Note: This is part of a series on the Trinity from a rational, non-mystical perspective. See the index here.

In “Polytheists on the Trinity,” I noted how belief in polytheism (and mysticism) naturally leads to a softening on the doctrine of the Trinity. But this is not always the case.

In “Semantic Mischief,” I had added Bnonn Tennant to the list of polytheists for his agreement with Heiser’s Divine Council of gods and Heiser’s position that Jesus is the “Angel of the Lord” (or the Second Yahweh) in the Old Testament. Only Bnonn Tennant—not coincidentally the least mystical of the group of polytheists—has attempted to argue for the Trinity in terms of reason and logical consistency.

But before we go into that, Tennant mirrors James Attebury’s argument that all of the world, universe, or creation was created through Jesus:

I won’t rehash the argument explaining why this is a mistranslation, but I will suggest reading this Unitarian  Monotheist argument regarding Colossians 1:16-17.

Now, let’s look at Tennant’s logical defense of the Trinity.

Tennant’s article is a response against the atheist’s claim. Immediately, Tennant argues for something in which we have no objection:

Contradictions cannot be believed. Just as the belief in something literally unbelievable is impossible, so too must contradictions be false. By Tennant’s argument, if the Trinity is contradictory, it cannot be believed and is false.

Tennant has nothing but contempt for the belief that the Trinity is an inherent contradiction, but it remains true. Thus, he should reject the Trinity because he rejects contradictions. But he won’t. We’ll see why.

We agree that if you can’t describe the Trinity without fallacious reasoning, you should abandon it as a doctrine.

Now, let’s skip ahead to Tennant’s thesis:

I feel sorry for Tennant. For centuries men have tried to come up with analogies to describe the Trinity in a logically consistent and non-heretical way, and they’ve continually failed to do so. The chance that Tennant managed to do what no one has managed has ever done before is highly unlikely even if he had a genius level IQ.

Many of the men who have tried and failed went on to accept that the Trinity is a logical contradiction and incomprehensible mystery (a few, like Isaac Newton, became Unitarian Monotheists instead). They chose to believe it anyway. But not Tennant! He, like James White, genuinely thinks that he’s the one to have finally described the Trinity in a way that doesn’t suffer from logical flaws. But, according to his own epistemology, his failure will mean he’s obligated to reject the doctrine.

But I’m going to go beyond this and show that it is actually an impossible task, not merely a matter of ability.

Let’s continue.

No kidding!

Tennant diverges from James White, who argues that the “WHOS” and the “WHATS” have to be kept separate in order to avoid collapsing into Modalism (we will see how important this is below). We already saw that James White was unable to make a coherent argument that avoiding equivocating on the WHOS and WHATS, so Tennant’s attempt is certainly an alternative. After all, you have to try something when nothing else is working.

Now we get to the crux of the matter.

There are two main reasons the doctrine of the Trinity is a contradiction.

The first is numerical: to equate one thing (“God”) as three things (“God”) at the same time is a contradiction.

The second is categorical: that persons and beings are separate concepts. To deny that a “person” is ontologically a “being” results in contradiction with the meaning of those words.

The traditional formulation of the Trinity asserts that both of these things are true, and so the resulting doctrine is unambiguously a contradiction.

Most of the heresies—including Modalism—involve giving up asserting one or both of these claims. Tennant has to prove that it is possible to speak of three Gods as one God simultaneously (i.e. that 3=1). Tennant also has to prove, somehow, that the definition of a word means the opposite of what it means while retaining its meaning (i.e. that A = ¬A).

Or, put another way, Tennant has to prove that saying “not in the same sense” is not implicitly a surrender. Is it?

When Tennant says “God is both one being and three beings … but in different ways or senses” he’s playing word games. The definition of “being” is well-defined. When Tennant talks about difference senses, he’s talking about multiple definitions. For example, here…

one being = one essence
three beings = three persons

…we have the word “being” in two different senses. Tennant’s attempt to abstract “one essence and three persons” into “one being and three beings in different senses” is just meaningless wordplay. The two are functionally equivalent, with Tennant’s variation being needlessly obscure. This reformulation avoids neither the numerical nor the categorical problem with the doctrine of the Trinity.

