How the Trinity Impacts Everything

The Trinity as the Foundation of Apologetics and Christian Life

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. And today we have a very special guest, Dr. Vern Poitras from Westminster Theological Seminary. He is a distinguished professor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at Westminster where he's taught for, I believe, over 44 years.

Dr. Poitras, his academic interests include how Christianity and the Trinitarian nature of God impact all areas of life. And he's also spent much of his career studying and teaching biblical interpretation and hermeneutics.

So for those who are new to Dr. Poitras' writings and teachings on these specific areas, he recommends on the Westminster website where he has his bio posted there, he recommends several resources as places to start regarding Christianity and relationship to all areas of life.

Consider his books, Redeeming Science, Redeeming Philosophy, or Chance and Sovereignty of God. And a related book is, In the Beginning Was the Word, which looks at the Trinitarian foundations for language, which I think is very interesting.

And hopefully we can get into a little bit of that today. And another recent publication in this area is Redeeming Mathematics. And you could also find links to various interviews that he has appeared in online in various places.

So without further ado, let me bring Dr. Poitras on with us today. And perhaps he can take a moment to say, hi to everyone and maybe add a little bit to what I've just provided there by way of introduction.

There you go. You're on with Dr. Poitras.

Well, thank you for inviting me. Your introduction was fine. I don't think of anything offhand that I'd like to add. So I'm eager to participate in the dialogue here.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. I know that I've really lucked out with, lucked out, come on. Nice old Calvinist doesn't believe in luck, but if I can use the terminology, I've really lucked out in getting a lot of great reformed theologians and apologists, especially with this quarantine, everybody's home.

So everyone's open to do these sorts of things. So it's very exciting to have you on. Now on this show, if I can give you kind of a brief summary, we typically cover the topic of apologetics in general and presuppositional apologetics more specifically, and especially in the area in which presuppositional apologetics applies to like a wide variety of areas.

So for instance, in past shows, we've covered presuppositional argumentation applied to competing religious perspectives, presuppositionalism applied to canonical studies, how evidence relates to presuppositional methodology and transcendental argumentation.

We had the pleasure of having Dr. James Anderson on to talk about those issues. And people were texting me and messaging me, you need to get Vern Poitras on. I was like, all right, fine. He's probably gonna be too busy.

And then you responded to the email.

So I was like, yes.

So we're super, super excited to have you on. And I'm hoping that we can get into some really interesting stuff. I've tried to construct some interesting questions that perhaps you could unpack for us and we'll take it from there.

How does that sound?

Go ahead.

All right. Just a real quick by way of introductions for people who have been following the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel. If you haven't yet subscribed to the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel, I strongly suggest, if I was not doing this, I would suggest it.

Cause we've had some great interviews covering a wide variety of topics. But since I'm the host, yes, I would love for you to subscribe as well. On July 9th, I'm going to be having Dr. Hugh Ross and Jason Lyle, Dr. Jason Lyle, discussing a kind of an open informal discussion on the young earth, old earth creationist perspectives.

And so I'm looking forward to a very respectful yet interesting and engaging discussion on that topic. And also on July 10th, I'll be having Dr. James Anderson on again to talk about the differences between classical apologetic methodology and presuppositional apologetic methodology.

So without further ado, I'm super, super excited. I can't wait to ask these questions and have you kind of get into a little more depth. So we're going to start from simple to more complex. And so the topic of this episode was the doctrine of the Trinity applied to everything.

So, you know, that's probably a very intriguing title for many people, but let's see what we can do with that. So why don't you define for us the doctrine of the Trinity itself and then briefly explain its theological and apologetic importance.

Why don't you do that for us?

The Doctrine of the Trinity and Why It Matters

Well, the doctrine of the Trinity says God is three persons. That's about as simple a summary as I can do.

Okay.

Each of the three persons is fully God and yet they're distinct from one another. And the total package there is incomprehensible.

Hmm.

So you would say ultimately the doctrine of the Trinity is one of those doctrines that are mysterious, ultimately speaking, when we're trying to completely wrap our heads around it.

Yes.

Okay.

Not a lot of people like that. I think a lot of people, we don't like mystery in our theology. I think mystery is a very important aspect in understanding that God cannot be fully comprehend, although he can be comprehended as much as he reveals himself.

