For those
who interact with apologists for the Trinity doctrine realise that one’s theological
opponent is forced to defend an internally inconsistent doctrine; I quite like the title of the Buzzard/Hunting text against the Trinity from a Socinian perspective, The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity's Self-Inflicted Wound, which pretty much sums up what the Trinity is--the largest of the (many) self-inflicted wounds so-called "Orthodox" Christianity holds to dogmatically. This is not
just an opinion of a decidedly non-Trinitarian such as myself, but something
that the more honest defender of the doctrine is forced to admit. I just came
across this gem from Thomas McCall in a recent series of essays on this
doctrine. McCall is discussing the concept of “divine simplicity” and the
Trinity:
The doctrine of the Trinity gives us:
(10) The Father is not identical to the Son.
Meanwhile, some versions of the D[octrine of] D[ivine] S[implicity]
gives us both
(11) The Father is identical to the divine essence; and
(12) The son is identical to the divine essence.
Given the fact that identity is symmetrical and transitive,
(13) the Father is identical to the Son
Is strictly entailed by the conjunction of (11) and (12). But (13) is
the direct and explicit denial of (1), and as such it is in direct
contradiction to orthodox Trinitarianism. This entailment is heretical, of
course, but it follows inexorably from the identity of both the Father and the
Son with the divine essence. If the divine persons are all identical with the
divine essence, then (on the argument from (10) to (13)) the divine persons
will be identical with one another. Such a doctrine seems hopeless for Trinitarian
theology.
Source: Thomas H.
McCall, “Trinity Doctrine, Plain and Simple,” in Advancing Trinitarian
Theology: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and
Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2014), 42-59, here pp. 57-58
(emphasis and square brackets my own).
Hopefully, the more intellectually honest, sincere Trinitarian will, at the very least, reevaluate their adherence to the doctrine.