Once we strip away the wordplay, we are left with this:

The axiomatic position of the doctrine of the Trinity is that God is one in one sense and three in another sense. This is equivalent to saying he is a “being” in two different senses. The important point is that the “persons” and “essence” must not be conflated:

But keeping these from being conflated does not establish (that’s the word Tennant uses) that the doctrine of the Trinity is true, it only describes what the doctrine of the Trinity is, as opposed to some other doctrinal formulation. Tennant isn’t saying anything of substance here either, only that the traditional interpretation of the Trinity involves assuming that the “person” and “essence” are different senses and not a contradiction.

Well, duh! That’s the thing under debate. If Tennant is actually arguing that this establishes—a curious use of the word—that the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t inherently contradictory in its form, this is just begging-the-question (or circular reasoning). Simply reformulating the doctrine of the Trinity into a different logically equivalent form does not establish anything about God. It’s just a meaningless tautology.

Let’s read more and see if he is merely saying nothing substantive or if he’s (more seriously) engaging in fallacious reasoning.

Tennant has used over a thousand words to this point in his article just to say that he doesn’t know what the alleged distinction is between “sense A” (traditionally God’s essence) and “sense B” (traditionally, God’s personhood). He claims, without evidence or argument, that there is one, but he’s offered nothing substantive to this point.

Wait, what?

If you’ve been following along, you know that Tennant hasn’t made an argument yet. He’s made no substantive claims. The only thing he did so far was use the word “establishes” in an ambiguous fashion that might have meant he was making logically fallacious claim (or else saying nothing meaningful).

What strength could there be in not knowing something? It is unclear, but Tennant may be preparing to make a fallacious argument from silence or (more likely) a fallacious argument from ignorance.

The fact is, there is no strength found in the claim to ignorance.

Right, and a paradox is “a logically self-contradictory statement that runs contrary to one’s expectation.” So Tennant has murdered over a thousand words just to admit what we already knew: the doctrine of the Trinity is a contradiction. But I’m not sure that it is even, strictly speaking, a paradox, because a paradox is a contradiction that one does not expect. But the contradictory nature of the Trinity has been well-known for many centuries. This is, ironically, no mystery.

I guess the strength of not knowing is that we know that we don’t know. That’s a curious thing to spent two long paragraphs on, but Tennant seems to be the master of writing a lot of words while saying nothing of substance.

But, that’s about to change.

Wow. Here is his claim:

Of course there is nothing contradictory. It’s not contradictory because it is not an argument about the Trinity. There are three premises in this “argument”…

(1) Premise: Sense A
(2) Premise: Sense B
(3) Premise: We are Ignorant

…followed by a simple “conclusion”…

(4) There is nothing to conclude.

I suppose this is kind of like an argument, but it’s a pointless and meaningless one. Let’s temporarily jump ahead through his article to a very important point:

The reason Tennant is trying so hard to avoid the claim that the Trinity is a contradiction is to avoid the logical consequence that the doctrine of the Trinity is meaningless. But so far, all he has done is convey nothing of value. His replacement—that we are ignorant—is also meaningless. He’s exchanged one meaningless construct for another. That’s no victory.

Now, let’s continue.

This sure sounds like the setup to a fallacious argument from ignorance. But here is the thing. It is not a given that God is someone whose nature we do not and cannot understanding. There is no reason for anyone—especially the atheist Tennant is responding to—to grant Tennant that concession.

In fact, there are plenty of Christologies that do not require embracing logical contradictions. Those Christologies are rationally understandable. If Tennant wanted a Christology that could be fully understood, he could pick one out! The Trinity is the only one that explicitly requires the belief that God be inscrutable and a mystery. Tennant should not project his metaphysical assumption onto either the rational or theological discussion, but that’s precisely what he’s doing.

Tennant has no logical grounding to make the claim that God is incomprehensible on the basis of his own personal ignorance. That’s a textbook fallacious argument from ignorance!

The consequence of this becomes plain immediately:

Tennant is assuming—without logical warrant—that we cannot understand the nature of God (at least enough to determine if God is a Trinity or not). He does so in order that he can avoid concluding that the doctrine of the Trinity is a contradiction. Using the incomprehensibility of the Trinity as evidence that God is incomprehensible on that point is plainly circular, if not an outright contradiction.

At best, Tennant’s discussion of the incomprehensibility of God is a red herring argument that has no relevance on whether or not God is an incomprehensible Trinity or not. At worst, however, it is circular reasoning or even a contradiction.

Whether or not we can understand the nature of God or not, this doesn’t make a contradictory statement palatable. Even if we knew nothing about the nature of God, the fact that the Trinitarian formulation is inherently contradictory (numerically and categorically) as a matter of language is enough on its own to reject it. We don’t actually need to know whether God is a Trinity or not to know that contradictions are always false.

Now let’s look at the fatal flaw in Tennant’s argument.

This is the essence of Tennant’s argument. Tennant wants to differentiate between ontological explicability (“in principle”) and non-ontological explicability (“to us”) in order to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is ontologically explicable but non-ontologically inexplicable.

If the doctrine of the Trinity is ontologically explicable, then it can’t be a contradiction. But how does one go about showing that something is inexplicable? By showing that it leads to a contradiction. So, in order to prove that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a contradiction (Tennant’s thesis), he must prove that it is a contradiction in order to show that it is inexplicable. This is self-refuting.

Because his argument is self-refuting, there exists no analogy that Tennant can ever cite that would be sufficient to support his argument. Consider the analogy of the blind person. There is nothing inherently inexplicable about color for a blind person. A blind person may not be able to experience color through their eyes, but this is a very different thing from being unable to explain it or account for it. A blind person absolutely does not have to accept the existence of color “on faith,” just as you don’t have to accept the existence of subatomic particles “on faith.”

The problem with trying to reason by analogy is that the formulation of the Trinity is not ontologically explicable (i.e. in principle). The conventional understanding of the Trinity is that it is an inexplicable mystery (to us) because it is a logical contradiction (in principle). It is not an inexplicable mystery in principle or merely a logical contradiction to us.

Just pause for a moment. There is no reason, at all, that the atheist he is arguing against should accept this. All the atheist must do is accept that a contradiction remains a contradiction and should be rejected. He’s not required to accept Tennant’s special pleading. Tennant knows that his argument is speculative pleading, which is why he says it “may be reasonable…even if we can’t understand it.” He’s got no argument and he’s hoping that you’ll let him continue without one.

It’s sad really. The clash between Tennant’s Trinitarian faith and his logic and reason is irreconcilable. He’s got to choose between blind faith or a rejection of the Trinity, but instead he’s choosing not to choose.

Now, let’s look at that example.

Recall that because Tennant’s premise is a self-refuting contradiction, there exists no analogy that can support his argument. This analogy is no different.

Tennant is obviously not a mathematician, because the explicability of higher dimensions is not restricted because one exists on a lower dimension. In fact, in our three dimensions, we can explain any n^th dimension. The hypothetical being inhabiting a two-dimensional world is not, in any way, inherently restricted from formulating and conceptualizing an n^th dimensional world on the basis of his own experience. In fact, the mathematical proofs of multiple dimensions involves starting with the lower dimensions and building incrementally to arbitrarily large dimensions. There is no logical reason that Flatlanders could not reason about three dimensional shapes or conceive of them in their minds. If they could reason about 2-dimensional shapes, they could reason about n-dimensional shapes.

Here is ChatGPT’s (disclaimer: ChatGPT) attempt at proof of n-dimensional space. Notice that the proof begins with the first dimension and reasons outward from that.

Keep in mind that Tennant’s analogy is bad not because he chose a bad analogy, but because no good analogy actually exists. Every analogy he might choose is a bad one.

Now its time to see that even if we ignore the bad analogy, Tennant still commits serious errors of reasoning.

Very simply, I’d use the universal language of mathematics.

No, both propositions are objectively and unambiguously false. If you communicated these things, you would be lying to them. We can use the universal language of mathematics to communicate the true reality in a way that doesn’t involve deceiving 2-dimensional beings.

A cylinder is not a square or a circle, but a projection onto two-dimensional space might be. But this projection is a transformation (as is its opposite). When we talk about the projection, we are no longer discussing a cylinder, but a 3-dimensional projection onto a 2-dimensional space.

This is the heresy of partialism:

This is like how Radix Fidem claims that the Hebrews couldn’t understand certain abstract concepts or “ways of thought” because they supposedly lacked the formal written language to express them. It’s an ignorant, simplistic, elitist, or even racist way to view how another group understands reality.

The word vertical is just the name we give to the third dimension after the first two. It’s not even categorically different from width and length. Considering that we three dimensional beings have no difficulty conceiving of other dimensions as different categories (such as time), Flatlanders should find the concept of vertical to be a completely explicable extension of what they already know.

It’s only a contradiction if you think they are the same thing. The two 3D-to-2D projections are showing two different things. If the Flatlanders correctly understand them to be describing two different things, then there is no contradiction.