So, all right. So that's what the doctrine of the Trinity is. What do you think the theological and apologetic importance is of that doctrine? Why is it important theologically and why is it important apologetically, do you think?

Well, let's start with the fact that God has revealed himself in the world and revealed himself clearly in the things he's made. That's Romans one. And also he's revealed himself even in the very constitution of each one of us as a human being so that we inescapably know him.

That's said in Romans one, two. The problem is not lack of knowledge of God of that kind, but suppression of the knowledge. We flee from God. So once the Lord called me to himself, he revealed himself to me through Jesus Christ and through the Bible.

Once I became a follower of Christ, it opened more and more things where I began to see the hand of God. And God is the Trinitarian God so that everything you look at has a unity to it because there's a unified purpose of God and a unified plan of God.

And everything has a subtle diversity to it that is a reflection ultimately of the diversity in the plan of God, which is the plan of the father and of the son and of the spirit. I had a friend who grew up in a kind of humanism didn't believe there was a God.

He had an experience one day, he went out into a meadow and the meadow was so beautiful that he was overwhelmed. And he felt like falling down and worshiping, except he didn't think there was anybody to worship.

He became a Christian later on. So later on, he was able to reinterpret that experience. I've also heard of people who have watched films, not even Christian films necessarily, but films of the more profound kind that ask a lot of questions or that probe deeply into the nature of man or the nature of the world.

And they come away with an experience of saying, there is something very deep that I long to know and I long to experience. Well, that's an area of apologetics that people often don't think of because they're oriented to rational arguments.

And there's a role of rational argument. You see in the Acts of the Apostles, the record of Christian preaching and people bring up the fact that the Old Testament prophesied centuries beforehand, what happened when Jesus Christ came into the world.

Well, that's a strong support for the claims of the Christian faith. But people even beyond that, they have kind of intuitive, instinctive reaction of sometimes more intense, right? So becoming a Christian believer over the years, I began to take seriously what Cornelius Mantill as an apologist said about the centrality of the Trinity and that the apologetics shouldn't just defend a generic theism, but should defend specifically the God who is the only true God.

If you're a deist and you just worship a God who made the world and then walked away, that is not the true God, it's a fake God. There are certain parallels, certain similarities with the true God. If it's true that we need to present the true God, then it was worthwhile for me, it seemed to me, to think about how the Trinitarian structure of who God is, how that's reflected in the world he has made.

And actually some of the books then that you've mentioned are books of that kind that maybe they have some apologetic value to a non-Christian, but actually I'm writing a lot to Christians and say, wake up, we ought to see a lot more than what is suppressed because of the independence that all of us come into the world.

We all come into the world wanting to be independent, wanting to be our own God. We all have that in us. But if we're Christians, God has rescued us from that in a fundamental way through Christ. But that doesn't mean we don't still have remaining remnants of that same tendency.

So I wanted to encourage Christians and if the non-Christians are willing to read or listen, then to make them think about the fact actually you're surrounded by a pervasive testimony to who God is, but you're not, you're used to, you've developed a pattern of suppressing it.

General and Special Revelation, and the Knowledge of the Triune God

Now you said something about innate knowledge of God. I get this question all the time. Is the knowledge of God that all men have, is it the knowledge of the triune God? In other words, they have the knowledge of the true God, but does the knowledge that they have, that all men have, is it the knowledge of God's triunity or is God's triunity an aspect of special revelation?

Well, special revelation certainly makes it a lot more explicit, a lot more evident. But if you look at the special revelation, of course, is for new listeners, is the designation for the Bible and other material that is sent to specific groups and individuals at first.

It's mainly, it's the Bible now, although there are other things that God did that are not all recorded in the Bible. So you look at the Bible and it's a book, well, it's a collection of books as well as a single book.

It's a collection that's written over a period of at least 1 ,000 years and I would say 1 ,500 years or so, maybe even more, there are some very old parts. And the Trinitarian character of God is not revealed fully and explicitly until the New Testament.

Now, there are hints of it, there are shadows of it, there are elements that you can see in the Old Testament once you have the New Testament, but we have to understand that you can have a knowledge of God that's subject to development.

