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Divine contradiction: fascinating but unpersuasive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2024

Karen Kilby Open the ORCID record for Karen Kilby [Opens in a new window]
Karen Kilby*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, Durham, UK
*
Email: karen.kilby@durham.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article, offered from the point of view of a non-analytic, systematic theologian, admires the freshness, clarity, and simplicity of the proposal at the heart of Beall's Divine Contradiction, while raising three objections. The first is to the style in which the book is written: I suggest that it remains far too technical to reach large parts of its intended audience. The second is to the tendency to speak of God as ‘portion’ or ‘fragment’ of reality. The third, more substantive objection is to the proposal that the denial of the divinity of each of the Persons of the Trinity can be part of the Christian faith: I argue that Beall's position that only the failure to affirm a truth, and not its denial, counts as a real heresy, is under-argued and unpersuasive.

Keywords

BeallTrinitycontradiction
Type
Book Symposium
Information
Religious Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 4
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. One doesn't have to leave the world of arithmetic to find cases of not transitive relations. Consider ‘is twice as big as’: 4 is twice as big as 2, and 8 is twice as big as 4, but 8 is not twice as big as 2.

2. The same goes for the Holy Spirit's identity with God and non-identity with Father and Son, but the central issue Beall focuses on can be laid out in relation to just this one case.

3. Slightly more strictly put, God is a being of whom contradictions are true – and therefore, in Beall's language, a contradictory being.

4. To be fair, I should be clear that Beall's is not an entirely specialist piece of writing, something that would be available only to other logicians: it will I suspect usefully enable analytic theologians who are not also logicians to learn enough about logic to follow his argument.

5. Two minor points may be worth brief mention. On the final line of page 41 there is I think a simple error – ‘the non-identity is just false’ ought to read ‘the identity is just false’. There is also I believe an oversight in the inclusion of the word ‘just’ on page 76: ‘Christ, who just is God, . . .’. I think the proposal of this book includes that Christ is God and also Christ is not God, and that makes this use of the word ‘just’ misleading.