i think that Joel's point regarding the title "First and Last" (and its various equivalents) is sound. Dee Dee Warren has an excellent article on this subject at Tekton.
also, i find it unfortunate that Dan goes off on an unrelated tangent in the course of the debate. this seems to me to be characteristic of Dan. he did it several times in his debate with JP Holding, and his first response to me in our present debate was filled with nearly nothing but irrelevance. in Dan's first post, he asks Joel in what sense Joel understands Jesus (and the Father) to be "God".
Joel responds with several answers, one of them being--
4)The oneness of the Father and Son consists also in the fact that, according to us, the Father and Son share all the same monadic properties. (A monadic property, such as "blue" or "weighing 5 pounds" is something that many different things can have at the same time. The monadic properties of God are things such as "omnipotence" and "eternity" and "absolute goodness" and "omniscience". Polyadic properties, on the other hand, are properties that can only be had by one thing at a time. Thus "being three inches to the right of Joel's computer" or "being the only brother of Joel who is younger than Joel" are polyadic properties. The polyadic properties of the Trinity are these: the Father is uncaused/unbegotten, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is proceeding from the Father through the Son.
it is also worth keeping in mind that Joel
specifically pointed out that this portion of his post wasn't intended as a point of departure for further discussion--it was simply an answer given to address Dan's question.
the answer is easy enough to follow: in what sense, asks Dan, do you (Joel) understand the Son to be God? Joel replies that one such way is his believing the Son to have all of the commonly called "God properties". it answers Dan's question. it is now time to move on.
but Dan, for some reason, thinks it necessary to discuss substance metaphysics--
Excuse me, but I'm thoroughly confused by the foregoing. Do you have monadic and polyadic properties reversed? Are not monadic properties one-place and non-relational while polyadic properties are multi-place and relational?
again, this has nothing to do with whether or not "Jesus is God". it doesn't even have anything to do with whether or not both Jesus and the Father actually
have those properties--a point which would have been equally out of context, but atleast somewhat related to the debate. the comment is, in short, unwarranted in the context of the debate. it loses the focus of what the conversation is supposed to be about.
at any rate, i certainly believe Dan when he says that he is confused. but the fault is his, and not Joel's. monadic properties are indeed "non relational" and it is
precisely because of that that they
aren't "one-place". "weighing 160 lbs" can be true of many things: it can be true of me, and the person standing beside me, and the desk upon which my keyboard sits ... it can be true of any thing or person, atleast theoretically. it is therefore a
monadic property.
polyadic properties, on the other hand, are "relational" and therefore they
can't be "multi place". although Dan ought to have been able to figure out--merely from his own descriptions of the two classes of properties--that his understanding was incorrect, i'll use an illustration to show the difference.
"having brown hair" is a monadic property. there can be three people standing in a row, each with brown hair. if i ask, "which one is Joel", and i'm told, "Joel has brown hair", that doesn't help much. if, on the other hand, i'm told that "Joel is
the one in
the middle", i can now pick him out. the person who tells me this describes him as he is
in relation to the other two with brown hair: he is not the one on the far right; he is not the one on the far left; he is the one
in between them--to the right of the one on the far left, and to the left of the one on the far right. this "in between" is a
polyadic (relational) property. it picks something out by a specific property it, and it only, has. this property is constituted by its object's
relation to other objects.
hence while Dan's confusion was justified, it is his own fault. Dan's understanding of the two types of properties was wrong.
on the side, Dan said something else--equally irrelevant within the context of his debate--that i feel like saying something about.
Joel, in explaining the sense in which we (Trinitarians) understand God, said --
5)In line with point three, the Father and Son are one because they mutually entail one another. Thus to have one implies having the other, just as to pull the first link in a chain with three links means pulling all three links.
again, the answer answers Dan's question. it is a decent analogy that describes the way we understand the persons who are the One God. Joel specifically pointed out that his response, on this issue, wasn't intended as a matter of debate. it wasn't a "proof" offered by Joel for the eternality of the Son, or any such thing. the appropriate response from Dan would have been something like, "oh, i see. moving along, then, ..."
but instead, Dan chimes in with--
This view, of course, assumes that the Father-Son terminology in Scripture is used literally and not metaphorically. It also takes for granted that language employed in the sensible realm is closely correspondent with realities in the celestial sphere. That may or may not be the case.
from substance metaphysics to language theory--anything but the actual point!
but to entertain Dan's various and wandering questions about the Trinity (which the participant in his debate has specifically mentioned not wanting to get side-tracked on), and since i'm not involved in the debate, i'll provide something by way of response.
Dan's claim that such talk on our part "assumes" that father-son talk is to be understood "literally rather than metaphorically" is false. it is indeed difficult to understand how Dan could even manage to jump to such a conclusion.
in such talk, the Trinitarian "strips away" all connotations that (according to most folk) can't apply to the divine realm, while at the same time retaining as many of the connotations as possible. when all of the "stripping away" has been done in this case, we are left with identity of nature, generation, and a loving relationship between two persons. in other words, something along the lines of the Logos, or the description of Wisdom given in
Wis. 7:25f. it is every bit as much a metaphor as Plato's saying that God is "the Father of all" because God is, in some sense, the source and cause of all things. metaphors don't cease to be metaphors because they are capable of applying more connotations to their referents--indeed a metaphor
has to have atleast
some common connotations or else it stops being a metaphor and becomes nonsense. a metaphor only becomes literal when
all connotations are applied to the referents, and Dan had no justification whatever in assuming this of Trinitarians.
Dan's further implying that such an understanding (the Trinitarian one) "takes for granted" a theory of language that sees a 1-1 correspondence between a word and a "thing", whether in the corporeal or spiritual realm, is therefore equally muddled. but as an interesting aside, Athanasius understood the "metaphorical" sense to be, in this case,
backwards. that is, he understood the father-son relationship between God the Father and God the Son to be the "real" relationship from which all father-son talk gains its connotations, and our human relationships to be a rather imperfect copy of the divine prototype. the human referent is in this case the metaphor, rather than the divine!
hence Dan was more wrong than even seemed possible at first glance!
TheologyWeb Campus
» World Religions Dept.
» Unorthodox Theology 201
»
GYM DEBATE COMMENTARY: Is Jesus God? (Joelkaki versus Godisoneperson)
