Here's the latest. I've had difficulty accessing video-streaming, which might not be ready for several weeks but here is an article and a live-blog. I find it all very hard to understand.
This made me chuckle a little.
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A little background reading so we might mutually flourish when there are different opinions
3 comments:
Hi there! Thanks for the link to the debate.
I think a lot of the reason it's hard to understand is that they are discussing on one level a philosophical view known as "middle knowledge"; the big tipoff was the reference to "possible worlds."
Very simplistically, this view believes that any discussions about eternity (and others) must not be limited to the actual world and universe, but to all theoretically possible worlds. It's kind of like the game of chess, where the set of all possible remaining moves changes with each move, right up until the end of the game. A good chess player can anticipate these possible scenarios with great success.
So, for example, when Yandell said "if the Son is subordinate in all possible worlds...", he is formally stating (if I understand correctly) that if there is no possible situation or time when the Son would not be subordinate to the Father, it necessarily means that the Son cannot be intrinsically equal to the Father, hence the Son is not equal in essence or being.
Speaking of their use of "necessarily", that too is a specific philosophical term. Again, if I understand correctly, it states that something is not optional or that there can be no exceptions. For example, if the Son is subordinate in all possible worlds, it logically must follow that the Son is of lower rank as a required aspect of His very being, and thus not of the same substance as the Father.
Don't know if that helps at all, but it isn't exactly the easiest concept to grasp. But it does seem reasonable that it would take a high level of argumentation to even come close to shedding light on the nature of God as Trinity.
I'm thinking about blogging on the arguments themselves, but real life is interfering at the moment. :-)
Thank you very much - what I mean to do at some time is go through the argument very carefully line by line - video-streaming would help because you can tell a lot from expression - verbal and facial. But, yes, life has a habit of taking over so that this kind of work is hard to find time to complete. Keep me up-to-date if you blog on the issue - I will send the details to a forum in the US who are very helpful on this front and I'll update the blog as I go.
Rachel
Hi Rachel, here's the link to my blog. It turns out I'll have to make more than one post to cover it all.
trinity debate part one
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