Now, that's with respect to special revelation, but it seems to me that there's every reason to believe that general revelation is the same way, right? That what is revealed is the true God, but that because we have sin in us that flees the truth, then we succeeded in twisting that material itself.

And if we didn't twist it, there would be hints of the Trinitarian character of God.

So would you say that the innate knowledge of God is innate knowledge of the true God, but our knowledge of the true God and our knowledge of his triune nature comes through a development?

Yes.

All right, but because there is both unity and plurality, even when we don't, within existence and in reality, our thought patterns are, they have to think in terms of those oneness and manyness categories.

We have to assume a sort of oneness and manyness to even think, but we don't have an account of that until our theology develops through special revelation where God's triunity is revealed. Is that on the right track or am I a little off?

I think that's right. And again, apologetics, we have a curiosity and an intellectual desire to understand things and that's given to us by God, although it can be twisted. But if you think about how God brought us into the world, we came in as babies and we learn a lot without reflecting explicitly on it.

Our skill in language, for instance, our native tongue is almost all developed before we can rationally analyze it. We can look back and rationally analyze it. Well, it's a similar kind of thing with the knowledge of God that it's there before it's rationally explicit.

Ontological and Economic Trinity in Creation and Redemption

All right, when we speak about the Trinity, there are these terms that usually pop up and they're used to differentiate different ways of understanding the nature of God and the functions of the persons within the Trinity.

Why don't you unpack for people the difference between what we call the ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity?

Right, there's only one Trinity. That's maybe the first thing that's being said. But the ontological Trinity, that's the label for who God is even before he created the world. Now, when he created the world, he's still the same God.

So the ontological Trinity continues to be the ontological Trinity forever and ever. The economic Trinity is a way of labeling the fact that God shows himself in his Trinitarian, three persons, one God, in his works in the world, beginning with actually the creation of the world.

Because if you look at the account in Genesis 1, it's rather remarkable that there's as many hints as there are, not only the one God, we take that for granted sometimes, but in the ancient Near East, it couldn't be taken for granted because they believed in many gods in the surrounding cultures.

And the Egyptians, for instance, had many gods. So you look at Genesis and the first thing it strikes you is God did the whole thing, the one God. But then it also strikes you that the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

So there's some kind of suggestion of a differentiation between God just described as creating everything and God present as the spirit of God in an immediate way. Well, that differentiation is actually comes to fuller understanding in the New Testament where we see that among the persons, the Holy Spirit is most immediately involved in dwelling in us.

That's right.

So he expresses the presence of God. Now, when the Holy Spirit is present in your heart, this father and son are also present. It gets, it's another element of the mystery. But the Holy Spirit is preeminently singled out as the one who accomplishes that and it's mysterious.

Well, similarly with creation. So when I look back and say, well, God redeemed me by sending the Holy Spirit to be present in me. Well, he created the world by sending the Holy Spirit to be present in the world and exercising the will of God in power and immediate contact with the world.

But there's another thing that happens in Genesis, namely that God creates things by speaking. And John 1, 1 picks up on that and says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, talking about the person that we describe as the second person of the Trinity or as Jesus Christ.

Once he comes, he takes on human nature and he becomes incarnate. And John, as the book of John continues, he expounds how that's so. But the background of that is that the one we know was Jesus Christ always existed with the Father and the Spirit and that he was the instrument, the one through whom the world was created by speaking.

So, and if you think about it, to have a created order, you have to have a plan that's preeminently the Father. You have to have an execution of the plan by commandment. That's through the Son. And you have to have the contact between that commandment and the world that is receiving the commandment and that is through the Holy Spirit.

So, some people have said, I mean, it's not likely to be accepted by anybody that isn't already a Trinitarian, that a purely Unitarian God can't do anything, can't create the world. Because it takes this differentiation to do the work of creation.

That's interesting. So this doctrine is, I mean, it's very, very important. I think not just because it's an aspect of revelation, but it has huge, profound philosophical implications as to how we understand these things.

And the topic of this episode, how the Trinity applies to everything, I would imagine that this idea of unity, diversity, and the interactions and the tasks that are accomplished between the persons are all related to the working out of God's plan.

I think it's very, very fascinating.

Yeah, they are. For the average person, I think, the way in which it could be immediately illustrated is by human fatherhood. Because some people think of, well, we call God Father, and that's kind of an extrapolation from our experience of human fathers and their care and their authority.

