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Word of the Week: W/C 19/10/15 - Trinity

17/10/2015

Three persons of the Christian Godhead; Father, Son and Holy Spirit

The Christian concept of the Trinity is crucial to the Christian faith and yet is extremely difficult to comprehend and a mystery even to those who profess to be Christian. Put simply it is the belief that God is Three persons yet one God (Tri-Unity). Each of the persons of the Trinity expresses the different characteristics of God; The Father is the creator, The Son is the redeemer and The Holy spirit is the sustainer. They are these three persons and yet they are all one substance (Homoousios) and so Christianity is a Monotheistic faith.

But perhaps rather than trying to explain how the doctrine of the Trinity works it might be better to explain how it does not work! There are a number of analogies that do the rounds to try and explain the Trinity; whilst these analogies do help to unlock aspects of the doctrine they are always destined to fail in some way (and this is in the nature of analogies). So I am going to go through a few of them to point out what goes wrong with them.

Image: northpennwater.org

H2O; Ice, Water and Steam

The idea is that H2O has three states; solid, liquid and gas. In the same way God has three persons. The issue is that H2O is never in these three states at once whereas God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit at the same time. If you were to believe this of the Trinity you would be guilty of the heresy (theological error) of Modalism; believing that God was the Father in the Old Testament, changes to to Jesus in the New Testament and then is the Spirit from the day of Pentecost onwards. However events in the New Testament such as Jesus’ baptism show this to not be the case; the three are all present at the same time.

Image: ClkerFreeVectorImages

The Egg

Sometimes people say the trinity is like an egg - having three parts (shell, white and yoke) and yet being one egg. This analogy is poor because the three parts are totally different substances and so it is guilty of the heresy of Tritheism - believing that there are three gods and not one.

Characteristics

Sometimes people suggest that the persons of the Trinity is similar to how an individual person has a number of characteristics; I am a father, husband, teacher etc. The problem here is that It denies the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity. Ultimately I am still me in all there three situations. This therefore is the heresy of Modalism again.

Image: inspiredimages

Three Leaf Clover

St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is said to have used the Shamrock, the three-leaved clover, to explain the concept of the Trinity. It is one flower and yet has three parts. The big problem with this analogy is that the three leaves. whilst they are the same substance they are not three parts of God, they are three persons. It splits them too much and again could be seen as Tritheism.

The Sun, its light, its heat

Finally, could we think of the Trinity as the Sun (Father) which generates light (Son) and heat (Spirit). This analogy has the serious problem that the light and heat are not separate persons, rather they are the by-products of the Sun. Therefore this analogy commits the heresy of Arianism; the belief that Jesus and the Spirit are entirely distinct from Father and subordinate to him.

So What?

Well if none of these analogies work then what can we say? Perhaps there are two potential responses. We could suggest that the Trinity as a doctrine is not really as important and relevant and theologians have claimed it to be. As Karen Armstrong has said:

“Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate” - “Atoms and Eden” ed. by Steve Paulson.

Or we could adopt the view that the Trinity is a mystery that is not going to be fully understood by us but we can just try to express it as clearly as possible. As the Athanasian Creed puts it:

“We worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence”

Word of the Week: W/C 12/10/15 - Utility

11/10/2015

Judgement about an action as to whether it produces benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness. Associated with Utilitarianism as set forth by Jeremy Bentham.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

For much of the history of Moral Philosophy those who have proposed ideas about right and wrong have done so on the basis of rules and tradition. Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Plato, Rene Descartes, William of Ockham, Nagel and Scanlon have all proposed various versions of rule based ethics. But in 1789 Jeremy Bentham, building on the work of other philosophers such as Joseph Priestley, changed the world of ethics when he introduced the concept of Utility in his work The Principles of Morals and Legislation.

Sometimes known as the greatest happiness principle, the principle of utility is the aim that actions should produce more pleasure that pain. As he wrote in The Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…

Image: jpornelasadv

So it was that Bentham suggested that when we decide how to act we should think about how much pleasure our action will bring about and balance that against the amount of pain we will cause. So if torturing one person will prevent the deaths of ten innocent citizens then this is a moral action. He suggested that we can make this decision using a calculus (known variously as the hedonic or felicific calculus) to weigh up the extent, duration, propinquity etc of the action.

Bentham was also a very modern thinker for the eighteenth century - he argued that every individual counts equally regardless of status and that there should be no distinction between the type of pleasure being assessed - "pushpin is as good as poetry".

