I don't know the exact origination of the argument but some of it's very early advocates were St. Augustine and St. Anselm; then later Aquinas.
Perhaps the most famous philosopher and advocate of this argument in our era is Richard Swinburne. He states the argument like this:
"There is something profoundly imperfect and therefore inadequately divine in a solitary divine individual. If such an individual is love, he must share, and sharing with finite beings such as humans is not sharing all of one's nature and so is imperfect sharing. A divine individual's love has to be manifested in a sharing with another divine individual, and that (to keep the divine unity) means (in some sense) within the Godhead, that is, in mutual dependence and support." (Swinburne, The Christian God [Oxford University Press, USA, November 24, 1994], p. 190)It first came to my attention by perhaps one of the most popular and best apologists in Christianity, William Lane Craig in one of his debates with Muslim Apologist Shabir Ally:
"In fact, I like to finish out my first contention by offering an argument for why I think it’s plausible to think that God is a Trinity. To begin with, God is by definition the greatest conceivable Being; if you could think of any thing greater than God then that would be God. [DSS would satisfy this – DK]Sam Shamoun adds:
Now as the greatest conceivable being God must be perfect… if there were any imperfection in God then he would not be the greatest conceivable Being. Now a perfect Being must be a loving Being for love is a moral perfection. It is better for a person to be loving than unloving. God, therefore, must be a perfectly loving Being.
Now it is of the very nature of love to give oneself away. Love reaches out to another person rather than centering wholly in oneself. So if God is perfectly loving, by his very nature he must be giving his love to another.
But who is that other?
It cannot be any created person since creation is the result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love but it does not belong to his essence to create. God is necessarily loving but he is not necessarily creating; so we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and yet no created persons exist. So created persons cannot be the sufficient explanation of whom God loves. Moreover, we know from science that created persons have not always existed from eternity, but God is eternally loving. So, again, created persons alone are not sufficient to explain who the other is to whom God’s love is necessarily directed. It follows, therefore, that that other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God himself.
In other words, God is not a single, isolated individual as Islam holds; rather God is a plurality of Persons as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity holds. On the Islamic view God is not a Triad of Persons, he is a single person who does not give himself away in love essentially to another. He is focused essentially only upon himself, and hence he cannot be the most perfect being.
But on the Christian view God is a Triad of Persons in eternal, self-giving love relationships. Thus, since God is essentially loving the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian doctrine of God, such as Islam. Why? Because God is by nature a perfect Being of self-giving love."
"Being able to create doesn’t necessitate a relationship between two parties. After all, God doesn’t have to create something in order to be all-powerful or self-sufficient since his ability to create doesn’t depend on the existence of more than one entity. It merely depends on his having enough power to create whatever he pleases.
Divine love, however, is different in that love presupposes a relationship with more than one party. Hence, if God weren’t sharing his love with someone then he wouldn’t be perfectly loving since perfect love only exists between at least two persons, i.e. the Lover and the Beloved.
Furthermore, forgiveness is a result of God being love, i.e. that God is willing to forgive those who offend and hurt him on the grounds that he is love and, therefore, loves them...Yet forgiveness is not required for God to be perfectly loving provided that those he loves are living in perfect union and fellowship with him. It is only when such persons sin that God would need to show forgiveness, provided that he does love them."I believe the following quote provided by Ralph Smith is among the most plausible variations of the argument I have witnessed:
“Of all the gods in all the religions of the world, only the triune God of the Bible is truly and wholly personal. This point is often not recognized, so we will dwell on it briefly. First, consider the non-Christian theism embraced by Jews and Muslims, the belief in a single god who rules the world. By itself, theism will not suffice to give us a truly personal god, for a god who is utterly and simply one—a mere monad—fails to have the qualities we know to be essential to personality. Although an absolute monad, like the god of Islam, is the most exalted non-Christian idea of deity, a monad is a being who is eternally alone—with no other to love, no other with whom to communicate, and no other with whom to have fellowship. In the case of such a solitary god, love, fellowship, and communication cannot be essential to his being. Indeed, they are not part of the monad at all. But without these qualities it is difficult to imagine that the deity so understood is in any meaningful sense personal. To conceive of a god who does not know love, a god who has never shared, a god for whom a relationship with another is eternally irrelevant, is to conceive of an abstraction, an idea or a thing more than a person.