But actually, it's the reverse. God always existed as father, was always a father to the son, forever and ever before there ever was a world. And then when he created the world, he decided to create human beings who were made in the image of God.

There's actually, if you look at the verse, I know you, Elias, know it, but I'm saying for our audience, if you look at Genesis 1, 26, God says, let us make man in our image. There's been a lot of ink spilled over, what's the us?

Because this has been one God. Well, ultimately, I think it's a consultation between the persons, but it takes a lot of work to make sure that that's really the implication.

Well, I was gonna ask you about that verse. Do you think that that is a good verse to, I mean, because it's so much controversy over what that verse could mean or whatever, and people have spoken about the royal plural, where the royalty would speak of himself in third person.

Do you think that's a good verse to use as a cumulative scriptural case for the plurality within the one God, or do you think we should stay away from that verse if we're gonna use it for a larger case for the Trinity?

Yeah, that's a good question. It certainly would not be, what should I say, a primary verse that I would put most of my weight on. But once you have weighty verses that clearly teach the differentiation between the Father and the Son, for instance, in the Gospel of John, the Gospel of John is just full of this.

And also an assertion of the full deity of the Son, Jesus says at one point before Abraham was, I am, and the I am being a reflection of the name of God revealed in Genesis 3. I mean, the Jews knew what was going on.

They said, you're blaspheming. Well, he was blaspheming if he wasn't actually the true God. So there's things like that. And then you say, and clearly then the Father and Son talk to one another in the Gospel of John.

And so there's definitely a distinction. Once you have those things, which you do by reading many verses to make sure you understand, because we can never comprehend it to the very bottom. So you wanna make sure that you're doing justice to the entire witness of scripture.

Then you go back to Genesis 1 and you say, oh, wait, isn't this an anticipation? So it would be that kind of order. And at least some of the people who deny it's there in Genesis do so because they don't fully understand, I think, the way in which God had purposed that there be a whole canon eventually, and that the earlier passages be interpreted in the light of the later ones.

Yeah, so it's important to read the Old Testament really through Christological lens in light of what Jesus has come, that what we know about him with regards to the New Testament and seeing him in the Old in light of that.

And then when those verses like a Genesis 126 begin to make a little more sense.

Right, although there's two poles really, or two things you have to do, or I should say we have to do. And one is exactly what you say, or read the earlier in the light of the later because God intended it so to be read, right?

The revelation is progressive over time. But the second thing you do is you understand how wise it was for God not to say everything right away. So you can picture yourself standing with Adam and Eve or standing with the Israelites and Moses writing down Genesis 1.

You picture yourself in that situation and say, God didn't actually reveal everything we now know. And there's a profound wisdom in the way in which God does it. And so we don't need to say, well, if the Israelites didn't already have an explicitly well-worked out doctrine of the Trinity, then it's a terrible failure on their part.

And no, God didn't expect them to have worked it out explicitly. He did expect them to depend on the fact that he was the creator and the providential ruler. And as I kind of tried to hint, underneath that is his Trinitarian work.

And even in the Old Testament, whenever people are saved, you ask, how are people saved in the Old Testament? Well, there's only one way of salvation, namely Jesus Christ. Well, how could people be saved in the Old Testament before Christ did come?

Well, it's their benefits of the work of Christ are reckoned as it were backward. And there are types and shadows, there are pictures beforehand like animal sacrifice, like the high priest. There are pictures beforehand anticipating the work of Christ so that people can latch onto that, can have faith in God and his promises, but not everything is worked out.

So you have to have it to be saved. You have to have the father who's initiating your salvation. You have to have the son who is your substitute symbolized by the animal sacrifice. And you have to have the Holy Spirit who is applying that to you personally.

And without that, then people are just remain in unbelief.

Is the Trinity a Developmental Doctrine?

Okay, fine. Interesting.

Now, the doctrine of the Trinity has often been described as a developmental doctrine that developed over time, especially from critics of the Trinitarian position. They'll say, hey, the doctrine of the Trinity was developed over time and it wasn't really something from scripture.

It was kind of added on by later thinkers. So I guess the question here, and I guess this question would have apologetic import for some people, depending on their context. Is the doctrine of the Trinity a developmental doctrine?

