Turning the Incarnation and Trinity from "Defense" into "Offense"

This post is meant to re-enforce (re-explain) and add-on to the arguments I began to develop in the post about using the Trinity as an argument against Judaism and Islam.  Some of the following material is a re-hashing of those points with additional rigor.  Some is meant to simplify that post.  The truly new material comes near the bottom of the post where I go into the Incarnation as an argument against other monotheistic faiths based on a double-bind present in God's approach to evil.

Frequently, in discussing the faith with members of other monotheistic religions (Judaism and Islam, in particular) the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are treated as embarassments for the Christian.  These two teachings - the two most distinct teachings of Orthodox Christianity - are viewed as compromising both the singularity of God (God's one-ness) and God's transcendence (God's un-changing-ness).

This need not be the case, though.  Far from being something on which Christians should play "defense," we should critique other theists for denying them.  How?  Take a look after the jump.

On Institutional Loyalty and Bias

Short post today - just a personal gripe.  One of the most common "popular" arguments against religion in general is to complain that no "free thinking" person would believe in it.  The insinuation is that people of a religious bent are not free thinking, but are "indoctrinated" by institutions that "control" what they are allowed to say or believe.

In contrast, the "free thinker" is liberated from these institutional controls to pursue truth wherever reason or science or whatever truth-mechanism they follow would lead them.

This shows up in television (shows as different as House or Battlestar Galactica), and in real debates (it was forwarded as an argument against a Jesuit professor by an atheist scientist on "60 Minutes" just a few months ago).  The implication is that institutional bias compromises religious thinkers and therefore makes their beliefs (including their religious ones) untenable, at best, if not laughable.

Basic Arguments Against Sola Scriptura

The title says it all.  If you're struggling with the basics of how to present Orthodox views on theology with a Protestant, here are a few of the basic ways to argue against Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura comes in a variety of forms, but ultimately teaches (in all its forms) that Scripture should form not only the core of how Christians "do" theology, but indeed should be the sole input into that theology.  This gets presented in different ways, which I'll label "prima scriptura," "sola scriptura" and "solo scriptura"

Prima Scriptura: The scriptures should provide the highest norm against which theology is checked.  They have a veto power over any theology, though other sources may produce theology.  Things not explicitly forbidden in Scripture are probably ok provided they fit within the general theology of Christianity.

Sola Scriptura: Scripture is the sole content of theology when properly harmonized with itself.  Theology that is not directly traceable to Scripture should be denied.  It is ok for things that are direct implications of Scripture to be believed and practiced, and it is ok for non-theological practices (i.e. style of music) to change.

Solo Scriputura: Scripture is the sole content of theology and ONLY those practices specifically COMMANDED or permitted by Scripture ought to be practiced by the Church.  Nothing else; nothing less.

Theism Part Four: The Arguments from Design and Consciousness

This post continues the prior post concerning teleology.  Having established that science, on its own, cannot be expected to answer the teleological question (why is there order in the universe?) or cosmological question (why is there something rather than nothing?) we are, by deduction, left with only two possible answers to these questions:

1) Things simply are the way they are.  No explanation exists.

2) Something made things to be the way they are.

As established with the Kalam argument and argument from a finite past in an earlier post, we cannot accept an infinite chain of causes extending backwards into an infinite past.  Rather, there must be a first or initial cause.  In other words, the order we observe in the universe is either caused or it is an occurance of blind chance.

This is the essential starting point of the argument from design.

Theism Part Three: Teleological Arguments

This will be a brief post, mostly to present a framework for a series of small posts I intend to do defending and applying the argument from design.  Despite the broad dismissal of this argument in pop-culture, it is alive and well.  When people say that "science has disproven God" (it hasn't - how could it?) what they most often mean is "science can explain the order of the universe, so we don't need God."  Indeed, gods have long been used as cop-out explanations for hard-to-explain phenomena (like lightning, earthquakes, or the rise and fall of empires).

Yet there are two critical things to observe at the outset when analyzing arguments from design.  The first: what sort of question are we asking here?  The second: Is it proper to think that science could answer it?

The Trinity as Argument Against Judaism and Islam

No, the above is not a typo.  Typically, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is target number one for other monotheists seeking to refute Christianity.  They accuse us of tri-theism or, at best, equivocation / ambiguous terms.

Simply put, tri-theism is a strawman (we don't teach that).  Incidently, that creates an argument against Islam since the Koran makes this a cornerstone of its disagreement with Christianity.  Since it seems logical to assume that God understands Christianity better than me, and I understand that Christians are monotheists, but the Koran does not grasp this fact, then the Koran is not from God (and Islam would be, correspondingly, false).

The accusation of equivocation or ambiguity is, from a philosophical point of view, stronger, but it is refutable through a strict rejection of pure philosophy in favor of the Orthodox apophatic approach (and indeed, the Cappadocian theologians who articulated the doctrine of the Trinity made a point to state it apophatically - that God is beyond number, beyond arithmatic, such that concepts like 3 and 1 can't fully apply).

Yet the doctrine of the Trinity can indeed form a core argument FOR Christianity.  More after the jump:

Theism Part Two: The Kalam Argument and the Argument for a Finite Past

This continues the arguments in favor of theism.  If you're interested in how these arguments proceed or why I'm providing them, take a look at the first post in this series (Theism Part One) where I explain that, or post in the comments and I can seek to justify why, in an Orthodox context that generally dislikes syllogistic argumentation, I'm providing a syllogistic argument.

The following two arguments work together as a sort of super-charged version of the argument for God as "first cause."  The first, the Kalam argument, is most likely the one people are familiar with.  Typically, people know it in its rhetorical (rather than philosophical) form: How do we know there's a God?  Well, who else could have created the universe?

In other words, there is an implied rhetorical question (called the question of "cosmology").  It goes like this: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"  Ultimately, people fall into one of two camps on this question.  They either say "There just is" (sometimes called the "brute-force" or "materialist" viewpoint) or they say "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing."

Of course, if we answer the second way, people are rather proud to ask what they THINK is the nail in the coffin against belief in God: "Well, who made God then?  Who willed that GOD should exist?"  Put more philosophically, the theistic answer can appear to delay the question rather than answer it.  The statement "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing" pre-supposes a "something" doing the creating.  That just pushes the debate back one, doesn't it?

Not so.  And I'll use the Kalam and Finite-Past arguments to present the reasons why after the jump: