and justified by the divine testimony of scripture. He argues that numerous attempts by recent theologians and philosophers to interpret one of the apparently contradictory pairs in a way that makes the pair consistent always result in a lapse of orthodoxy , 11— A stock example is a man viewing apparently red objects.

The man then learns that a red light is shining on them. In learning this, he acquires a defeater for his belief that the items before him are red. Anderson argues that it does not, at least, if she reflects properly on the situation. Nor is it clear that God would be motivated to pay the costs of inflicting apparently contradictory divine revelations on us.

Moreover, Anderson has not ruled out that the apparent contradictions come not from the texts alone, but also from our theories or pre-existing beliefs. In a reply, Anderson denies that divine incomprehensibility is trivial, while agreeing that many things other than God are incomprehensible While Tuggy had attacked his suggestions about why God would want to afflict us with apparent contradictions, Anderson clarifies that.

As to whether these apparent contradictions result from the texts rightly understood, or whether they result from the texts together with mistaken assumptions we bring to them, this is a question only biblical exegesis can decide, not any a priori considerations In contrast, some theologians have held that doctrines including the Trinity imply not merely apparent but also real contradictions, but are nonetheless true.

Such hold that there are exceptions to the law of non-contradiction. While some philosophers have argued on mostly non-religious grounds for dialetheism , the claim that there can be true genuine, not merely apparent contradictions, this position has for the most part not been taken seriously by analytic theologians Anderson , —26 For a recent exception, see Beall They do this by suggesting models of the Trinity, intelligible and arguably coherent interpretations of most or all of the traditional language.

But in recent work the tools of analytic philosophy have been applied to several closely related issues. The first usage goes hand in hand with the claim that the one God just is the tripersonal God, the Trinity.

This God, it is assumed, does not merely happen to be tripersonal, but must be so; on such a view, it looks like tripersonality will be an essential divine attribute. Some Trinity theories embrace this section 2. See section 2. Thus, some Trinity theories eschew a thing which is tripersonal, while affirming three divine Persons whose divinity does not require tripersonality sections 2.

One-self trinitarians deny 3, and three-self trinitarians deny 1. But Tuggy argues that for scriptural reasons a Christian should deny 2. See also section 5. Jedwab and Keller , see the fundamental challenge for the orthodox trinitarian as showing how this seemingly inconsistent triad of claims is, rightly understood, consistent:. They argue that this must involve paraphrases, clearer formulations of 1—3 which can be seen as possibly all true.

They compare how the theories of sections 2. These provide materials for a formidable argument against any doctrine that entails those seven claims. Another recent piece compares different approaches to the Trinity by how they respond to an anti-trinitarian argument based on alleged differences between the Father and the Son Tuggy b. This Latin document is by an unknown author, and is not the product of any known council. Modern scholarship places it some time in the fifth century, well after the life of Athanasius d.

Objecting to making it a standard of trinitarian theology, several authors have pointed out its dubious provenance and coherence, and have observed that it has mainly been accepted in the Western realm and not in the East, and that it seems to stack the deck against three-self theories Layman —7, —71; McCall , ; Tuggy b, — But William Hasker argues that rightly understood, the claims of this creed may not be paradoxical, as it is largely concerned with what may and may not be said b, —4.

Baber describes five different foundations for theorizing about the Trinity, endorsing the fourth. It is misguided, he argues, to focus merely on the theoretical virtues of various rational reconstructions of what traditional Trinity language is really supposed to be expressing, as most of these will not plausibly be expressing the historical doctrine.

New-fangled accounts, Branson argues, have a burden of showing how they, if coherent, imply that the historical doctrine of the Trinity is coherent, and indeed why the former should even count as a version of the latter Section 5. Similarly with other theoretical virtues.

At any rate, nothing about the project of analytic theology requires the neglect of the crucial historical definers of the Trinity doctrine Section The arguments for this conclusion defy easy summary but see Chapter 7 and Jaskolla In some scholarly circles it is taken as obvious that New Testament teaching is not trinitarian—that it neither asserts, nor implies, nor assumes anything about a tripersonal God see e. But most analytic literature on the Trinity assumes the truth of an orthodox narrative about where Trinity theories come from.

According to this, from the beginning Christians were implicitly trinitarian; that is, they held views which imply that God is a Trinity, but typically did not realize this or have adequate language to express it. But in recent analytic literature on the Trinity there are two counternarratives, both of which see the idea of a triune God as entering into Christian traditions in the last half of the s. In reply, Tuggy has argued that recent Orthodox theologians seem divided on this point, and that the idea of a triune God the one God as the Trinity is found even in some of the Greek writers Branson claims as exemplars of theological orthodoxy Tuggy Another recent counternarrative sees ancient mainstream Christian theology as changing from unitarian to trinitarian.

Tuggy argues that in the New Testament the one God is not the Trinity but rather the Father alone. The argument moves from facts about the texts of the New Testament to what the authors probably thought about the one God, using what philosophers of science call the likelihood principle or the prime principle of confirmation.

Tuggy sees such identification of the one God with the Father dominating early Christian theologies until around the time of the second ecumenical council in C.

Tuggy , Chapter 5. Then, the Son and the Spirit, which in many 2nd to early 4th c. One-self Theories 1. Three-self Theories 2. Four-self, No-self, and Indeterminate Self Theories 3.

Mysterianism 4. Beyond Coherence 5. One-self Theories One-self theories assert the Trinity, despite initial appearances, to contain exactly one self. In this eternal begetting of Himself and being begotten of Himself, He posits Himself a third time as the Holy Spirit, that is, as the love which unites Him in Himself.

Similarly, Rahner says that God …is — at once and necessarily — the unoriginate who mediates himself to himself Father , the one who is in truth uttered for himself Son , and the one who is received and accepted in love for himself Spirit — and… as a result of this , he [i.

God] is the one who can freely communicate himself. Rahner , —2 Similarly, theologian Alastair McGrath writes that …when we talk about God as one person, we mean one person in the modern sense of the word [i. McGrath , All three theologians are assuming that the three modes of God are all essential and maximally overlapping.

Dole and A. Chignell eds. Alston, W. Anderson, J. Baber, H. Beall, J. Baxter and A. Cotnoir eds. Boyer, S. Branson, B. Riaudel and A. Perez eds. Brower, J. Byerly, T. Cain, J. Cartwright, R. Clark, K. Coakley, S. Davis, D. Kendall and G. Conn, C. Craig, W. Cotnoir, A. Cross, R. McCall and M. Rea eds. Maspero eds. Clark , pp. Davis, S. Stewart ed. Dolezal, J. Effingham, N. Geach, P. Munitz ed. Hasker, W. Ruloff ed. Howard-Snyder, D.

Retrieved 6 Jun. Alston : 17— Hughes, C. Jedwab, J. Kleinschmidt, S. Kvanvig ed. Layman, C. Lebens, S. Leftow, B. Zimmerman eds. Long, J. Makin, M. Martinich, A. McCall, T. Whose Monotheism? Crisp and F. Sanders eds. Sexton ed. McIntosh, C. Merricks, T. Crisp, M. Davidson and D. Vander Laan eds. Molto, D. Mooney, J. Moreland, J. Craig, [], Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 2nd ed. Mosser, C. Mullins, R. Page, B. Pawl, T. Pickup, M. Plantinga, C. Feenstra ed.

Rea, M. Flint and M. Marmodoro and J. God revealed himself successively in salvation history, first as Father creator and lawgiver , then as Son redeemer , and finally as Spirit sustainer and giver of grace.

For a modalist, the God of the Old Testament is the Father. In the incarnation, God was manifested in Jesus. Then, after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, God came in the mode of the Holy Spirit.

They affirm both that their God is one and that Jesus is fully God. But they deny that there are three divine persons. The United Pentecostal Church is the largest Oneness group in. It views the Trinitarian concept of God, that of God eternally existing as three distinctive persons, as inadequate and a departure from the consistent and emphatic biblical revelation of God being one.

Thus God is manifested as Father in creation and as the Father of the Son, in the Son for our redemption, and as the Holy Spirit in our regeneration. In other words, the Son of God is the manifestation of the Father in the flesh. The Son is not eternal, nor preexistent.

He did not experience a physical resurrection. In fact, his mission on earth failed and will be fulfilled through Sun Myung Moon, who is greater than Jesus. The Holy Spirit is feminine in nature.

She collaborates with Jesus in the spirit realm to draw people to Sun Myung Moon. Founded By: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Similar to Christian Science, Unity adherents believe God is an unseen, impersonal principle, not a person.

God is a force within everyone and everything. Jesus was only a man, not the Christ. He merely realized his spiritual identity as the Christ by practicing his potential for perfection. This is something all men can achieve. Jesus did not resurrect from the dead, but rather, he reincarnated. The Holy Spirit is the active expression of God's law.

Only the spirit part of us is real; matter is not real. Founded By: L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology defines God as Dynamic Infinity. Jesus is not God, Savior, or Creator, nor does he have control of supernatural powers. He is usually overlooked in Dianetics. The Holy Spirit is absent from this belief system as well. Men are "thetan" - immortal, spiritual beings with limitless capabilities and powers, though often they are unaware of this potential. Scientology teaches men how to achieve "higher states of awareness and ability" through practicing Dianetics.

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