Craig’s Model of the Trinity
The following excerpt is taken from Dr. William Lane Craig’s essay, “Tri-Personal Monotheism”, in One God, Three Persons, Four Views: A Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Dialogue on the Doctrine of the Trinity, edited by Chad A. McIntosh, and published by Cascade Books, Eugene, OR 2024, pp. 51-54. All emphasis will be mine.
Summary
In summary, we have strong scriptural grounds for affirming that
i. There is exactly one God
and
ii. There are exactly three distinct persons who are properly called God.
Now “a Trinity doctrine is commonly expressed as the statement that the one God exists as or in three equally divine ‘Persons’, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”46 It therefore follows that, as commonly expressed, the NT teaches a doctrine of the Trinity.
Model Component
So far as the biblical doctrine of the Trinity is concerned, the model component more or less takes care of itself. Brower and Rea observe that there is nothing particularly philosophically problematic about the above statement of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity.
The central claim of the doctrine of the Trinity is that God exists in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This claim is not problematic because of any superficial incoherence or inconsistency with well-entrenched intuitions. Rather, it is problematic because of a tension that results from constraints imposed on its interpretation by other aspects of orthodox Christian theology . . . neatly summarized in . . . the so-called Athanasian creed.47
It is these accreted constraints that occasion philosophical problems for the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. So one finds that philosophical articles on the subject of the Trinity very typically begin with quotations from later conciliar formulations of the doctrine, particularly the apparently incoherent Athanasian Creed. Protestants, however, bring all doctrinal statements, even conciliar creeds, especially creeds of non-ecumenical councils, before the bar of Scripture. To the extent that these formulations impose further constraints upon the above formulated biblical doctrine of the Trinity, I have no interest in defending them.
The biblical doctrine of the Trinity becomes logically problematic only if one interprets such statements as the following:
1. The Father is God
2. The Son is God
3. The Son is not the Father
as identity statements. Philip Bricker rightly warns, however, “Surface grammar often misrepresents the underlying logic: one must beware inferring logical from grammatical form.”48
The endemic ambiguity of ordinary language can make it very difficult to discern just when an author, especially one utterly unacquainted with the modern relation of identity, intends to make an identity statement. While biblical authors believed that the Son is God, they would have balked at the assertion that God is the Son, which suggests that we misinterpret them if we construe their initial belief as an identity statement.
Similarly, the same author who affirms that the Father is “the only true God” (John 17:3) also affirms that Jesus Christ “is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20), which again suggests that we misconstrue these affirmations if we interpret them as statements of identity.
Or again, the fact that the NT authors affirm that the Father is God and that Jesus Christ is God does not lead them to infer that the Father is Jesus Christ, in accordance with the transitivity of identity, showing once more that it is an anachronistic hermeneutical error to import the modern identity relation into these authors’ statements. There is just no prima facie logical incoherence in the biblical doctrine of the Trinity.
As for the metaphysical coherence of the biblical doctrine, it seems to me that a disarmingly simple model of the biblical doctrine may be stated as follows: God is an immaterial, tri-personal being. That’s it! No metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, no exotic stand-ins for the classical identity relation, no time-travelling fancy foot-stepping! God is an immaterial, tri-personal being, plain and simple.
We can gain some insight into this model by reflecting on the nature of the soul. Souls are immaterial substances, and many substance dualists hold that animals have souls. On such a view souls come in a spectrum of varying capacities and faculties.
Higher animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins possess souls more richly endowed with powers than those of iguanas and turtles. What makes the human soul a person is that the human soul is equipped with rational faculties of intellect and volition which enable it to be a self-reflective agent capable of a first-person perspective and self-determination.
Now God is very much like an unembodied soul; indeed, as a mental substance God just seems to be a soul. We naturally equate a rational soul with a person, since the human souls with which we are acquainted are persons.
But the reason human souls are individual persons is because each soul is equipped with one set of rational faculties sufficient for being a person. Suppose, then, that God is a soul which is endowed with three complete sets of rational faculties, each sufficient for personhood.
Then God, though one soul, would not be one person but three, for God would have three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality, and volition, as social Trinitarians maintain. God would clearly not be three discrete souls because the rational faculties in question are all faculties belonging to just one soul, one immaterial substance. God would therefore be an immaterial, tripersonal substance, just as each of us is an immaterial, unipersonal substance.49 This model of the Trinity is straightforward, perspicuous, and explanatorily deep. Such a biblically consonant view of the Trinity, while not committed to all the later credal formulations, seems to give a clear sense to the classical formula “three persons in one substance.”50 As a name for this view I suggest “Tri-Personal Monotheism.”
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, we have seen that the biblical doctrine of the Trinity affirms that (i) There is exactly one God, and (ii) There are exactly three distinct persons who are properly called God. Such a doctrine is prima facie logically unproblematic and can be straightforwardly modeled: God is an immaterial, tripersonal being.
47. Brower and Rea, “Material Constitution and the Trinity,” 58.
48. Bricker, “Identity,” 567.
49. Christopher Hughes arrives at a model much like this, according to which there are three Trinitarian persons who all have God as their substance. Hughes even suggests that this relation of “ensubstancement” “in certain ways resembles the relation holding between ‘multiple centers of consciousness’ and a human person with a divided mind” (“Defending the Consistency of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” 313).
50. William Hasker agrees: “The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that the three persons are together a single concrete being—that they share between them a single trope of deity, a single concrete instance of the divine nature. This claim can be modeled by the notion of a single mental substance, or soul, supporting simultaneously three distinct conscious lives, three distinct streams of experience” (Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God, 257).