And if so, why isn't that a problem for the Trinitarian defending his position against those who think the Trinity was simply kind of a later development with no foundation in scripture?

Yes, it's a hard but important question, I think. And in one way, we answer one side of it when we observe that people were always dependent on God as a Trinitarian God to be saved.

Okay.

So in the sense of, there's no development in who God is. He's always the same God.

That's right.

Right.

And whenever you meet him in the Old Testament, he is that Trinitarian God. So it's a matter of the rational explicitness with which that is worked out. And that takes time.

Sure.

And I believe then that the pattern of special revelation is completed with the completion of the New Testament canon. But then it takes the time still beyond that for the church to digest which are the genuine implications of that New Testament and Old Testament word of God.

To work out the implications, they're still being worked out.

Right.

And so there can be a tension because people feel, well, there's nothing to work out because it's all been given in the Bible. Well, in a sense, that's right. But we have to apply it, right? And the rational explicitness in the doctrine of the Trinity is basically working out explicitly and intellectually digesting what's already there in the Bible.

If you doubt this there, you can look at, well, I have a short summary in my book, The Knowing and the Trinity, a short summary of the biblical teaching and the biblical basis for the doctrine. John Owen has a little longer summary in a book that I footnote.

But it's very simple in a way. You can say there is only one God, both the Old Testament and the New Testament testify to this. The famous Shema, hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one. That's there and that's not the only passage.

And what's surprising to some people is that the New Testament is no less vigorous in asserting the unity of God. James 2 .19 and there's passages in the Apostle Paul and Jesus' testimony and go on. So there is only one God.

And then you also have verses in the Bible that show that the Father is God, that the Son is God, like John 1 .1, and that the Holy Spirit is God. And you also have verses that say the Father is not the Son and is not the Spirit because the Spirit is sent by the Father.

The Son sends the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, that verse in John 15, the way you have to have a distinction or you think of the baptism of Jesus where you have a voice from heaven. This is my beloved Son.

Well, that's the voice of the Father. The Son is there, visible in his human nature and the Holy Spirit dispenses the dove. So, but all this is incomprehensible, right? But in a sense, it's simple. You're saying all of those things are in the Bible.

They're unavoidably in the Bible, but it just took time for the church to realize we have to confuse all kinds of mistaken ideas, right? By people who try to get on top and master the whole thing. If you've mastered the doctrine of the Trinity, and so there's no more mystery than you are a heretic.

You haven't got the actual doctrine of the Trinity, but you've got something else. And that's what happened in the first few centuries. So you could see that in a sense, what's worked out there is what we have to say in order to guard against all these deviant views.

But the true view was already there in the Bible. It's set there and it's not that hard to see that there are verses that assert all the things that I've mentioned.

Sure, so two points of summary. So basically, if someone thinks that they have comprehended the incomprehensible God, there's an issue. Okay, that's right. But at the same time, saying that God is incomprehensible does not mean that he's unknowable because there are aspects of him that he has revealed such that we can know those aspects of who he is.

Number two, let me see if I could summarize. So basically, the doctrine of the Trinity is a developmental doctrine only in the sense that while it is taught in scripture, the church throughout time developed the language with which to talk about the Trinity in a meaningful way and within the context of responding to many of those other views out there that were not grounded in scripture.

Would I be correct there?

Right, but one of the things that happens when the church develops some, it's not very much, but it's some new vocabulary of essence in person, for example, one of the things that happens is that the people who don't refuse to accept this doctrine say, well, those words are not in the Bible.

So that's why John Owen comes along and it's this small discourse on the doctrine of the Trinity and he does the doctrine without any of the vocabulary, just Bible vocabulary, but he puts it all out there.

It's simply the extra vocabulary is what you use to summarize the thing, to compress it, right? So, but I think Owen was wise because in his day, the Trinity was being attacked and it was being attacked and saying, it's got this extra vocabulary that we don't find in the Bible.

And so Owen didn't object to that vocabulary as a summary, but he said, look, that isn't the issue. The issue is the Bible's teaching. It just goes directly to the Bible.

That's right.

It does no good to say that, well, the word Trinity doesn't appear in the Bible.

You've got a point.

The word monotheism doesn't appear in the Bible yet. It's whether the concept itself is taught in there. I think that's very important. Now, my next question is, just give me one second. My next question, let me just fix this real quick.

I'll explain what I'm doing when I get that on the camera.

I put the air conditioning on in my office.

It's hot in here.

Well, Elias, let me, you made me think of one more thing to stress the difference between incomprehensibility and knowability.

Right.

Because you can go off the edge in terms of thinking you have mastered God. You deny his incomprehensibility. You put yourself in effect on the level of the creator instead of the level of the creature.

But the other problem, which is just as bad in its own way, is you deny that God can be known.

Yeah.

And it's actually very central to the proclamation of the Bible that you can know God and know him truly. John 17 three is really important where Jesus says, this is eternal life. That you know, they know you, the only true God.

See, there's the oneness of God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. So he hangs the issue of eternal life on whether you can know God. You can know the father in particular, but you know him through Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

So you could see you've got the doctor, you know, the beginnings of doctrine of trinity right there in that proclamation. But it's a proclamation about you can know, you actually know the true God. That's his very strong affirmation as over against some of the errors that have actually been made in the course of church history where people get into a thing where they think they're honoring God by saying, well, he's so far away that nobody can really make a true statement about him.

That's just not true. It's God himself, of course, who has communicated to us in the Bible. And he assures us, you can know me, know me through Jesus Christ whom I have sent.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say something to that effect that, you know, God is so beyond us that even if he did exist, you couldn't know anything about him. And so you'll even have agnostic, some form of agnostic say something like that.

And I think, I don't know if it was Greg Bonson or someone I was listening to had a nice interesting response to that, that if God existed, we couldn't know anything about him. How do you know that about him?

Namely, that if this God existed, he's the kind of God that either is not known or cannot reveal himself such that he can be known. So even to say that we can't know anything about God is to actually say something about him, which I think is important.

So there's that apologetic application, but at the same time, that existential personal thing from a Christian perspective, we never wanna hold the position which will cut the thread, so to speak, of our communication with a personal God whom we're supposed to be in relationship with.

I think it's a very important element there. My next question is a little more philosophical, but then we're gonna do a U-turn and get back into the doctrine of the Trinity as to how it relates to some of these other areas that you've written on.

So we're gonna try to tie in a philosophical question and then tie it into how it relates to other areas that you are hopefully, hopefully, will be very familiar with, which I'm sure you will be. All right, can you explain for us what is, in summary, what is the philosophical one and the many problem in philosophy?

And how does the doctrine of the Trinity solve this philosophical conundrum? And then we can break the question. And then the next part is going to be, what is the apologetic value in solving this philosophical puzzle?

Okay, so what is the problem of the one and the many? How does the Trinity solve it? And what is the apologetical value in that the Trinity solves it?

The One and the Many, and Why the Trinity Is Necessary for Meaning

Yes, well, Elias, you know that what I'm gonna say here, I owe to Cornelius Van Til, who was the one who worked this out, who was zealous for apologetics that took into account who God is as Trinity. But let me try to put it, so in a sense, I can say Van Til did it better than I can do it, but I can do it in my own words by saying that the Greek philosophers and actually Chinese philosophical culture as well, and you can see it in Indian culture.

But the Greek philosophers struggled with how you brought together the fact of individual dogs, like Fido, let's say, and the species of dog.

Okay.

Or we might say dogginess, right? The abstract idea of a dog.

Okay.

Now, but the Greek philosophers got up on the wrong foot because they were skeptical of the many gods of the Greek pantheon, and rightly so. But they didn't turn to the one true God. They turned to human rationality as if it were virtually divine.

So they tried to work out without God, how can you explain the unity and the diversity of the world? If you start only with an ultimate diversity, like the atomists, the Greeks, some of the Greeks said everything is made up of atoms.

Right.

So you have all these atoms and they're all diverse from one another, but how do you build anything with any unity? And how come it is that we can see the unity of the species of dog? Is it just an accident?

Right, is it just a perception that is in the end an illusion? So you can see you can't, if you start with ultimate diversity, you can't give an explanation for why there should ever be, in addition, some kind of unity.

And atomism is an extreme form of it. And then there's nominalism in the medieval form. You can trace it into modern times. And then the opposite view was to start with a unity. Now, Plato was very much in favor of that.