Analogies of the Trinity and Apologetic Methodology

Cerberus as a Bad Trinity Analogy

On the last dividing line I did, I commented on a Reasonable Faith presentation that William Lane Craig did down in Florida. And a lot of the comments from my response to that have come from what I said about, well, the first clip I played, which was the last section of the Q &A.

And in that section a man asked Dr. Craig about what analogies he might suggest for illustration of the doctrine of the Trinity. And much to my surprise and disappointment, and many other people's surprise as well, Dr. Craig suggested the animal from Greek mythology known as Cerberus.

In fact, I went into my library and I picked up the complete world of Greek mythology from behind me there. That's not a facade, by the way, that's actually my library. And, well, part of it anyways, it goes over there someplace, but we won't put that in there because it's irrelevant.

Anyways, here's a picture of Cerberus. You can't really see it here, I suppose, but he has a red head and a black head and a white head. And in this one he's got all sorts of coiled snakes growing out of him too, which would be a quite fearsome thing to see.

And if you know history, or at least mythology, certainly not history, you know that Heracles, his last task was to capture Cerberus. And, of course, he was successful in so doing. In fact, I just realized the very front, look at the front of the thing here.

That's actually a better illustration because there's, yeah, that's the same illustration, but larger, easier to see that way. Anyway, the analogy left a lot of us scratching our heads because if you understand the doctrine of the Trinity, other than the fact that it has three heads, I don't see the connection to the Trinity at all.

I mean, he said, well, you can assign a mind to each one, but the reason that Christians shouldn't use analogies to the Trinity is because God is absolutely unique. And an analogy is a means of making a connection to the created order.

It's like this, but if it's not like anything, then anytime you go, it's like this, you're running into danger, right? And when you think of the doctrine of the Trinity, if this man had asked me that question, and I've been asked that question many, many times, I would say, well, I would stay away from analogies, and I would present what the Bible teaches on the subject.

And what the Bible teaches is that there is one true and eternal God, creator of all things, eternal, unchanging. That there are three divine persons who are distinguished from one another, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And that those three persons are co-equal and co-eternal, hence the deity of Christ, personality, and deity of the Holy Spirit. So within the one being of God, there exists eternally three co-equal, co-eternal persons, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Three persons sharing the one being that is God, not three heads on a dog. Because that would make the heads of the dog analogous to the persons, and the body analogous to the being, I guess. I don't know.

Apologetic Methodology and Scripture’s Authority

It strikes me as very, very, very odd, and what prompted me to do this recording today is this morning, I happened to notice that MuslimByChoice on YouTube, who has often posted critical videos of yours truly, some of which are not overly fair, and I've pointed that out, but obviously listens to the dividing line.

Thank you very much for doing that, whether it's one of you or a group of you, I don't have any idea. And provided the entirety of my comments from the dividing line, and even the clip from William Lane Craig's video, where he gives the Kerberos analogy and illustration.

So even the Muslims recognize, this is a really bad analogy. And it is. It's a very bad analogy. I wonder if Dr. Sanders over there at Biola, who has written on the Trinity, has ever used that type of analogy.

I hope not. I hope not. And I wonder if anyone has conversations with Dr. Craig about some of these things. I wanted to talk about sort of three things. First, a little bit about this concept. Where Dr. Craig is coming from, the reason that I take the time to respond to some of the things he's saying, is because he's so very well known, and yet he responds to things in a very different way than I do.

We debate many of the same people. I'll be debating Shabir Ali in just a couple of days. And he's debated Shabir Ali. But we debate Shabir Ali in different ways. We come from a different perspective. And the evidentialism, and the Mullenism, and the mere Christianity-ism, if we can use that phraseology, of William Lane Craig, illustrates the difference between a philosophical apologetic that establishes philosophical parameters, and then goes to the Bible, where philosophy is clearly the ultimate authority, not Scripture, and where you develop an apologetic methodology, and then your theology has to fit into what you find to be pragmatically useful in apologetic methodology.

I believe it comes the other direction. Philosophy is underneath Scripture. Scripture is theanoustos. We start with our theology as it's revealed in Scripture, and we develop our apologetics based upon what it is we are defending.

