Critical Thoughts

Dr. Isma’il al-Faruqi wrote the following on the Trinity:

The offense of Christianity against transcendence was even greater. Islam charged Christianity with extending the nontranscendent concept to God’s “fatherhood of the Jewish kings” to Jesus and giving it, besides its moral signification of compliance with God’s commandments, the de-transcendentalizing ontological connotation of unity of substance between God and Jesus. Indeed, Christian catholicity defined itself with terms of this “substantial” identity of Jesus with God, as distinct from plurality of their “personalities,” characters and consciousness. Obviously, the source of this new departure from transcendence of the divine being within the Semitic stream was not the Jewish inheritance of Christianity. This had given Christianity the concepts, not their connotation. Neither was gnosticism the source of that departure, whose argument “If he suffer, he was not God; if he was God, he did not suffer” was hurled against their fellow Christians in defence of transcendence. The source must be the non-Semitic influence of the “mystery religions.” It was from this source that Christianity derived its “suffering God” who saves by dying and returning to life and whose mana (grace) is imparted to the communicant thought sacrament.

This anti-transcendence influence on Christianity at its formative stage was partly responsible for its success among non-Semitic peoples unfamiliar with the notion of God as “totally-other.” It is equally responsible for the misinterpretation of innocent Hebrew and Aramaic concepts current among Jesus’ contemporaries. Barnasha or bar-Adam meant a well-bred and hence virtuous person. But it acquired in St. Paul a mysterious metaphysical dimension. Any righteous person could claim what Jesus did, namely, “I and my father (God) are one,” in the sense of total compliance with God’s will. Christians, however, took this to mean that Jesus claimed divine status. Whereas Kurie, D. Kurios, Mar Mari and Maran were among Semites attributable to anyone in authority, Christians took this attribution to Jesus by his Semitic disciples as their evidence of assuming him to be God. Finally, Christian theologians, taking all these elements for granted, searched the Hebrew scripture for evidence of plural divinity, With tvpical intellectual clumsiness, Augustine, Tertullian and many others thought they found in the plural pronouns of Genesis, “Let us create man according to our image” (Genesis: 1:28) the evidence for three persons in the deity! This has remained a Christian “argument” to the present day held by such a notable thinker as Karl Barth. Indeed, Barth shamelessly claimed that maleness and femaleness were intrinsic to the divine nature because Genesis had reported immediately after the above-mentioned statement, “Male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:28). Since the former statement ends with the word “image,” he thought, the latter statement must be an apposition to the term and hence indicating maleness and femaleness as constitutive of the divine image! Christians have committed themselves to divine non-transcendence so resolutely that it had become with them an idée fixe, enabling Paul Tillich to declare sub specie eternitatis that the transcendent God is unknown and unknowable unless He is concretized in an object of nature and history. Since this was the state of “God’s transcendence” in Christianity, the language expressing it was equally improper.

Although Christians never ceased to claim that God is transcendent, they spoke of Him as a real man who walked on earth and did all things men do, including the suffering of the agonies of death. Of course, according to them, Jesus was both man and God. They never took a consistent position on Jesus’ humanity or divinity with accusation of apostasy and heresy. That is why their language is always confusing, at best. When pinned down, every Christian will have to admit that his God is both transcendent and immanent. But his claim of transcendence is ipso facto devoid of grounds. To maintain the contrary, one has to give up the laws of logic. But Christianity was prepared to go to this length too. It raised paradox above self-evident truth and vested it with the status of an epistemological principle. But under such principle, anything can be asserted and discussion becomes idle.

The Christian may not claim that the trinity is a way of talking about God; because if the trinity discloses the nature of God better than unity, a greater plurality would do the job better. At any rate, to reduce the “Holy Trinity” to a status of in percipi is heretical as it denies una substantia as metaphysical doctrine.