The Triune Human Soul

I very much liked this quote:

The human mind is triune in its being ordered to the transcendental splendor of the good, the true and the beautiful which resides in the Mind of God. Since the metaphysical is best expressed in terms of metaphor, we can say that the head can be seen as the seat of the True (reason), the heart can be seen as the seat of the Good (love or virtue) and the loins can be seen as the seat of the Beautiful (creation, pro-creation and sub-creation). The head, as the seat of the true, is the home of consciousness which seeks clarity; the heart, as the seat of the good, is the home of conscience, which seeks charity; and the loins, as the seat of beauty, is the home of creativity, which seeks chastity.

From HERE.

Bernard of Clairveaux on the Unity of the Trinity and Love

From On Loving God, Ch. XII:

For what preserves the glorious and ineffable Unity of the blessed Trinity, except love? Charity, the law of the Lord, joins the Three Persons into the unity of the Godhead and unites the holy Trinity in the bond of peace. Do not suppose me to imply that charity exists as an accidental quality of Deity; for whatever could be conceived of as wanting in the divine Nature is not God. No, it is the very substance of the Godhead; and my assertion is neither novel nor extraordinary, since St. John says, 'God is love' (I John 4.8). One may therefore say with truth that love is at once God and the gift of God, essential love imparting the quality of love.

This quote caught my attention because it points to the relation between God's being love, and the Holy Trinity. This is an important topic in our witness to Muslims, of course.

Abdul Asad: How Islam sharpens our theology

Yes, thanks to Islam, I have delved back into Church history and been forced to re-examine the creeds and confessions of the Church, and to be able to articulate their nuances not merely for the sake of theological reflection with other Christians, but for the sake of the salvation of many people who need to understand these distinctions!

Indeed. Since moving to dar al islam I have vastly expanded my knowledge of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Part of that, I suppose, is the natural process of learning more with time. But really, When you are living in an Islamic context knowing the Trinity becomes not a simple hobby or curios, but something central to your witness.

The whole post is at Circumpolar. I left a comment over there too, check out the whole thing.

Your input needed on the Trinity

Hi All,

A Christian living in the ME has been thinking a lot about the Trinity lately. He has questions, and I am sure you all (with your excellent theological training and grasp of tradition) can make a great contribution to the quality of his witness.

He writes:

Lately I've been spending a lot of time talking about the Trinity (explicitly or implicitly) to close friends around me. Most people try to avoid this conversation by saying, "You just have to believe it. There's no real way to explain it." Unfortunately, I have a hard time accepting that method. I believe that if the Trinity is true, then what makes it true must be comprehensible. I admit that it might not be comprehensible to an unredeemed mind. Yet, to the redeemed He reveals mysteries.

I want to open this posting up to anyone who wants to take a stab at this question: What is the Trinity?

So what do you think? CLick your way over there and give him your input. Rainthinker.

A Lengthy Discussion with Two Muslims Friends

A Lengthy Discussion with Two Muslims Friends

I went to see some friends and Abd started out by saying, How difficult was the life of Job! He had scars and sores and he lost everything! We talked about Job a while, and then I asked (knowing that the Qur'an says very little about Job) where he heard this. He said, I read it in the Bible you gave me. I didn't know he had been reading it. We discussed redemption a little: the idea of God making good from an evil situation.

I have two Muslim friends with whom I got into a rather lengthy conversation with yesterday. Abd asked me point blank, do you say that Jesus is God? It is practice among evangelical missionaries today to not answer such a question in the affirmative. But I am becoming increasingly disappointed with that approach. I answered in the affirmative. He quoted the verse of the Qur'an about God not begetting nor being begotten. I agreed with the verse, saying that in the biological sense it was absolutely true, and that is what the Qur'an was talking about. So Christians and Muslims both agree with that statement if understood in context. I explained that as a Christian I do not limit the power of God--God is all powerful. Therefore if God wills to become human he may. In other words, as a Christian I really believe that Allahu Akbar (God is greatest), unlike Muslims who circumscribe and limit God's ability to reveal himself.

What ensued then was a discussion on the Trinity. The Trinity is another one of those topics that missionaries today tend to stay away from, most of them, to be honest, don't have the theological training to really understand the doctrine, much less explain it to others, much less defend it. I said that we believe in the Trinity because the Gospel says that God is love. For God to be love from all eternity means that the essence of God is relational: the essence of God is nothing other than the relationality of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I recited the Orthodox phrase several times: Allah Waahid, mutasawwi fil jawhar, wa ghayr munfasil: One God, co-equal in essence, inseparable. God is eternally loving, and indeed God is love, something that we can believe because we believe in the Trinity. It is not a quality of God, but the very being of God.

Whereupon I was asked about the Holy Spirit, and I replied that our souls are sick and broken, and God desiring us to be holy and righteous, but knowing that we are not able to accomplish this by our own power, has offered to give us his Spirit to dwell within us and empower us to be righteous.

This was a fairly lengthy conversation. We talked about lots of other things. But it was a pretty all-encompassing sort of discussion. Both of these guys are really thinking about the claims of the Gospel and Jesus.

Kenneth Cragg on the Trinity for Muslims

Kenneth Cragg here, in his magisterial book on Islam and Christianity, The Call of the Minaret, is explaining why the classic doctrines of vicarious atonement and the Trinity co-inhere better with the doctrine of God as the most glorious (similar to Llull's strategy, but executed in a very different manner, obviously).

A God out of relation is certainly not theism, or monotheism... But God in relationship is precisely what we mean by the doctrine of the Trinity--God so truly and unmistakably in relation with us that we take the pattern of that relationship to us as the clue to the divine nature. What else, what better, should we take?

p. 285, Third Edition.

Llull and The Hundred Forms

If you read Llull's Ars Brevis, which is the best way to get familiar with his philosophy and theology and thus his manner of evangelizing Jews and Muslims, you find a fascinating section in Part X, Section 12, called The Hundred Forms, where he basically lays out certain definitions and relations so that the rest of his epistemological system can function correctly.

Llull is fascinating because he does not start, like Descartes, with doubting everything, nor does he start with just reason, but he starts with a moral universe and a real God, but not, ab initio, with a Christian God. The beginning point for his philosophy, or really his 'art', is virtue and the glory of God. This is how he can use his art to reason with Muslims and Jews and even Monophysites.

While he does not claim that his art proves from reason alone the Trinity, he does claim that it proves the Trinity is reasonable--a key flaw he saw in his days among others who were evangelizing Muslims.

His first step is to build common ground. Anyway, here are some sections from the Hundred Forms:

2. Essence is the form abstracted from and sustained in being.

12. Form is the essence with which the agent acts in matter.

50. Monstrosity is the deviation of natural motion.

64. Grace is a primary form, placed in the person receiving it without any merit on his part.

80. Theology is the science that speaks of God.

81. Philosophy is the subject by means of which the intellect concentrates on all the sciences.

Rahner on the Incarnation

The question is this: is the humanity of the Logos merely something foreign which has been assumed, or is that which precisely comes into being when the Logos ex-presses himself into the non-divine? ...should human nature ultimately be explained through the self-emptying self-utterance of the Logos himself?

The Trinity, p. 31 fn
Karl Rahner, trans. by Joseph Donceel
Kent: Burns & Oates 1970

Williams on the Trinity; religious dialogue with Islam

Rowan Williams responded to the Common Word letter from several dozen Muslim scholars, and there is a very nice section in his response about the Trinity, which follows:

Because God exists in this threefold pattern of interdependent action, the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one in which there is always a ‘giving place’ to each other, each standing back so that the other may act. The only human language we have for this is love: the three dimensions of divine life relate to each other in self-sacrifice or self-giving. The doctrine of the Trinity is a way of explaining why we say that God is love, not only that he shows love.

That having been said, need I mention that inter-religious dialogue only happens in places where Muslims are a minority? Islam, in the end I suspect, has no use for such dialogue.

I have written about this topic in Islam and the Other Religions.

Hart: sacrifice and credit

God's balances are not righted by an act of immolation, the debt is not discharged by the destruction of the victim and his transformation into credit; rather, God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustibly, regardless of rejection. God gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again. There is no calculable economy in this trinitarian discourse of love, to which creation is graciously admitted.

David Hart
Beauty of the Infinite
P. 351

Chesterton on Islam

GK Chesterton was one of the most influential popular Christian authors of the 20th C. He was an Anglican-turned-Catholic and he wrote on Saint Francis, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the basics of the Christian faith, and many other topics. Here is a fascinating quote of his on Islam:

Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea “it is not well for man to be alone.” The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of monks. So even asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent. If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence)–to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and, the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

(Quote is taken from the article Allah and the Trinity)

(Originally posted 27 Jan 07, but a great quote and thought it would be good to repost.)

Christians are Tri-theists

Well, we Christians can insist up and down that we believe in one God, but that doesn't matter. Muslims know what we believe better than we do. Here in fact is the proof that you (if you're a Christian) do believe in three gods, even though you don't know it.

How do you respond to the critique? And can you outline how he has misrepresented the doctrine of the Trinity?

From Answering Christianity:

Trinitarians often like to claim that they have a monotheistic belief, and that the Trinity is not the worship of 3 Gods rather it is the worship of One God. Basically they say the Trinity doctrine is as follow:

1- God is made up of 3 persons

2- The three persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

3- All three persons are distinct from each other, The Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Father etc.

4- Each person in the Trinity has a role of their own

5- Jesus is the Son in the Trinity

So basically that is the dogma of the Trinity.

Now let us show exactly why Christians do in fact worship three God's. As I said, the Trinity is made up of THREE people, these three people are all different than one another, it is basically exactly like having 3 people in an office, Tom Dick and Harry.

Now Christians say that Jesus is God, the Father is God, and so is the Holy Spirit. So therefore if you have three people, and each one of them is God then what are you left with? You are left with THREE Gods! This is logic!

If Tom Dick and Harry are each managers, how many managers do you have? You have three! Remember Trinity has THREE different persons, and each person is God, therefore you have three Gods and not one, there is no way around this mess.

Pentecostalism, adaptation, history

From an interview with Pentecostal theologian Simon Chan, who talks about Pentecostalism, liturgy (!), the Trinity, and mission. Great stuff, glad to see a serious Pentecostal theologian, we certainly need more.

Check it all out at CT

Surely part of Pentecostalism's success is its ability to adapt rapidly in a technological culture.

Pentecostals are definitely very adaptable. They are quick to seize upon new opportunities for the sake of the gospel. They make use of the technologies of the times. There is a certain habit of mind that enables them to readily leave behind things that don't work and to move on to things that they think will work. Whereas the liturgy creates a different habit of mind, a habit of stability. This has its strengths and weaknesses, just as the Pentecostal mindset has its strengths and weaknesses. But in my view, in the modern world especially, the danger of a short memory far outweighs the danger of not being willing to change.

Many people would say the opposite: For the church to succeed in its mission, it needs to be ready to change.

But is that true in the long run? Coming from a Pentecostal background, I'm more sensitive to the dangers that a church is exposed to when it forgets its history.

The Trinity and Love

From the April 2007 edition of First Things, Letters to the Editor:

...the nature and possibility of love is inextricably grounded in the Trinitarian nature of the God whom Christians profess. What I mean is the following: If it is true, as Christians and various other monotheists maintain, that God is a loving God, then somehow or other, love must be a characteristic of the essence of God apart from his relationship to anything outside himself defined as "creation." But if God is the purely monotheistic god of Jews, Muslims, deists, or monotheists of whatever stripe, then the only kind of love that could characterise the essence of such a god would be narcissism raised to the power of infinity.

In contrast, in the essence or internal life of the revealed Triune God, consisting of three distinct persons, fully sharing one nature, there are others for each to love and be loved by!

--Thomas J. Kleist
Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Part XI: Muslims' Main Objections to Christianity

In Part X of this series on Islam I wrote on four of the main things that attract Muslims to Christianity (The Bible, Dreams and Wonders, Charity and Kindness, and Christian Community or the Church), but now I want to outline the four main theological stumbling blocks for Muslims who are interested in the Christian faith. Note that I am talking about the ones who are interested, most Muslims actually have no desire whatsoever to learn about other religions, nor do they have any desire to ask hard questions about their book or the life of Muhammad. Islam does claim to be the supremely logical religion, but the ability to engage in critical thought in the Middle East is close to null.

In any case, here are the four theological topics which are most confusing and difficult for Muslims who are searching for truth. The four topics are born from Islamic caricatures or misunderstandings of genuine Christian teaching. I will make no effort in this article to show how Christians respond to these objections, though I am open to doing that if you are interested.

1) The Incarnation: How can God become a man? This has been scandalous since the very beginning of the faith, but it is absolutely essential to maintain this doctrine since without it God becomes further and further removed from our understanding. Also, our anthropology or understanding of what it means to be human, whether as individuals or as parts of a community, becomes degraded.

2) The Trinity: The period of Islam's growth and early spreading was marked by an extraordinary and effective policy of military subjugation which did not allow space for attempting to understand the Christian dogma of the Trinity, which was by then articulated in the language of Greek philosophy. Thus the rejection of the nuanced doctrine of God's triunity was firmly cemented as a form of tri-theism by the time Islamic scholars gained the skills whereby they could effectively dialogue with Christian theologians. Of course, by that time is was an article of faith for the Muslim scholars that trinity was somehow identical to tri-theism, so in spite of their academic abilities, it was simply not open to question: the Christians had to believe in three gods, even if the Christians said they didn't.

3) Corruption of the Bible: Muslims are taught that Christians and Jews corrupted the books which came down from heaven to such prophets as Jesus and Moses and David. This is, actually, not clearly supported by the Quran, but it is a common teaching today.

4) The Crucifixion: The prevalent interpretation of the Quran today indicates that Jesus was not crucified. Also, in Islam God's grace and favor must be identified with political and military supremacy, thus the idea that one of God's prophets could be reduced to such a humiliating death is fairly repulsive to Muslims. There are interpretations of the Quran which support that Jesus was crucified, but Islam refuses to or is unable to differentiate between the meaning of the Quranic text and the act of interpretation.

Orthodoxy, Abouna Zacarias, and the Trinity

Folks in the West don't usually think about the Orthodox churches' missions to Islam very much. In fact, most Western Christians don't know the first thing about Eastern Orthodoxy.

One of various Orthodox churches is the Coptic Orthodox Church. For those of you who knows something about church history, they are one of the non-Chalcedonian churches. That is, they did not accept the Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD) wherein the Church said that Christ had two natures, one human, and one divine. He did not have some mixture of natures, nor was one eliminated or subsumed into the other.

The Coptic Orthodox Church is based out of Egypt, and they are by far the largest of the existing churches in the lands of Islamdom.

Now there is one Coptic priest named Abouna Zacarias. (Abouna is simply Arabic for 'our father' and is the title used for a priest here.) He is a brilliant scholar of Islam and is hands down the best-known apologist for Christianity in the entire region.

If you would like to read some of his work here is a link. He is here tackling what is probably the single hardest issue one could think of: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Need I say that, technically speaking, the majority of Western Christians (Roman Catholic and Protestant) are probably heretics? I mean that if you keep asking questions about the Trinity and about the divinity of the Son you will generally run into a heresy. That is not because they want to be heretics of course, they simply have not read the early definitions and creeds on the matter. And the pastors who are responsible for teaching them? Unfortunately, the evangelical distaste for Catholicism led to a distaste for church history, and well, if you don't know where you come from you simply don't know who you are. So many of the pastors are ignorant of Trinitarian theology, even at a basic level.

Want to test your knowledge? Try this: name five heresies related to the divinity of Christ or the Trinity.

In any case, kudos to Abouna Zacarias for addressing these questions in an intelligent and direct way. He does not skirt around the fact that he is not a Muslim or that he does not believe in the Quran or Muhammad, as do many Western Christians when they discuss these questions. God bless him and his ministry

Chesterton on Islam

GK Chesterton was one of the most influential popular Christian authors of the 20th C. He was an Anglican-turned-Catholic and he wrote on Saint Francis, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the basics of the Christian faith, and many other topics. Here is a fascinating quote of his on Islam:

Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea “it is not well for man to be alone.” The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of monks. So even asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent. If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence)–to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and, the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

(Quote is taken from the article Allah and the Trinity)