I really believe we come at these things from completely different angles, and that's why we answer things in a very different way. And I have said very often that what Dr. Craig is presenting is a least common denominator.

It's the smallest target that he can create for his opponents. It is not full-throated Christianity. It's a small thing, and that's why one of the earlier questions that he was asked was, another person said, well, you know, how would you suggest that I learn to defend the authority of Scripture in apologetics?

He said, well, I don't do that. That's not the direction I go. You should treat the Scriptures as if they're just a reliable historical record, like Suetonius or Pliny or Tacitus or something like that.

And once you introduce somebody to Jesus, then you start thinking about these issues of Scriptural authority and inspiration and things like that. And I just go, that does not work. I mean, I can see that planting the seeds of its own destruction.

What kind of a Jesus do you get from merely primarily reliable historical documents? Do you get a primarily Lord Jesus who was primarily maybe resurrected? Possibly his probability from the dead? Maybe might have been God, but we're not sure.

I mean, how can you take mainly reliable historical documents and come to firm spiritual conclusions that would cause a person to bow the knee in repentance and faith to his creator? I can't even begin to conceive of it, and I think that it shows a fundamental lack of confidence in the work of the Spirit.

But of course, that goes back to theology again, because Dr. Craig is a Molinist and he's an Arminian, and it's not, you know, the Spirit tries. But then again, as a Molinist, it gets confusing at times.

The Trinity Box and the Revelation of God

Anyway, it's all connected together, and I hope that you can see that it's all connected together along those lines. But I also wanted to talk a little bit about analogies, and some might say, well, so you're saying you should never use an analogy?

Well, I would say that for the doctrine of the Trinity as the doctrine of the Trinity, if we confess that only God exists in this way, and that there is nothing in creation that exists in the same way that God does, then, yeah, no analogy is ever going to work.

Well, but we learn by analogy.

Well, maybe.

I think you can illustrate certain aspects possibly, but you have to be extremely circumspect in how you address this subject.

Many, many years ago,.

Back when I was at a large Southern Baptist church, a friend of mine, Alan Willis, helped me to make this. I do not blame him for the very old and crusty electrical tape. This was just a box we went over to Radio Shack and bought, and we called this the Trinity Box.

The Trinity Box. Now, I'm going to turn it on here. It's plugged in, so if I go and fall over, you'll know what happened, and this YouTube video will go viral. But, ah, good.

It works.

See the light just turned on there? What I would do is I would turn the lights off in the classroom, and I would put this, like, on a music stand or something like that.

So everybody could see it.

And I talk about the one light that we can see here, and you're seeing a white light. And I would talk about the nature of God as we see him in the Old Testament and the revelation of his holiness and his immutability and the fact that he's the creator of all things.

And, you know, Psalm 102. He creates all things, but he doesn't change. Everything else grows old. He does not. We have all the, you know, justice and love and mercy and chesed and all those things that are revealed of God in the Old Testament.

And then I would turn it around and hope that it doesn't turn off in the process. And here on this side, I think you can sort of see it. I'm looking at the, you can sort of see a red, a green, and a blue.

You see a red, green, and blue. Now, what I emphasize is there's only one light in this box. The God hasn't changed. It's the same God, the white light here. Now the light is just simply differentiated.

Now you were seeing red, green, and blue here. If you know anything about light, you know that you're seeing red, green, and blue in the white light. It's just your eye cannot differentiate it. You can use a prism or something like that to separate out the colors.

But what we've done here is you can see the red, the green, and the blue because we've provided a means whereby they can be differentiated from one another. And this really wasn't an illustration of the Trinity so much as the revelation of the Trinity.

And what I mean by that is the revelation takes place between the Old and the New Testament in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God. And so, what the incarnation and the coming of the Spirit do, then as that is inscripturated for us in the New Testament, where the New Testament becomes the documentation of what God has done in those great events, what that allows us to do is to differentiate what was already there.

The red, the green, and the blue were there, but now we have the means of differentiating them. And we can see the certain aspects by which we recognize the Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, the Spirit is the Spirit.

