Holy Trinities Batman!

I have a copy of Is God a Trinity? on file, published by the WCG way back when. In those distant times there was little doubt about the answer: no!

But times have changed, and what appears to be the first booklet published under the GCI brand is titled A Brief Introduction to Trinitarian Theology.

This time round they're not even bothering to ask the question.

The kind of trinitarianism GCI promotes isn't the standard version you'd find in Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox communions, but a variety pickled with the MSG of junk theology, marketed under the labels "Barth" and "Reformed," and produced in porridge vats with the patented perichoresis ingredient by Baxter Kruger, the terrible Torrances, and their ilk. Perichoresis, you ask? How to put this delicately... God (to quote Wikipedia) enjoys "mutual interpenetration."

This particular concoction has universalist dimensions, so much so that the booklet even asks the rhetorical question Isn't this universalism? and consciously distances itself from bog Calvinism. Well, that's commendable I guess, but the fact remains that it stills build on a Calvinist foundation (as does Arminianism - which can only make sense as a reaction to Calvinism.) You buy a cheap Ford, strip it down and soup the coupe... is it still a Ford?

Well, it sure ain't a BMW.

Who's the author? There's no attribution in the online edition; GCI seems to be using the same anonymity policy as the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society. Part 1 sets out the case, and part 2 is a kind of "catechism" that rehearses possible questions. If you reside in the USA, Joe & Co. will graciously send you a free copy. If you live elsewhere, you'll need to read it online.

New Buzzy Book

Former Ambassador College teacher Sir Anthony Buzzard has moved on from his earlier treatment of the Trinity in a jointly authored volume with fellow Armstrong refugee Charles Hunting (currently unavailable on Amazon, but procurable from Atlanta Bible College), to a solo title of 400 pages called Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian.

The newer book appears to avoid some of the clangers that plagued the earlier tome. Buzzard is, of course, not arguing from a place of scholarly objectivity, but making a case for a biblical unitarianism. This is the perspective that is aired in the One God seminars organized by Ken Westby, and influential in unexpected corners of the WCG diaspora.

For a critical pro-trinitarian review of the book, click here. It appears however that the reviewer is every bit as one-eyed as the author he critiques. Provided you share the same assumptions Buzzard does - about the inspiration of the Bible and the factual status of the gospel accounts for example - he seems to make reasonable good sense.

Holy Trinities, Batman!

I am grumbling my way through an essay on the Trinity as part of a university paper called "Doing Theology." I say "grumbling" because the paper is a compulsory one in the BTheol program, and because - despite long disassociation from Armstrongism - I'm a thorough-going skeptic over full-blown trinitarianism.

Later I want to expand on this subject, but for the moment I'd like to share some of the surprises that have cropped up in my reading.

* Catholic theologians cheerfully concede that there is no explicit doctrine of the Trinity in either Old or New Testaments. I've dug through Richard McBrien's excellent Catholicism before making this statement.

[W]e cannot read back into the New Testament, much less into the Old Testament, the trinitarian theology and doctrine which slowly and often unevenly developed over the course of some fifteen centuries. (283)

* Evangelical theologians cheerfully concede that there is no explicit doctrine of the Trinity in either Old or New Testaments. I call British Anglican evangelical poster-boy Alister McGrath (Christian Theology, 2007 edition) to the witness box to demonstrate the veracity of that statement.

[N]either the developed trinitarian vocabulary or the specific concepts developed by Christian theologians to express the Christian vision of God are explicitly stated in the New Testament. (249)

* The first person to use the term Trinity was the Montanist convert Tertullian. Tertullian abandoned Catholic Christianity to adopt the beliefs of a Holy Spirit obsessed sect. Remarkably then, the first "trinitarian" to self-identify under that label was a heretic.

Tertullian's Montanism helped him to insights by which the church eventually transcended this formula and developed a more consistent doctrine of the Trinity. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), 105.)

* Popular conservative theologian Larry Hurtado consistently describes the position of the early church as "binatarian."

The arguments used by orthodox theologians are sometimes creative, occasionally profound, and invariably subjective. Catholics have the easiest path through because they can fall back on the authority of tradition, something most of us feel more jaundiced about. But why let the facts get in the way? My favorite quote comes from Robert Jenson who, despite being Lutheran is a devotee of Reformed dogmatician Karl Barth.

Genesis' teaching about creation can only be accounted for by a full-blown doctrine of the Trinity. (Jenson, "Creation as a Triune Act," Word & World 2/1 (1982), 39)

Yeah right: try convincing a rabbi. This is supercessionism gone crazy.

In any case, the subject, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of the dogmatic bias from certain mainline sectarian hacks, has set me thinking. Of course, finding problems with the Trinity doesn't mean that COG7-style binatarianism is thereby a better option, or Ken Westby-style "One God" unitarianism, and I'd want to make that go double for the near polytheism of the Armstrong/Mormon "God Family" teaching. Making sense of the God question in 2007 calls for something more radical and "out of the box" than squabbling over proof-texts and obscure philosophical mumbo-jumbo.

More on this at a later time.