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Is Christianity monotheistic?

This document is intended to address a common concern of Muslims and Jews that Christianity violates monotheism. It contains two sections. The first talks about the Incarnation. This is the doctrine describing the sense in which Jesus is identified with God. The second talks about the Trinity.

The Incarnation

The basic principle is that Christ is God's own presence in human history. That is, Jesus isn't a separate God, but is the one God's vehicle to interact with humanity, and in fact to unite human beings with himself.

There were actually two different approaches to speaking about this. One saw Jesus as a normal human being in which God was present in a special way. The accusation was that this compromised Jesus' uniqueness by making him just an inspired man, no different from prophets. However the intent was that God's presence was of a different kind, appropriate for a son. Whatever else one might say, this approach clearly maintains Jesus as human and God as God, and thus is no threat to monotheism.

However this approach was eventually rejected. It can be called a Christology "from below," in that it looks as Jesus as a human, and sees how it would be for God to be present in him in a special way. The dominant approach is often referred to as a Christology "from above," because it starts from God's point of view: it looks at how God uses this human to be present in human history, and unite humans to himself.

At times one can get the impression that Jesus is being portrayed as a body that God manipulates to interact with humans. However that is not fair: everyone saw that Jesus needs to be understood as a human being with a real human life. But the full implications of that took a couple of centuries, as the Church confronted questions such as how many wills Christ had. (The final answer was two: The human being had a separate human will.)

But the dominant understanding continued to be one of God himself using a human being as his vehicle to be present with and unite himself with us. Jesus is in no sense a separate God. Rather, he is God's own humanity.

I think orthodox theology is at the edge of not portraying Jesus as a full human being. The official doctrine says that the God (specifically, the Logos) took on a human nature. The result is one being ( hypostasis ) with two natures: God's nature and human nature. The theology goes to great pains to clarify that the human nature has all the usual parts of a human being, including a distinct human will, and functions as a human being. Yet this human being isn't a completely independent individual. Ultimately when you deal with Jesus you are dealing with God.

It's not that Jesus is just a mask that God puts on, sort of like a gorilla suit. He is a full human being living a full human life. Yet there's a sense in which God does put him on. When the theology talks of one hypostasis with two natures, it is not being entirely symmetrical. The natures are symmetrical: there's one human and one divine. But the hypostasis is the person of the eternal Logos. Any other human being would have a human hypostasis. Christ does not. Ultimately in Christ we're dealing with God, who has taken to himself a human life to be his human life.

I am not trying here to establish either that this is a sensible approach, or that it is consistent with Jesus as we come to know him in the Gospels. Rather, I'm looking at whether this is consistent with monotheism. I think it clearly is. There's no sense that Jesus is a human being who is divine in his own right. The only sense in which one might call this human being divine is that when we encounter him we encounter God. But it's the one God.

Trinity

This isn't going to be a complete presentation on the Trinity. Rather, I'm simply responding to the concern that this doctrine threatens the unity of God.

Note that there is some confusion because the term "Son" is overloaded in Christianity theology. The Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some people think "Son" means the human being Jesus, so that a human being is part of the Trinity. That's not the case.

In this context the Son is the eternal Logos. This is the eternal Word, which was always present with God. It originated from Jewish speculative thought, in which the Logos or Torah was seen as preexistent. Speculative thought, certainly in Judaism, and at times even in Islam, has often included some kind of trinity. This typically occurs as philosophers analyse how God acts in the universe. Once God acts, and interacts with humans, he can no longer be a completely undescribed "mathematical point."

When applied to the Logos, "son" has a somewhat non-literal meaning. The Logos has the Father as his source. This is referred to as being "begotten of the Father before time." But "begotten" isn't sexual. It's simply a way of saying that the Father is the source of the Son, and that like human fathers and sons, the Son has the same divine nature as the Father. However this has to be taken in the context described below: Father and Son aren't two separate things.

The official language describing the Trinity is that God is three Persons with one nature or substance. In English this sounds like we are talking about three individuals of the same kind. But that's not quite the case.

At this point I would love to give you a precise explanation of what "person" and "nature" mean in this context. But that has proven remarkably difficult to do. There are (as usual) a couple of different approaches.

The West tended to be less sophisticated theologically. It also tended to emphasize God's unity. To use my own non-technical terms, the West tended to see God as one "thing." The three persons were viewed as what I would call personal roles.

In fact the West tends to see the Trinity as being a consequence of the fact that God is personal, and that relationships such as love originate with him. God didn't need to wait for the universe to be created to experience love. But a personal relationship implies some kind of distinction in personal roles. For the West, that's the only sense in which there is a distinction within the Trinity. There is just enough of a distinction in personal role for God to relate to himself in love. His relationship of love is the source of love for us: he isn't commanding us to do something on our own, but inviting us into his own communion.

God has one power, he acts with one action, and he thinks with one mind. However to quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, this one mind "will have a three-fold consciousness, knowing itself in three ways in accordance with its three modes of existence."

In the East things are more complex. The East tends to focus more on the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as in some sense distinct. But the East is also concerned to maintain the unity of God. However they do it differently.

The first person of the Trinity, God the Father, is the "fountain" of the Godhead, the source, cause or principle of origin for the other two persons. He is the bond of unity between the three: there is one God because there is one Father. "The union is the Father, from whom and to whom the order of the persons runs its course" (St Gregory the Theologian). The other two persons are each defined in terms of their relationship to the Father: the Son is "begotten" by the Father, the Spirit "proceeds" from the Father.
[Kallistos Ware, http://agrino.org/cyberdesert/kallistos.htm]

Other writers emphasize the unity of action. The Trinity acts with one action. It is not a committee: the three persons don't make separate decisions and vote, rather they function together as a single actor. The East refuses to try to define what the divine nature is, for good reason. However one aspect of it is certainly that God is the ultimate power and authority. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not independently the ultimate power. Rather, they act as a single power.

If this all seems odd, Eastern theologians would say that this is because we have a defective understanding of what it means to be a responsible person. There are alternatives to dictatorship and completely independent beings. God is a model for that. God is not just an isolated individual, but is a "communion of three divine persons" [op. cit.]

The Western model seems unambiguously monotheistic. The Eastern model is only if you allow Christian theology to challenge some of your assumptions. That may not be a bad thing, but I'm probably not the best one to present it.

[NOTE: While everything God does is done by all three Persons, still there are things where one or the other Person is the more visible. E.g. creation is thought of as more the responsibility of the Father, and inspiring humans more the responsibility of the Holy Spirit. In this sense it is specifically the Logos who took on humanity.]