I suppose I could actually turn it like this, to where the red's on top, and the green's in the middle, the blue's on the bottom, and say, well, the top is the Father, and then the Son, and then the Spirit.

And they've taken different roles in the economy of salvation and there are mechanisms by which we can differentiate them, again, provided to us primarily by the revelation of the New Testament itself.

But this was not meant to be an overarching illustration of all of the Trinity. For example, I just turned it off. You can't really do that with God. It was meant to have one particular application, primarily to help believers to see that God didn't change between the Old and the New Testament.

It wasn't that we had a Unitarian God in the Old Testament, and now we've got a Trinitarian God in the New Testament. No, God's always existed in the Trinity. It is the fact that the revelation of God allows us to see with clarity what we could not see with clarity before.

But that's a lot different from drawing something out of Greek mythology and saying, here's a good illustration. At least when I presented this, and that box is between 25 and 30 years old now, at least when I presented this, I limited the range that I was attempting to illustrate.

And at the very least, what William Lane Craig needs to do, well, obviously he just needs to abandon that whole thing, but at the very least, what he would have to have done, there in Florida or wherever else he's made this presentation, is to severely limit, in fact, it would take so many caveats, so many, I don't mean to say this, I don't mean to say this, it's not meant to illustrate this, that by the time you get to the end of it, there wouldn't be time to actually give the illustration, which might be a good thing.

Might be a good thing.

Why Muslim Piety Elevates Muhammad

What I was trying to do is just illustrate one aspect of the revelation of the doctrine of Trinity here with the little Trinity box, which still works after all of these years. It's nice to see that. But I did also want to address Muslim by choice, which I've done a number of times directly, and here I go again.

You and I agree, over against Dr. Craig, that physical created analogies cannot do justice to the nature of God. We would agree that there is nothing in the created order that can really appropriately be applied to God in the sense of being a meaningful analogy of the very highest revelation of his being.

But where you and I disagree, and what I would like you to think about, I don't need to have a video response or anything else. I'm just talking to you directly and everybody else gets to listen in. But what I would ask you to think about is where Islam, I think, has a fundamental deficiency.

Look around as you look at the Muslim world, and I don't know exactly where you're coming from. Would you view yourself as Salafi, Wahhabi, just an orthodox Sunni? Where are you coming from? I don't know.

You tend toward the more conservative stuff, okay. Look around the Islamic world at people celebrating Muhammad's birthday and prayers to Muhammad and the people weeping outside of his tomb and all of these things and the exaltation of Muhammad that you can see in so many strains of Islamic piety.

And ask yourself the question, why is that? I mean, I think a lot of people make a very strong argument that's a fundamental denial of Tawhid. It borders on and becomes shirk from your own perspective.

But why is it? Why does that happen? You see, I would suggest to you that the Quran, and listen to what I'm saying, I have to say this. This is my honest conclusion. In its ignorance of the preceding revelations, which it itself claims were revelations, but in its ignorance of the content and meaning of those revelations, specifically the Torah and the Injil, because it rejects that revelation that is found in Jesus Christ in the incarnation, his deity, etc., it forces the Muslims to look for this kind of connectedness to the transcendent God.

And the only person they can find it in, in light of your own teachings that he is the greatest of mankind and he's the final prophet and he's the perfect example, it has to be Muhammad. And so you get this elevation of Muhammad, even far beyond what he himself ever allowed in his own lifetime, even if we accept the Hadith sources as accurately representing his own words.

He didn't want that kind of adoration that frequently he receives today. And I suggest to you the reason that happens is because we are created in the image of God. And he has placed within us that desire to have relationship with him.

And Islam, in essence, does not allow that. You don't have a mediator. You don't have one who can meet in the middle. You don't have the incarnate one. And so while we might agree that certain illustrations don't work, I would say to you, bad illustrations aside, the scriptures still reveal that God made himself present in the person of Jesus Christ.

And it is that very incarnation that meets the deepest needs of we, God's creations. So I'd like you to think about that, not asking for a response, but just like you to think about what that really says.

Anyways, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.