We know something is amiss when apologists are compelled to sound the depths of absurdity. In Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2003) authors J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig confront the unenviable task of explaining the Christian Trinity. One explanatory model which they offer is ... Cerberus, in Greek mythology the three-headed hound of hell, a spectral creature guarding the gates of hades. That’s right – an imaginary three-headed dog to explain the nature of God.
In a more recent podcast Craig explains that this was never intended as an analogy, as indeed there are no perfect analogies for the Trinity, but that it nevertheless conveys something significant regarding the essential idea of a tri-personal being. Where the analogy fails, Craig elaborates, is that, if Cerberus should die and his form dissolve, the three minds of God would detach and fly off into space.
States Craig:
God is an immaterial substance or soul endowed with three sets of cognitive faculties each of which is sufficient for personhood, so that God has three centres of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. … the persons are [each] divine… since the model describes a God who is tri-personal. The persons are the minds of God.
and:
… just as Cerberus is a single dog with three consciousnesses, so God is a single spiritual substance or soul with three self-consciousnesses.
I submit that, far from being an elegant contrivance, this sounds as atrocious as it is, and we see exemplified the impotence and conceptual absurdity to which trinitarians are reduced in defending their model. We see the unfailing need for extra-biblical referents, concepts and constructs, to maintain what is clearly not a scriptural given. Why – oh why – must theologians conclude that, when God took on human form, this means there are two of them, and when again relinquishing this form but leaving his Spirit, this makes them three? I mean, the Bible explains itself. Jesus said, I am the root and offspring of David, in answer to the very controversy as raised by the Pharisees – how Christ could be God and yet walk the earth as a common man. If only theologians would take the biblical image – that of man – to show forth the nature of God – instead of a three-headed dog or whatever else – the lamentable trinitarian idea would have never arisen.
We see, further, the carnal and regressive notion of God as substance, and this quite apart from self-contradictory notion of an immaterial substance. Indeed it appears in the above example that a forth entity is being postulated, i.e. the dog proper supporting the three heads, constituting, as it were, the container or glue, holding together the persons of the Trinity. Not the biblical Spirit – or consciousness – but a spiritual substance constitutes the Godhead by this account – as indeed I always suspected of the trinitarian conception. Without question, the trinitarian reifies his God and, evidently, the more of them (up to a point), the better. While this may seem a reductio absurdum, I have observed it in countless conversations. Faced with the unitarian conception, the trinitarian feels deprived of two thirds of his deity, showing that the trinitarian glasses remain in place, even while an alternative is ostensibly being contemplated. But such is among the consequences when the cart is before the horse with respect to spirit and substance – when there is failure to understand that God is Spirit.
Why, finally, the need to theologise? Why the need for argument? Did not Jesus also say, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God? Why then, and for whose benefit, the intellectual acrobatics of theologians and Christian philosophers? I mean, no-one will argue at consummate length that the sun gives light or that water is wet. Insofar then as their recourse is biblical scholarship – textual analysis and the light of reason – they admit in effect that they have not seen God. From which we can reasonably conclude that they – meaning, the greater majority thus engaged – have no idea what they are talking about.
Of course this is shocking to contemplate. Let me state for the record my essential respect for Moreland and Craig as leading lights of Christian academia. Scholarship, however, is no safeguard against theological error, especially when the greater consensus is a stake. Our example illustrates the badlands of absurdity into which even the erudite plummet when compelled to defend one of the many misconceptions in which enlightened modern evangelical Christendom abounds.
Is it really so difficult to countenance that the church may have it all wrong?
As a writer myself, I am further aware that one wrong-headed idea – and here we may definitely include the three-headed hound of Moreland and Craig – when elaborated or defended, leads to a cloud of obfuscation, an exacerbation of confusion, and before long one faces the fact that one is writing gibberish. Of course, without something more than mere erudition, one may never come that far.