Many students that I teach rather like Bentham when they hear about him for the first time - his disregard for tradition, religion and the authorities of his age make him appealing. However it does not take long to show that it is not really a very sound ethical theory. The two most obvious problems are predicting the future and the risk of ”might being right” at the expense of minorities.

First of all, how can we really make a judgement about what will happen when we take a certain action? Take the earlier example of choosing whether to torture someone - how can we know that the information he gives under torture is genuine? How do we know that torturing him will not anger others more so that they are committed to retribution? We could make things much worse than we intended.

Image: parameciorecords

Secondly, there is the problem that if we adopt the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number then that means that the majority will always rule over the minority no matter the action. This is often illustrated through the hypothetical example of ten sadistic guards torturing one prisoner. Their torturing of the one cannot be prevented as ten sadists getting some pleasure outweighs the pain of the one.

Despite these criticisms Bentham’s principle of Utility would go on to spawn other versions of Utilitarianism that would attempt to deal with these problems. Thinkers such as J S Mill, Sidgwick, Hare, Glover and Singer have all created new versions of what might broadly be called Consequentialism. These theories together have influenced popular and political thought in ways that Bentham could have only dreamt.

If you want to know more about Utilitarianism I would suggest that you look at my recent post about In Our Time and their episode about it - you can find it here.

Dig Deeper: In Our Time

8/10/2015

Image: www.bbc.co.uk

In Our Time is a long running BBC radio 4 programme, presented by the polymath Melvin Bragg, that discusses the history of ideas. It has been running since 1998 and has a huge number of topics (610!) available to download for free.

There are normally three experts in their subject who are questioned and cross-examined by Bragg - he knows exactly how to extract ideas from them and is a master of questioning. His general knowledge must be phenomenal - a true renaissance man!

If you need any further endorsement it is Mr Hopcroft’s favourite radio programme and he allegedly has a poster of Melvin Bragg on his bedroom wall!

The main BBC website can be found here. You can then click on Podcasts and find radio programmes by categories such as Religion, Philosophy, History and Culture. They are also developing a very good Archive for searching as well.

A few episodes that you might find relevant to the GCSE/IGCSE and A-level courses are (Click on the image to listen to them):

The Ontological Arguement

Utilitarianism

The Mind Body Problem

Free Will

Logical Positivism

Heraclitus

Ockham's Razor

The Trinity

David Hume

Word of the Week: w/c 05/10/15 - Stewardship

4/10/2015

The belief that humans are responsible for the world and should look after it for God.

Image: Stokpic

We only have to open a newspaper or turn on the TV to be confronted by that fact that humanity is facing a very large problem - how to deal with our environment and the effects that we have had upon the natural world. Climate Change is a phenomena that many scientists agree is being directly affected by human actions and in the past 40 years there has been a growing movement to ensure that humans act to reduce our impact upon the environment.

Christians have also been part of the green movement and there is a great deal in the Bible to support the idea that they have a special duty to care for the environment: As it says in Pslams: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it." (Psalm 24:1) or in Deuteronomy: "To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it." (Deuteronomy 10:14). Many Christians feel that they should care for the world because it is not really theirs but rather belongs to God.

This can be seen in the second creation story in Genesis 2 when God creates the world and then creates Adam to “till and keep” the Garden of Eden; many liberal Christians interpret this Myth to mean that they have a responsibility to maintain the world and use its resources sustainably. They will have to give it back to God one day and certainly have to pass it on to the next generation.

Image: ClkerFreeVectorImages

The wider debate is how we are to achieve this - are we to try and have the least impact upon the world by reducing, reusing and recycling straight away? Are we to turn to low-energy technology and renewable sources of energy such as wind, tide and solar? Do Governments have a duty to force us to adopt these practices? Should they be heavily subsidising the production of electric vehicles and taxing products with poor environmental credentials? Or would it be better in the long run to not try and interfere in the process of development and trust that necessity and market forces will bring about the changes needed. Indeed, there are many “Climate Change deniers” who argue that the state of the planet and man’s influence upon the climate has been over-stated.

Whatever the answer to these questions Christians still have many areas of their lives where they should consider Stewardship and the impact of everything belonging to God on their lives. Often Christians focus on Time, Treasures and Talents when considering how to act. This video from the Church of Scotland highlights the range of areas that Christians might consider in their lives: