Oneness Word Games

 In his book All in the Name, Mark McNeil discusses a word game that his old Oneness Pentecostal pastor would play in an effort to "gotcha" Trinitarians over John 1:1:

My Oneness pastor would often explain this text by asking, "Who is your God?" If you answered, "The Trinity," he then read John 1:1, inserting the word "the Trinity" each time the word "God" appears... This reading is [apparently] problematic for Trinitarians since it suggests the Word is something other than or outside of the Trinity, yet at the same time, identical to the Trinity. If we say, on the other hand, that the Word (or Son) was with the Father thereby interpreting the first use of "God" as a reference to the Father, he then suggested [that the Word or Son was the Father]....The Oneness solution is that the Word is simply an aspect of God, the divine plan or thought, and therefore can be said, rather poetically, to be with God but, at the same time, is, as an aspect of God, God. {pp. 65-66}

There is a problem here. I should say that, before addressing my thought on this, Mr. McNeil does a fine job of answering this in his book. I would add this comment: what is sauce for the goose becomes sauce for the gander. That is to say, I notice some equivocation in the Oneness explanation which is not allowed for the Trinitarians. After all, I could simply substitute "Jesus" for "God", as the Oneness Pentecostals do in claiming that Jesus is the one true name of the one true God. Now the Word is with (outside of, per their reading of "The Trinity") Jesus, and the Word is Jesus. If we allow the "poetic" reading, that "The Word" is Jesus divine plan, and yet that this divine plan is in some sense Jesus (e.g. we pivot to, say, the Incarnation). This is a neat interpretation, but it requires use to ask, as a former US President asked, what the meaning of the word "is" is.

As C.S. Lewis notes, there are different uses of the word "is," and they are not all equivalent. To say that God is love is not the same as to same that love is God--and indeed, the latter interpretation can have some rather disastrous effects. I would agree with the Oneness statement that the Incarnation "is" God, in that in Jesus Christ we have two natures--one human, one divine--which are united. Thus, Jesus is God. However, it is an entirely different use of the word "is" to say that the Incarnation was with God from the beginning, or to say that God was ("is" past tense) incarnate with a body and human nature from the beginning* (and, we know that Jesus' body changed in time, as He was born, grew, was tormented, dies, was resurrected). If we mean instead that this plan "is" with (outside of) God from the beginning, but also "is" God in the second sense (that is, God is present in the Incarnation), we have to the ask why "The Word" (divine plan) took on flesh and dwelt among us, as opposed to simply saying that "God took on flesh and dwelt among us." In some sense, this latter interpretation is what the Arians and semi-Arians were claiming.

It follows that there is no reason to force an interpretation which says that "with" means outside of (the Trinity), or alternatively that the second use of God must be identified with the first. After all, the Oneness solution requires that we equivocate on the meaning of "is." We could as easily read this to mean, "The Word was with [the other Persons of] the Trinity, and the Word was [a Person of] the Trinity," or "The Word was with God [the Father], and the Word was God [the Son]."

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*We would say here that God united his divine nature to human nature: rather than gaining or adding to His nature a human one, he instead added/united His divine nature to a human one so that a man has now also a divine nature.

Agnostics

James Chastek has a series of short posts challenging agnosticism. Most recently, he states that the term is improperly defined. The question is not so much whether we can be certain of God's existence (or non-existence), but whether we can be certain of the possibility of His existence.

It's an interesting argument--he claims to be borrowing it in part from Leibniz. It seems to me that this is an interesting variation of the ontological argument. Specifically, if it is possible for God to exist, then He either actually exists, or exists contingently. But God by definition is a necessary being, and thus is not contingent. Therefore, if it is possible for God to exist, then it is necessary that He does exist. Therefore, a consistent agnostic (and not an intellectually lazy "lukewarm" would-be agnostic) is committed to arguing the it is impossible to know whether it is even possible for God to exist.

If this argument is valid, there is a further implication: an atheist must therefore maintain, not that God does not exist, but that God is in fact impossible.

Vocations and Sanctity

As a follow-up to the post the other day about the possibility of Chesterton's being canonized, I should say this. Every person is called to a particular vocation (or set of vocations), and discerning that vocation is the primary job of every person until he knows what his vocation is. Thus, dating is a part of the discernment process for the vocation of marriage (which includes also family life as a mother or father), high school and college is a part of the discernment for vocations later in life (trade school and graduate or professional school ought to imply having already more-or-less discerned the vocation in question).

But this need to discern a vocation also implies that every true vocation [1] is a service to God and/or His Church. To quote from Saint Paul,

"But all these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to every one according as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free; and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink. For the body also is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him. And if they all were one member, where would be the body? But now there are many members indeed, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you. Yea, much more those that seem to be the more feeble members of the body, are more necessary. And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about these we put more abundant honour; and those that are our uncomely parts, have more abundant comeliness. But our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, giving to that which wanted the more abundant honour, That there might be no schism in the body; but the members might be mutually careful one for another" (1 Corinthians 12:11-25).

That is to say, there are many gifts and talents, and this is because there are many different vocations among the Church. Not everyone is called to be a priest, or a monk, or a nun.  And while those may seem to the positions of honor in the Church, the laity are every bit as important to the life of the Church.  To quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

"By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer" and ""Love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being" (CCC 898 and 2392).

Which is to say that there are plenty of lay vocations which fit into the life of the Church, so long as they are performed out of love for both God and Man.

If every true vocation is really necessary for the Church, then that means that every person who enters his vocation and does a good job of it for the glory of God and for the aide of the Church and community is being sanctified through his vocation (by God's grace, of course). Every person who enters a vocation which is his true calling is in effect replying to God's will for his life, so he is also making a sort of prayer of his occupations. He is also therefore receptive of God's grace.

If the Church really does need all vocations, then all vocations come with the possibility of sanctity, provided they are done for God's glory.  This means that there must be grace available, not only to priests and religious--the "Fathers" and "Mothers" in the Church--but also to "ordinary" lay mothers and fathers, not to mention to a host of other true callings.  That also would imply that people in any of these vocations are called to be saints, not simply by giving up these vocations, but by working to be a saint within everyday life.  Thus, for example, in the case of Chesterton, his vocation was to be a husband, a journalist, and a "secular" theologian and "popular" philosopher.  In his day as in ours, the Church needed all of these things, and Chesterton embraced these vocations as his own.

That the way in which sanctity is displayed while following these particular callings is different from the way in which a Mother Teresa or a Francis of Assisi made manifest their own sanctity does not take anything away from either Chesterton's own holiness, nor from the Church's own treasury of sanctity.  That his life gave testimony in a different way from St Dominic's or Saint Augustine's or Saint Vincent De Paul's or Saint Therese of Lisiux'z does not in the least diminish the witness of any of these saints, but rather complements each and all of them, so that all these different types can bear testimony in his own unique way.

To use an analogy (if one which is a bit cliche), each of these different saints had a different way of giving witness to their faith in, to their hope for, to their love of God, much as a group of blind men might describe an elephant by touch.  We are, after all, all of us blind to some extent, seeing at best through a glass darkly (see 1 Corinthians 13:12).  That the blind men each describes the elephant differently does not mean they are seeing a different elephant; rather, the elephant's description should be a synthesis of the men's descriptions, though even this will (of course) fall a bit short.  The same is true of holiness and sanctity, of the virtues (especially faith, hope, and love), and ultimately of God Himself:  the best description we can have comes from a synthesis of the lives of the saints, with a great deal of assistance from revelation (even the blind men working together can't ascertain the elephant's color).

To throw away the blind man's description of the elephant's tail because it does not match the descriptions of the other blind men would be to lose real knowledge about the elephant:  the picture would be less complete.  Thus, to throw away Chesterton's witness as a saint merely because his life was not the same as a so-called "conventional saint's" is to throw away a little bit of the mystery of holiness [2], to lose a little information about sanctity and service to the Lord.  Indeed, it would be to throw away a little bit of genuine knowledge about God.  How tragic that would be.


