Q: I was talking to a skeptic who wouldn’t subscribe to the possibility of the Christian God being 3-in-1. I gave an analogy of a person being mind, body, and soul, and although this intrigued her, she offered that the mind was actually an extension of the soul. Do you have any thoughts or references that I could access to clarify my position?
A: Most Christian theologians conclude, and I would agree, that it is not possible to separate the soul and the spirit of a human. However, standard Christian doctrine asserts that the earthly body of a human is separable. When a human dies having committed his or her life to Christ, the soul and spirit depart from the body to be with the Lord in heaven. Thus, the body, soul, and spirit of a human is not a good analogy for the Trinity. Every member of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Spirit—have always existed and will continue to always exist.
This is also a bad analogy because, biblically, the soul is an emergent property that exists when a body and spirit are joined (Gen. 2:7). Furthermore, each of these three aspects (body, soul, and spirit) only make up a single human person, so it doesn’t correspond to the belief that the one God is three persons. [1]
As to how we can better argue for and establish the existence of the Triune God, I have found by experience that one of the best ways is to show people how science makes sense only if God is Triune. One example would be to point out that love is not possible unless there are at least two persons to express and receive love. The problem with strictly monotheistic religions like Islam and Judaism is that a nonloving entity supposedly created beings that give and receive love. How can the lesser create the greater? To put it another way, in strict monotheism, God must create in order to have any possibility of giving or receiving love. If God is a single person, he is unfulfilled until he creates. For the Trinitarian God, creation is an option. It is not a need.
This philosophical argument is often made by social trinitarians, who believe that the three persons of trinitarian theology are three selves in principle capable of interpersonal relationships. [2] Their reasoning may be summarized as follows:
1. Necessarily, God is perfectly loving (premise).
2. Being perfectly loving implies actually loving another (premise).
3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).
4. Therefore, if God necessarily loves another, this other must be within himself (from 3).
5. Therefore, God loves another within himself (from 1-2, 4).
6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).
The weak point of the argument is premise 2. Trinitarians who use this argument are being inconsistent in how they apply this premise. If we make an almost identical argument, but for another attribute of God (his perfect forgiveness), it leads to a clear absurdity: [3]
1*. Necessarily, God is perfectly forgiving (premise).
2*. Being perfectly forgiving implies actually forgiving another (premise).
3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).
4*. Therefore, if God necessarily forgives another, this other must be within himself (from 3).
5*. Therefore, God forgives another within himself (from 1-2, 4).
6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).
This reductio ad absurdum shows that, if we apply premise 2 to God’s forgiveness (premise 2*), it implies that God has an eternally sinful person within himself, whom he eternally forgives. To avoid the absurdity, the trinitarian must show that premise 2* is sufficiently different from premise 2, which is difficult or impossible to do on purely philosophical grounds, since the two premises are almost identical.
Of course, the trinitarian could appeal to 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”) to show that God is perfectly loving in a different way than his other attributes. But then the argument moves from pure philosophy to an argument from revelation, and a claim that the New Testament is best interpreted in a trinitarian way. This certainly won’t convince any non-Christian skeptic, nor will it convince anyone familiar with unitarian arguments about the New Testament and early church history. The New Testament clearly teaches and assumes that God just is the Father alone, and trinitarianism was not widely believed in the early church until the 4th century, which is hard to explain if it’s truly taught in the New Testament. [4] Even in the case of 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”), the context establishes that “God” refers to the Father, separate from the Son and the Spirit (4:9-16), so this philosophical argument (if true) would prove that the Father is multi-personal.
What then does it mean to say that God is perfectly loving, or that “God is love”? It means that, given the existence of another person, God will unfailingly love that person. It doesn’t guarantee the necessary existence of that person, any more than God’s perfect forgiveness guarantees the necessary existence of a sinful person. It’s possible to imagine a world where God never created another person, in which case his perfect love would still exist but wouldn’t be expressed, just as it’s possible to imagine a friendly person living alone on an island (he has no friends, but if he did meet anyone, he would befriend them).
