Tuesday, April 14, 2020

James Henry Owino Kombo on the Influence of Islam and Judaism on the Trinity and Divine Simplicity





The influence of Islam and Judaism:
God as His Non-Divisible Essence

The Early Islamic philosophy had more influence on the Christians’ idea of God than theology has been prepared to accept. The Early Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the second century AH (early 9th AD) and lasting until the sixth century AH (late 12th AD). The period began with al-Kindi in the ninth century and ended with Averros (Ibn Rushd) at the end of twelfth century. Thomas Aquinas appears to have been familiar with Mutazilite work and particularly Avicennism and Avorroism. The Kalam appeared at the very beginning of this age.

The Kalam theology resuscitated the Jewish-Christian debates on the problem of monotheism. This time both Judaism and Islam joined hands and defined “one-ness or unity of God as having to do with his non-material and therefore non-composite and non-divisible essence.” In other words, the one-ness of God was understood to be the common substance and the three hypostases reduced to mere essential attributes.

The Christian-Muslim debates that dated from the early ninth century indicate that the Oriental-Christian apologists tried to explain the Muslims the concept of the Triune God using the attributes ascribed to Allah in the Qu’ran. The early approach identified the being of God with the Father. Then the Son and the Spirit merely became his attributes. This approach is seen in the Al Kindi’s, Apology, which introduces wisdom and knowledge (alternatively life and knowledge) as the two essential attributes that together with the divine substance make a Trinity. There are also instances where the Father is associated with one divine attribute. For example, by 1150-1200 two Muslim works (Trinitizing the Unity and The Book of the Existing World) explain that the Oriental-Arabic Christians taught that God’s essence has the three attributes of Power (the Father), Knowledge (the Son), and Will (the Holy Spirit).

The response of the Muslims and the Jews to this type of polemics is interesting. The Kalamic School of the Mutazilites, for example, denied the existence of attributes in God altogether. However, the dominant Muslim group in the school of Asharism and the Jews accepted the existence of the attributes but did not see how any of the attributes could ever exist as Trinitarian personae. Later in the high and late Middle Ages the Christian authors in the Latin West would adopt many of the arguments earlier posited by the Oriental-Arabic-Christian polemicists, who saw the one-ness of God as a common substance with three essential attributes that (by necessity) belong to the substance and are one with it. Some of the early Latin-Western-Christian thinkers who used the Oriental-Arabic-Christian polemicists’ style of constructing the doctrine of the Trinity and employed the substance-attributes model are William of Conches (d. 1145) and Peter Abelard (1079-1142). In these thinkers we see the triad Father = potential, Son = sapentia, and Spirit = voluntas (in the case of William) and benignitas (in Abelard). The same triad occurs in Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141), except that this time more flexibility is accorded to the Holy Spirit: bonitas sive benignitas, amor, voluntas. A similar trend is noticeable in the works of Anselm. (James Henry Owino Kombo, Theological Models of the Doctrine of the Trinity [Global Perspectives Series; Carlisle, Cumbria: Langham Global Library, 2016], 56-58)