Did Van Til say “One Person & Three Persons? -Yes!

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today I'm going to be covering Cornelius Van Till and his view on the Trinity. So we're gonna be talking about the Trinity today, a little bit about how it relates to apologetics, we'll even talk a little bit about the nature of covenant and why that's important in understanding how we relate to God, how the world relates to God, and how that's related to apologetics as well.

Van Til, the Trinity, and the Apologetics Connection

And so this is kind of a an episode that will be primarily for the Christian who wants to kind of understand the ins and outs of Van Till's view of the Trinity and and why he described the Trinity in the way that he did in some of his works that has been a cause for some confusion, okay?

So that's what we're gonna be doing tonight. There's a lot of things going on here from the politics in this country to the fall of Pastor Stephen Lawson, I just read about that on social media, and a debate between William Lane Craig and Muhammad Hijab on the Trinity.

That was interesting, I just watched that full debate today on my way home from work. So there's a lot of things going on, some interesting things, some unfortunate things of course. I'm not going to be commenting too much on those things now but just to put them on your radar if you're not aware.

So there's a lot to be talking about in the world today, but tonight I'm going to be focusing on theology and the Trinity and Cornelius Van Till's views and things like that. So I just wanted to throw that out there, some interesting stuff going on.

If you are interested in debates on the Trinity, I did think that the interaction between Dr. William Lane Craig and Muhammad Hijab was actually interesting. I want to reserve my thoughts of what I thought about the debate and hopefully maybe I can get an expert on the show and maybe do a review of the debate.

I do really think that it was very fascinating. Muhammad Hijab is a very interesting individual. I actually met Muhammad Hijab years back when he came to New York and debated David Wood. So I was able to briefly meet David Wood so quick, not even shake a hand, nice to meet you, that was it.

And then I was sitting, it was a big auditorium, I was sitting on the wrong side. Apparently the Christians were sitting on the left and the Muslims were sitting on the right. And I was sitting with the Muslims and I think Muhammad Hijab and some others approached me and were greeting me, hey brother, how's it going?

I'm like, hey, I'm actually a Christian. He's like, oh it's okay, you know. I was sitting on the wrong side. I thought that was hilarious. But I got to talk to some really nice Muslims, had some great conversations, and then afterwards I met Muhammad Hijab in the parking lot where we talked a little bit about Christianity and Islam and some theology, maybe like five or ten minutes.

And I think it was Ali Dawa was there as well, kind of his crew there. That was the first time I kind of interacted with him and heard of him, really. But then to hear him debate William Lane Craig on the Trinity, I was like, yeah, I got to listen to this.

So check it out. I think it was over at Capturing Christianity. I'm sure there'll be reviews and responses and things like that. So nevertheless, the topic tonight is the Trinity. I don't think, although feel free, if you have any questions, I'll try to address them.

My voice is kind of, I feel my voice kind of going a little bit. As you guys know, I'm a teacher during the day, so I'm always talking. So we'll see how well I do tonight. If you do have a question, I will try my best to answer it.

The topic today is a little difficult, but if you stick with me, I promise I will try to simplify things after laying out the details. I will simplify things for folks who are like, well, what is all this about?

What is he talking about? So I'll try my best to do that. And please forgive me beforehand. I'll be reaching over for my water multiple times because my throat feels a little dry. So bear with me with that as well.

So hello, Michelle. God bless you. Thank you for coming in and listening in. Matt Bell, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. And we have some people trickling in here in the live.

So welcome as well. So I hope this topic is of interest to you. So now what's the big deal with all of this? If you guys saw the thumbnail, it's kind of making the assertion that Vant Hill defined the Trinity as one person and three persons.

One person and three persons. Now of course, this is important because that wording at first glance has the impression of a blatant logical contradiction. As a matter of fact, oftentimes when Christian theologians speak of the doctrine of the Trinity, or Christian apologists are defending the doctrine of the Trinity, we will often highlight the importance of properly defining the Trinity.

When I teach my students, I teach them that the best way, one of the best ways to defend the Trinity, whether it's against Muslims or Unitarians or things like that, it really boils down to properly defining the Trinity.