If, to make his god more personal, a believer in such a deity suggested that this god loved the world after he created it, the result would be a god who changes in time and who needs the world in order to grow into his self-realization as a god of love—a god who becomes personal only with the help of the creation. Suppose one asserted that the monad loved the world from eternity? Then the personality of this deity and his attribute of love would still depend for their existence on the world he created. Creation would be a necessary act of self-becoming. For, unless this deity created the world, he could not realize the love that had been eternally hidden in him, waiting for its time to shine forth.
In either case, we would have theism of a sort. Both cases would be attempts to obtain a monad for whom love had some meaning. However, these attempts succeed in exalting the monad ethically by demoting him ontologically, for he is no longer absolute, no longer transcendent. We would have to admit that he could no longer truly be god, and that a god who varies or a god who is dependent on the world that he creates is not worthy to be regarded as a deity. Be that as it may, in either of these cases, though the idea of love has been imported into an inchoate theism, we are clearly far from the biblical concept of a personal fellowship of love among equals. Of course, neither orthodox Jews nor orthodox Muslims imagine their god as a changing or contingent being. They would not think of revising their views of god to enhance his image and compensate for his lack of personal qualities. It follows that they must be satisfied with a god who exists in an eternal vacuum, even though they will find irresistible the temptation to ascribe personality to the monad…
What we have said here about love applies to other attributes of God also. In the Bible, words like righteousness, faithfulness, and goodness refer to divine attributes that ultimately require the doctrine of the Trinity. None of these notions can be defined biblically apart from the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit. Even outside of the biblical worldview, they cannot really be defined apart from the context of interpersonal relationship. Righteousness for a lonely monad simply has no specific content. Righteousness for the triune God means that each of the persons respects and preserves the boundaries of the others. The Father honors the Son and does not allow the infringement of what belongs to the Son. Goodness refers to their mutual seeking of blessing for one another, faithfulness to their keeping their word with one another. In the absence of a relationship among persons, these and similar words become so utterly abstract that meaning disappears. They may describe the monad’s relationship to the world, but that brings up the same problems that appeared when we considered the meaning of love.” (Smith, Trinity and Reality: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, pp. 18-19.)Finally in-conjunction with an argument against Islamic Monotheism, the following author argues this kind of monotheism produces an impersonal object as a deity:
“The unity of God is unique. It is the only unity of the kind. An individual man is one; and any individual creature or thing is one. But there are others like it, each of which is likewise numerically one. God is not merely one, but the only one; not merely unus (one), but unicus (unique). He is not one of a species or one in contrast with another of the same kind. God is one God and the only God. The notion of the unique must be associated with that of unity in the instance of the Supreme Being. God is not a unit, but a unity. A unit, like a stone or a stick, is marked by mere singleness. It admits no interior distinctions and is incapable of that inherent trinality which is necessary to self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Mere singleness is incompatible with society, and therefore incompatible with divine communion and blessedness. God is blessed only as he is self-knowing and self-communing. A subject without an object could not experience either love or joy. Love and joy are social. They imply more than a single person. The scriptural doctrine of divine plenitude favors distinctions in divine essence. Fullness of being implies variety of existence. A finite unit has no plurality or manifoldness. It is destitute of modes of subsistence. Meagerness and barrenness mark a unit; opulence and fruitfulness mark a unity. This plērōma or plenitude of divine essence is spoken of in the following: “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19) and “the fullness of the Godhead” (Col. 1:19; 2:9). Owen (in his work Doctrine of the Trinity Vindicated) remarks that “it may be true that in one essence there can be but one person, when the essence is finite and limited, but not when the essence is infinite.” [Shedd, W. G. T., & Gomes, A. W. (2003). Dogmatic theology (3rd ed.) (222). Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R Pub.]
No comments:
Post a Comment