The problem with polytheistic faiths is that the multiple gods possess different creation plans and goals. Thus, in polytheistic religions like Hinduism, there is the expectation that the natural realm will be inharmonious and filled with inconsistencies and unresolvable anomalies. However, centuries of scientific research reveal the opposite. The more we study the record of nature the greater level of harmony and consistency we see and the longer the list becomes of resolved anomalies.
Reasons to Believe (RtB) now explains why monotheism (i.e., the existence of a single perfect God) is the best explanation of the consistency we see in the natural world. This argument may well be true, for in most (all?) polytheistic religions, there are stories about the gods disagreeing and fighting over how to run the world. I’m not sure how effective this would be at convincing an atheistic skeptic, as RtB hasn’t yet argued for the existence of any gods in this article — could the consistency of the natural world be equally well explained given the existence of no gods? In any case, this argument is irrelevant to the Trinity now that we’ve debunked the claim that a single perfect God must be multi-personal.
Science, therefore, establishes why God in some sense must be uniplural, as the Hebrew word for God (Elohim) used in Genesis 1 implies. The uniplurality of God also explains why both singular and plural pronouns are used for God in Genesis 1:26–27.
These claims are very tenuous, and aren’t agreed on even by most trinitarian scholars. I debunked them at the beginning of this blog post. The fact is that plural titles like Elohim were used as majestic titles, not just for God, but also by the Canaanites for their own gods, for other humans in the Bible, and also for the Father and Jesus as individual persons (Ps. 45:6-7; cf. Heb. 1:8-9). As for the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26-27, this is almost certainly referring to the divine council which was with God in the beginning (1 Kgs. 22:19; Job 15:8; Psa. 89:7; Dan. 7:10, 26). The divine council’s decrees could be spoken of interchangeably as God’s own decrees, as shown by Daniel 4:17, 24.
One question that remains is why three Persons and not two, four, or more. Both creation and the redemption of billions of humans reveals a division of labor that points to three Persons. Also, John in his first epistle explains that God’s spiritual light in the world has three components: life, love, and truth, wherein the Son takes responsibility for bestowing life, the Father takes responsibility for bestowing love, and the Holy Spirit takes responsibility for bestowing truth.
Psychologists point out that when two people isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, they frequently become codependent in their relationship. A third person breaks the codependency. This need for three persons is illustrated in marriage. The bride and groom unite to become one, where the bride and groom become an ezer (essential military ally) for one another. However, for this alliance to truly build an increasingly loving relationship and an increasingly productive ministry, the married couple must completely embrace God as their ezer.
This argument for three persons is incredibly selective, and it shows that RtB is starting with their conclusion and trying to find premises to justify it. Psychologists also point out that good relationships involve respect for boundaries and giving the other person space if they need it. Does this prove that there’s a place where the Father doesn’t exist so that the Son can have alone time, which means God isn’t omnipresent? Psychologists point out that good relationships involve accepting each other’s shortcomings. God doesn’t have shortcomings, so does this mean that the Father and the Son can’t be in a good relationship and therefore aren’t perfectly loving? Clearly, RtB is simply assuming that God is three persons and looking for arguments to back it up.
In conclusion, the universe, its life, and God’s plan revealed both in nature and Scripture for the redemption of billions of human beings reveals the work of three supernatural Persons who are one in essence, character, purpose, and plan.
While there may be an effective argument for this, RtB certainly hasn’t made it. At the most, all they’ve shown is that the consistency of the natural world is better explained by monotheism than polytheism, which unitarians shouldn’t have an issue with. As for me, I’ll stick to the clear teaching of scripture that there is one God, the Father alone, and Jesus is his human Son, the Messiah, and our Lord (John 8:40; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:4-6; 1 Tim. 2:5).
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[1] For more on these three aspects of a human person, see my blog post, “Body, Spirit, and Soul.”
[2] For other Trinity theories, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Trinity.
[3] Dale Tuggy, “Antiunitarian Arguments from Divine Perfection,” Journal of Analytic Theology 9 (2021): 264-266.
[4] See my series of blog posts on the history of unitarianism and trinitarianism in the early church; for a more academic treatment of the data, see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988).
Aaron Welch wrote a similar article a few years ago entitled "The God Who is Love". It blows my mind sometimes how apologetics websites use such obviously self-serving arguments. Good to see you writing again!
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