So oftentimes critiques of the Trinity are based upon misunderstandings of the Trinity, and not always. Sometimes someone will properly understand the Trinity but disagree with it and offer their reasons, and so you have those sorts of discussions.

But we want to make sure that we know what the Trinity is, okay? We are not saying, in essence, that God is one person and three persons. Now, is Vant Hill saying that? Yes, but he doesn't mean what you think it means at face value.

And of course, maybe this is the fault of Vant Hill, and the way he communicated often wasn't the best, but I don't think that he was blatantly affirming a contradiction, okay? And so that's what I want to talk about tonight, okay?

So, Cornelius Vant Hill, just to get this out at the beginning, just looking at the thumbnail, he did not believe that God was one person and three persons, ready, in the same sense. That's important, okay?

Okay, that would be a contradiction, because remember, the second law of logic, okay, the law of non-contradiction states that a statement cannot be both true and false. Here's the key part. It can't be true and false at the same time and in the same sense, okay?

So there are different senses in which one can use a term, and, you know, understanding those senses will alleviate any contradiction, any apparent contradiction, okay? Now, Vant Hill, Vant Hill's way of speaking about the Trinity, because he used this language, which I'm going to get into now, led to misunderstandings, and I think appropriately so.

But if you read Vant Hill, and you kind of read what he means, it becomes evident very quickly that he doesn't mean what it seems to be what he means, namely, that God is one person and three persons in that blatant way that sounds contradictory, okay?

But again, if you take his statement here in the Introduction to Systematic Theology, page 229, he says, quote, Vant Hill says, he says, we do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person, okay?

Now, that appears contradictory, but I think it requires a deeper understanding of Vant Hill's theological intent, especially within his presuppositional framework and things like this. Just to give folks a heads-up, this episode is live, it is not pre-recorded, okay?

The previous one was pre-recorded, but this one is live, so just throw that out there, folks are asking. All right? So if you search Vant Hill's works, you will read in Vant Hill where he says God is one person and three persons, but again, this statement needs to be understood in its proper theological context.

Vant Hill is not suggesting that God is one person in the same way he is three persons, okay? He's emphasizing, rather, the different aspects of God's unity and plurality within the mystery of the Trinity, and this is really important.

So let's kind of explore what he actually meant, and then why it's actually important to understand those distinctions. Now again, I would not define, okay, I would not define the Trinity in the way that Vant Hill defined it.

Not because I don't think it's a contradiction, I just think it can be easily confusing, okay? So there you go. So I think the Trinity is the belief that there is one God who exists as three persons. So God is one in being, one in nature and essence, three in person.

So you know how you've read a systematic theology, God is one what and three who's, right? There is one God, we affirm monotheism, but this one God is a triunity of persons, okay? Vant Hill is saying God is one person and three persons, but he's not saying God is one person and three persons in the same sense, okay?

There are different senses in which we could understand this, okay? So again, so this is not a contradiction. Easily confused, you know, it can be confusing, but it's not a contradiction if you kind of take a look at what he actually was saying.

So when Vant Hill said that God is one person, he's not denying the classical distinction between one essence and the three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. Instead, Vant Hill is emphasizing that the God of Scripture is ultimately personal rather than an abstract force or an impersonal force, and his use of one person in this sense is meant to stress that God's unity is not a bare or abstract oneness, but a personal unity.

And this is critical, I think, in Vant Hill's theology, which holds that God is not simply a metaphysical essence, but a personal being who relates to his creation, okay? And so when Vant Hill affirmed that God is also three persons, he's affirming the classical doctrine of the Trinity, that the one God exists as three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And these persons are not separate gods, but share one undivided essence, fully co-equal, fully co-eternal, okay? So that's a really important thing to keep in mind with respect to how Vant Hill understood the Trinity.

So Vant Hill is not affirming a logical contradiction, I know people claim that. If someone...now, I'm not...let me say this. Vant Hill is not a perfect theologian, but it is very interesting to read some of the criticisms of his positions, okay?