---Footnotes---
[1] I can think of a handful of "false vocations," by which I mean occupations which are not needed by God or the Church: but every one of these vocations involves some form of sin as the primary occupation. Thus, pornographers, prostitutes, abortionists, terrorists, executioners, and other jobs whose purpose is to destroy public morality and/or freedom are false vocations: they do not help the person who chooses these paths to become holy, and put the person against both God and His Church. That is not to say that such people can't find forgiveness or become holy, but a part of this is to leave the sinful occupation behind. Another way of saying this, I suppose, is that no occupations which is sinful by its very nature is a person's true vocation, so a person who chooses such a way of life is therefore also acting against God's will, and therefore rejecting (some or all of) the grace which would otherwise have been made available to that person.

[2] Again, this general argument can't necessarily be stretched limitlessly.  There are a great many people who are not saints, and whose lives tell us little if anything which is true about God or the Faith.  That is why there is a long process in canonization, including the necessity for two confirmed miracles attributed to the saint in question. Moreover, not every aspect of even a saint's life is necessarily holy (the saints are, after all, sinners too, and fallible to boot).  Thus, for example, the canonization of Saint Francis does not mean by necessity that we all should wear brown sack-cloth robes everywhere we go.

Against the Church Belligerent

Justice Antonin Scalia's son, Fr Paul Scalia, has an article in the Catholic Answers Magazine about one of the dangers of becoming too strident in defense of the Church: that we cease to become the Church Militant and start to become the Church Belligerent. He also gives advice for how to avoid that fate, to wit:

Of course, we do not want to throw out the baby (Church Militant) with the bathwater (Church Belligerent). Because we do have to fight. But how should we fight? How do we wield the sword without impaling our souls on it?

First (and last), we must be willing to suffer. It is not our job to correct everything. And trying to do so will only bring unrest. Yes, this means that at times we will have to bear wrongs and allow errors to go uncorrected. There are many rotten things in the Church, but none of them are of the Church. We must suffer to see the weeds among the wheat.

Second, holiness of life is essential. Again, the true battle is not out there, but within. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings provides a good image of true and false battles. In that trilogy the big, exciting scenes are of enormous armies arrayed for battle. But the more important storyline is that of the two hobbits quietly making their hidden way to destroy the ring. Their inconspicuous, unseen mission is the real battle, without which the armies of light are destroyed. So also for us. The most intense battle, the most difficult mission territory, the first place to be reformed, is hidden and unseen: the heart. And unless we tend to that first, all else is for naught.

Third, we should draw inspiration from and follow the example of the warriors who have gone before us. First among these, of course, is our Lord himself. He certainly fought—with the devil, with the scribes and Pharisees, with death itself. And he was capable of severity. Yet he directed his harshest words and actions not at prostitutes and tax collectors, but at religious hypocrites. He commands us to learn from him not because of his severity but because he is meek and humble of heart (cf. Matt. 11:29). Yes, he cleansed the temple, but he also wept over Jerusalem.

In some ways, I'm reminded of Peter Kreeft's talk on how to win the culture wars: the answer is to become saints. This is not to take the foolhardy route of saying (with the Sojourners and any number of other liberal Christians) that the way to win a culture war is not to fight one, but rather it is to say that it can't be a total war. The only "total war" which we can wage is against our own sins, our own demons, and even this can't really be won without turning to God first.

When it comes to the culture, to other people, we have to remember that winning arguments is not the real endgame: winning souls is. And winning souls is not something which we can do by ourselves. It's certainly not something we can do by argument alone, and an argument pushed too hard, absent compassion, absent personal witness, will likely as not push the person on the receiving end away. Arguments (meaning here a vigorous defense of doctrine) are sometimes good for catechesis--that is, teaching about the faith to people who are already at least somewhat sympathetic. They also are necessary in apologetics--defending the Faith from an attack, often with the knowledge that there are others around than the two people involved in the argument.

But arguments and particularly polemics have a much smaller place in the process of evangelizing people. This process of evangelization involves winning both hearts and minds, and is best accomplished through personal witness, tactful (and honest) discussions, and of course prayer (it is God and not us Who ultimately wins the soul).