You can see that a lot of the criticisms don't take the time to hear him in his own context. For example, you know, Alvin Plantinga, who's a brilliant Christian philosopher, once said that Vant Hill thinks that unbelievers don't have knowledge, that Vant Hill's view is that the unbeliever doesn't know anything.

Well, that's clearly false, that's not what Vant Hill taught. As a matter of fact, he taught the complete opposite. So it's often the case when people are criticizing Vant Hill, it's interesting to see how often people take him out of context.

Now, I'm saying this, obviously I'm a Vantillian, but I wouldn't say that Vant Hill was perfect or he expressed himself perfectly. I'm sure there are aspects of his theology that, you know, when you take a closer look, like, I'm not sure what he's trying to do there.

I get that. But in these specific areas, I think he warrants a closer look and a fair hearing so that we can appreciate some of the more sophisticated nuances that he made when explaining his views, okay?

So no, so Vant Hill is not affirming a logical contradiction, okay? A contradiction would occur if someone claimed that God is one person and three persons, pardon, in the same sense, or that God is one in essence and three in essence.

But Vant Hill carefully maintained the distinction between God's one essence and his three persons, and so when he used the term person in two different senses, it was to make a distinctive point, alright?

So, one person refers to the fact that God is a personal being, not an impersonal substance, okay? So God is, when Vant Hill calls God one person, he's talking about his nature as being ultimately, foundationally, personal.

That's why Vant Hill would refer to God as absolute personality. There is nothing within God that has an impersonal aspect to him, okay? The three persons refers to the distinct persons of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And so Vant Hill's language, and I agree with this, it appears contradictory, but it's actually not, okay? When you actually understand why he's saying what he's saying. And so he wanted to emphasize the personal nature of God's unity, while also maintaining the proper distinction of persons within the Trinity, okay?

And so those distinctions, I think, are important to keep in mind if you're going to understand, you know, where he's coming from in terms of his understanding of the Trinity, and why he uses the language that he does.

Is the language confusing? Yeah, I think it is, but when you read him in context, I think you could make sense out of what he's trying to say. And so while we can disagree with how he phrases things, I think if you are Trinitarian, you could agree with basically what he's saying in terms of how he understands the Trinity, okay?

And so despite the whole controversy that was surrounding the phraseology that he used, Vant Hill, I think, remained well within the bounds of Orthodox Trinitarian theology, and he upheld the classical Christian creeds, right?

The Nicene Creed, the Athanasius Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and so forth, okay? Which affirm that God is one in essence and three in persons. Vant Hill would affirm that. And so Vant Hill's formulation can be understood as his way of safeguarding the mystery of the Trinity.

He emphasizes that God's unity and plurality are not comparable to anything in creation, and should not be understood through human categories alone. That's key. And so for Vant Hill, divine mystery, in a sense, must be affirmed and accepted, rather than domesticated by human reasoning.

And so Vant Hill's presuppositional method, again, his apologetic flowed from his theology, was deeply rooted in the creator-creature distinction, okay? Now when we talk about metaphysics of a worldview, for Vant Hill, this is key, okay?

One of the most fundamental, the most fundamental aspect of the Christian worldview in terms of metaphysics is the creator-creature distinction, okay? So the creator-creature distinction teaches that God's being is unique and wholly distinct from that of the created order.

And this is what drove his insistence that God's unity and plurality transcend human categories, and where his unusual phrasing really comes into into play here, okay? And so in summary here, Vant Hill's not affirming a logical contradiction, but he's using distinctive language to highlight various theological truths that he wants to get across, and his intention was to really underscore and highlight that God is both personal, he's a personal being, and he exists as three distinct persons.

And so his phrasing can be confusing, I agree, but Vant Hill's view, I think, is firmly rooted in an Orthodox Trinitarian perspective, okay? Now, why is this important, okay? The distinction that he makes is crucial, I think, to apologetics in a bunch of different ways, especially within the presuppositional approach, right?

Because Vant Hill's insistence on God being absolute personality forms the foundation of the Christian worldview, right? In presuppositional apologetics, from our perspective, the core argument is that only the Christian worldview, rooted in the triune God, provides the necessary preconditions for intelligibility.

We've talked about this countless times on this channel. And Vant Hill's emphasis here is on God's personal nature, okay? His emphasis on God's personal nature reinforces that all knowledge, logic, morality, and existence are contingent upon a personal God, who is relational and sovereign over all things.

And this is very key to understanding Vant Hill's perspective. And so presuppositional, the presuppositional perspective begins with the recognition that all reasoning and knowledge are grounded in one's ultimate authority or starting point.

And so for Vant Hill, the triune God is that ultimate starting point. And his nature, right, the triune God and his nature as a personal being is foundational to that, okay? And again, when you link, for example, the metaphysical assumption of the triune God and the epistemological reality of Revelation, you see that there is a very important link there for Vant Hill, okay?

And so for Vant Hill, the triune God is the ultimate authority and his nature as a personal being, again, is key to his perspective. Now God is not an abstract. This is why, this is why Vant Hill called God one person and three persons, okay?

And he meant them in different senses, okay? There is, in God, there is no abstract principle or impersonal force within God. God is at base, at the foundation, a personal being who actively sustains and governs the universe.

And this means that all human reasoning, morality, and experience are possible because they are grounded in a God who is himself at the most fundamental level, personal, relational, and communicative.

This is an essential feature of who God is, all right? So in contrast, you take a look at the non-christian worldviews, which often rest on impersonal or abstract foundations, right? Such as something like materialism or pantheism or deism.

These systems, I think, really fail to account for the personal aspects of reality, such as, you know, things like human personality, morality, rationality, because they can't, they cannot ground the concept of a relational, rational, and moral universe in something impersonal.

It just doesn't make sense. For example, an impersonal force or principle cannot account for the existence of moral laws or the meaningfulness of human relationships or anything along those lines. But Van Til's Trinitarian theology, with its emphasis on God as absolute personality, I think provides a coherent foundation for those aspects of reality.

And, of course, other aspects. That's why we argue that he is the necessary precondition for intelligible experience, knowledge, and things like that, okay? All right, so I see some activity in the chat.

Let me see if there's any questions or there's just stuff going on. Let's take a look here. Let me take my little water break real quick. If you enjoyed this content and you really appreciate it, please subscribe, if you haven't subscribed, and smash the notification bell, as they say.

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All right, let's see here. Yeah, Michelle. Yeah, so Michelle says, I always say the one being of God consisting of three divine persons. Yeah, that's true. So from our perspective, God is one in being, three in persons.

The three persons share in the divine being of the divine essence. So yeah, I would agree. That's good. All right. All right, Frank Odom says, do you think Van Til was perhaps too smart for his own good, unable to coherently communicate what he's thinking?

I don't think that's the reason why. I mean, he was a brilliant thinker, and that's true even if you disagree with Van Til. I mean, you can say, I don't like what Van Til was arguing with his old presuppositional stuff.

You could still acknowledge that he was a creative and innovative thinker and how he kind of put things together and made certain connections. I mean, he was a very intelligent person. I think part of it is, I think what makes Van Til, in my opinion, a little difficult to grasp is, number one, English wasn't his first language, so just his writing can be very clunky.

He's very philosophically detailed, so he can be very wordy, okay? And I think what is difficult for a lot of people is that Van Til, I say, if you read philosophers today, a lot of the philosophers today come from what we call the analytic philosophical tradition.

And analytic philosophy is very specific in terms of laying out specific premises and points of argumentation, defining certain key terms in very detailed ways. When you take someone like Van Til, he comes from a more continental philosophical tradition, in terms of which continental philosophy tended to focus on kind of the big picture, the broad picture, these worldview systems and things like that.

And so there is a broadness to his philosophy and the continental tradition in general, where someone who is more analytically minded would kind of find it frustrating because he doesn't go into some of the details that we wish that, you know, someone would go into, okay?

Now that's interesting because when you kind of take Van Til's thought, which comes from a more continental outlook, where you have these broad strokes, you have someone who comes along like Greg Bonson, who is in the analytic tradition, okay?

And you have someone like Bonson bring more specificity to the broad brush strokes of Van Til. So I think that they are a perfect grouping in terms of taking the big ideas of Van Til, and you have someone like that's more analytically minded in Bonson, and bringing those down with more specificity, adding some more flesh to what Van Til has laid out.

So I think that's why a lot of people find him confusing, is there, the things I mentioned. Plus, he comes from a philosophical tradition that most people today aren't used to. So I think that's one of the reasons why.

I don't think it's simply because he was such a smart guy. I think he was a smart guy. I think he was a brilliant, but I don't think that's the reason, that's the reason why. All right? Great question.

Okay. Yeah, so these things, that's interesting. So breakfast, fast tacos. Nice name. Look at all these people rejecting the self-evident truth of our shared naturalistic atheistic reality that has been revealed to all sound mind through both natural and special revelation in an undeniable way.

Right, so this is a perfect example of someone completely missing the boat, right? So if I was not a presuppositionalist, I wasn't a presuppositionalist, but I understood presuppositionalism, I would never say something like this.

Now this is, this would be at the level of, you know, I would make the distinction between more scholarly and careful criticisms of presuppositionalism, and then you kind of have like the, you know, the traditional kind of like online atheist interactions with presuppositions, not very sophisticated.

This one here is not very sophisticated. It's actually based upon the faulty assumption that A, the claim that the presuppositionalist is making is a bare authority claim. Christianity's true, God's revealed himself, you all know it, you're all deceived for denying it, yada yada yada, that's it.

And so there's no argument there, we're just making the assertion. Of course, that's not what we're saying. There is an argument baked into what we, how we demonstrate that. He also thinks that because it's a bare authority claim, that the claim is equally reversible, right?

So when someone says, well the Christian says, all men know that God exists. Well, I'm gonna turn around and say, well all men know that atheism, atheism, everyone knows that atheism is true, or something along those lines.

And look at the incoherentness, the incoherency of this statement. He says, look at all the people rejecting the self-evident truth of our shared naturalistic atheistic reality that has been revealed.

Revelation is a function of personality, not impersonality of naturalistic and atheistic reality. A reality that is at base naturalistic and atheistic is by definition impersonal. And so impersonal things do not participate in revelation.

Revelation is a feature of personality. So not only is this a surface-level comment here, it literally is self-contradictory. But there you go, that's, I mean, these are the sorts of things that, you know, folks would would get into.

There's more careful ways to critique presuppositionalism. There are good critiques, not the one, I don't think they go through, but I think they're well thought out. And the presuppositionalist has to grapple with those, and that's fair.

This isn't one of them. So I just wanted to highlight that. Let's see here, yes, atheist precept. By the way, with the mention of atheist precept here, so I think it's it's so silly. When an atheist tries to use presuppositionalism and they think they're using like a tactic, you don't realize, if you if you understand what presuppositionalists argue, we argue that everyone is at heart a presuppositionalist.

Everyone has presuppositions, everyone has their ultimate authority. And the presuppositionalist wants to himself be epistemologically self-conscious. We want to be aware that we have presuppositions, that we have metaphysical assumptions, epistemological, you know, foundations, and so forth.

And we want the unbeliever to be aware of those things too, so that they can reason in a way that makes them aware of not just what they're saying, but the foundation from which they are saying it, so that we can critique the foundation and show the worldview to be problematic.

So when an atheist precept says, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna try to be an atheist precept and use it again, you're actually doing what we want you to do. We want you to acknowledge that you have a presuppositional position and that we want you to argue it, okay?

But this is not the way you do it, all right? This is very surface-level interaction with these ideas, but this isn't like, you know, an atheist precept isn't something slick or intelligent. That's literally what we try.

This is actually one of the reasons why it's frustrating talking to some atheists, not all of them, some of them, is because we're trying to get them to see that they are presuppositional at their foundation.

When an atheist admits, well, I'm gonna be an atheist precept, then you actually make, you actually, you know, you do the very thing we've been trying to get you to recognize to begin with, that you are a presuppositionalist.

So apply a presuppositional atheistic apologetic, do that, and we would be happy to interact with that, because that's what we've been going, that's what we wanted the atheists to do all along, is to think consistently as a presuppositionalist, because they are presuppositionalists at heart, and then interact with the worldview, okay?

So this isn't something like slick and, you know, like, you know, smart. This is just what we want you to do because we think the issue is the presuppositions and the worldviews, okay? So there you go.

We want to interact with them, that's kind of very surface-level, we've addressed that stuff a boogajillion times, so. Let's see here, there's a lot of the, yeah, it's a troll. All right, that's fine.

Okay, all right, let's see here. Okay, I don't see any other questions. No questions, that's fine. Some people interacting with, I guess, the troll in the comments. Yeah, okay. I don't think, I don't think there are any questions there.

Okay, so I will continue where I left off. All right. Okay, so the Trinity, getting back to the Trinity, as Van Til articulated, okay, is central to the coherence of the Christian worldview, right? This is important, too, because when we argue from a presuppositional perspective, we do so in a very specifically Christian way.

In the debate between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein, Bonson made this clear, he says, I'm not arguing for generic, generic theism, okay? I'm arguing for Christian theism. So, yeah, let me see, I'm looking at the comments here.

Okay. All right, I'll get to some of the other questions. I'll try to, I'm trying not to, if there are trolls in the comments, I mean, you're free to say whatever you want, that's fine. But I'm trying my best not to be so derailed, because sometimes I feel inclined to respond to everything in the chat, and of course, I got to, I'm going to choose, try to choose my things to respond to with care, so I don't want to derail from what I'm trying to say here.

But nevertheless, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to a Christian worldview, and so by maintaining that God is one personal being with three distinct persons, okay, that's highlighting the fact that there is nothing to, there's nothing to God that is impersonal.

So Van Til affirmed that God is one personal being with three distinct persons, and in doing so, I think he was trying to avoid the pitfall of depersonalizing God, and hence depersonalizing the Christian worldview.

So at a metaphysically foundational perspective, there is nothing impersonal within God. He is absolute personality, and the triune nature of God provides the metaphysical basis for unity and diversity, which are fundamental aspects of reality.

And so the unity of God's essence corresponds to the order and regularity of creation, while the diversity of persons corresponds to the relational and multifaceted nature of human experience. This gets into the issue of, you know, the one and the many, things like that.

Okay, let me see here. Oh gosh. You ever just hear, you ever just read cringy comments, you're just tempted to go, I'm going to resist the temptation. Okay. It's hard to do this. You're trying to, you know, it's hard.

Anyway. Okay. So without a personal triune God, other worldviews, I would argue, are forced into incoherent positions because they lack the capacity to account for unity and diversity in the world. Okay?

So for example, if reality is at base material, okay, materiality, then you cannot account for universal abstract logical principles, right? How do you make sense out of, how does a worldview make sense out of both unity and plurality?

You know, the ancient Greeks, the pre-Socratics tried to do this. This was a big question in the history of Western philosophy. And there are problems, I can't get into it now, but there are problems when you posit an ultimate unity to the exclusion of plurality.

And if you posit an ultimate plurality to the exclusion of unity. And so the Greek philosophers try, they were grappling between ultimate unity and ultimate plurality. And the Christian worldview, which has the triune God as its foundation, really doesn't suffer from the deficiencies of those other perspectives because as we know, within the Trinity, God is equally one and equally many.

Okay? He is, the oneness of God is not more fundamental than the manyness of God. And the manyness of God is not more fundamental than the oneness. It is the oneness and the manyness are equally ultimate.

Now within the presuppositional project, and we're doing apologetics, the goal is to show that only the Christian worldview provides those preconditions for intelligibility. And so Van Til's emphasis on God's personal nature is key to that approach.

And so when engaging with say like an atheist or agnostic perspectives, presuppositionalists argue that denying the existence of the triune God leads to epistemological and ethical collapse. So without a personal sovereign God, there is no coherent foundation for knowledge.

There is no coherent foundation for logic. There is no coherent foundation for morality. And if you're just visiting this channel, no, we're not simply asserting that. We argue for that. And if you look in past videos and you study the literature, there's an argument there.

Maybe you disagree with the argument, but you need to interact with what we're actually arguing. The transcendental argument is an actual argument. There's actually non-presuppositional forms of it as well.

This isn't something that like Christians invented. And so if God were merely an impersonal force or an abstract principle, then concepts like truth, morality, personal identity would be left without a foundation.

For instance, an impersonal universe can't provide a reason why abstract universal laws of logic should exist in the first place. Nor can it account for why human beings as personal agents are able to think rationally or engage in moral discourse.

And so Vantel's insistence that God is absolute personality means that these necessary aspects of human life, reason, morality, relationality, things like this, are grounded in the personal and relational nature of God himself.

And so another important point in Vantel's outlook is that human beings—and this is a Christian outlook—human beings are made in the image of God. And we're made in the image of the personal and relational God.

And so Vantel's emphasis on the personal nature of God is not merely kind of a philosophical concept. It speaks directly to the nature of human beings. And so humans, as image bearers of God, are personal, relational, and rational beings because they reflect the personal and triune nature of God himself.

And so this provides the foundation for Christian ethics and morality, as well as the meaningfulness of human relationships and communication, logic, knowledge, and so forth. And so when a worldview that rejects a personal God—okay, when you reject the personal God—that worldview will struggle to explain why human beings should be viewed as anything more than complex biological machines or random accidents of nature, if you're coming from a materialistic worldview.

And so out of the window goes things like human dignity, moral obligation, personal identity. These things are problematic on worldviews that are not grounded in the personal God that we've been describing here.

So again, how do we demonstrate that? Well, we've discussed that ad nauseum on this channel. That's not the topic here. I'm not trying to demonstrate the existence of God or providing a justification for the transcendental argument.

We've done that in other parts as well. Let me see here. Yeah, I don't know what the problem of the one in the many is. Yeah, sure. I'm not biting that one. Okay, here we go. All right. So we've got an official troll in the chat.

There we go. Now, if you have a question, preface your question with a question so that I could differentiate it between trolling and actual questions. So that would be helpful to me. Okay? All right.

I have no moderators too. I do all this stuff myself. It's okay. It's all good. So yes, if you have a question, please preface your question with a question or I won't be able to answer it. Okay, let me see if I can go up, up, up.

So if I don't see the question, I'm only going to respond if there's a question in front of... Let me see. Yeah, don't worry about it. If someone's trolling in the comments, it's okay. It's all right.

Some of the stuff he's saying is pretty lame anyway. I don't want to spend too much time on it. But if you have a question, I will be happy if you let me know that you have a specific question. So let me see here.

All right. So let's take a question here. Scott Terry says, The Transcendental Thomists say being is the most primitive concept, but as good Vantillians, shouldn't we say triune personal being is the most primitive of all concepts?

Well, again, everything has to be understood and defined, right? When we say being, I mean, is that an abstract concept? This is wrapped up in Vantill's concept of the abstract universal as opposed to a concrete universal.

So we start with something as abstract as being. I mean, what does that mean, right? We're starting not with some abstraction, but we are starting with the personal triune God. And so Vantill would say, we are starting with a concrete universal as opposed to an abstract universal.

We're not theorizing out here in the ether about the nature of being. We're starting with the specific being of God, the metaphysically ultimate triune God, who grounds, creates, and gives meaning to everything else that is created.

And that's where that fundamental metaphysical aspect of the creator-creature distinction comes in. So yeah, again, sure, I would say that the triune God is metaphysically ultimate. He is metaphysically primitive, if what you mean by that is that he's fundamental.

Sure. And so the being of the triune God, yes, I would say that we could say that as long as we define our terms correctly. All right, let's see here. Let's see here. A little off topic, but Frank Odom says, this may be a stretch for tonight.

It is a little stretch, but it's okay. I listened to and read Ravi Zacharias for decades. I was shocked when the truth about him came out. He lost respect, but do think what he did. I don't know what you're asking.