The same is true of the Trinity. There is no contradiction until one says that three is equal to one (or that persons are different things from beings). The error is taking different things and treating them as if they were the same (or the same things as if they were different). That’s why the Flatlanders see no contradiction, but the doctrine of the Trinity is still a contradiction: there is no way to rectify the latter. Even the Flatlanders would view the Trinity as a contradiction.

Tennant’s analogy is failing him badly.

This is just a collection of false statements, for the reasons already stated.

No, we do not. If this is what God was telling us, then God would have to be a liar. Since we know, theologically, that God is not a liar, this cannot be true.

No, this is a contradiction and we know that no contradiction can be true. So we do know what it means for there to be a different sense of being in this context: falsehood.

As with the cylinder, the projection of the cylinder is no longer a cylinder, but a projection. If you tried to claim that the projection was the cylinder, it would be a contradiction, a falsehood.

This is false. If God had actually said so, unambiguously, there would have been no reason to try to make a logical proof for the Trinity, rather than join the conventional explanation that it is inexplicable and utterly beyond reason. All you would have had to do is point out where God actually said so, and the discussion would end. But the discussion didn’t end, as seen by Tennant’s argument here.

The funny thing is that Tennant is already a polytheist. He believes in a divine council of lesser gods. For some reason, he isn’t arguing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate higher gods. This would also satisfy the conclusion of being God in different senses, but it wouldn’t involve rational inexplicability. Why won’t he do this? It’s not because it’s a matter of logic, but because it’s a matter of theology. He has a logic-free prior commitment to the Trinity. His (blind) faith requires it of him, so he’s trying (and failing) to make his logic cohere with his faith. He’s not being intellectually honest with himself about his motivations, or else he’d become a heretic by subscribing to one of the logically consistent formulations.

It’s known as the fallacy of equivocation. It is also not an appearance of contradiction, but a reality of contradiction.

Except that he just stated it. This is self-refuting.

Fundamentally, you cannot make a coherent (or non-contradictory) argument from incoherence (or contradiction). Tennant is trying to state something that, by his own definition, cannot be stated coherently without contradiction. It’s literally, according to Tennant, inexplicable. Moreover, if he succeeded in his goal to state what cannot be stated, then it wouldn’t be unable to be stated after all! His act is utterly futile, for he fails if he fails and fails if he succeeds.

Tennant cannot show that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be stated unless he shows that it is a contradiction, which is precisely what he is refusing to do. So, the most he can do is simply claim—without argument—that the doctrine is true, but inexplicable. And this is exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity teaches: that it is a belief held on blind faith that is not accessible to logic and reason, in large part because it actually is a contradiction, but that it is true nonetheless.

The problem here isn’t, per se, that the Trinity is a contradiction. Plenty of people believe in contradictions. The problem is that Tennant knows that believing in a contradiction is a completely logically invalid thing to do. Tennant is stubbornly trying to have it both ways. He must make a choice. Is it blind faith devoid of reason? Or is it to abandon the doctrine of the Trinity? Or will he continue to believing in a contradiction by trying to believe both at once? What will he choose?

All this wordplay will avail him nothing. He must choose for himself.

There is no evidence that the problem with the Trinity being contradictory is one of precision. The reasons that it is a contradiction are both numerical (i.e. counting) and categorical. Why it is a contradiction is easy to understand. It would not be any more or less of a contradiction if we possessed greater precision in language or numbers. For example, whether “1=3” or the more precise “1.0000 = 3.0000,” it remains a contradiction.

If we replaced a six-sided color wheel with a more precise 168-color wheel, this would not alter the ontology or explicability of color in any way. Precision is not the same thing as inexplicability. If the Trinity were a mere approximation of some reality, we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation. But Tennant is having an ontological discussion where he is claiming that “sense A” is ontologically different from “sense B.” Precision simply does not have any bearing on ontology. As above, this is a bad analogy.

Similarly, lack of precision does not lead to logical contradiction. It only leads to a lack of clarity.

I’m sorry, but this is just plain nonsense. The whole reason we know a contradiction exists is because the doctrine of the Trinity tries to distinguish between senses of being (qualitatively and quantitatively). If no such distinguishing took place, there would be no contradiction remaining and we’d all be modalists (or some other version). The distinguishing between senses of being—of essence and personhood—is the source of the contradiction!

Whether one articulates it or not is utterly irrelevant.

This is just some combination of fallacious equivocation, special pleading, non sequitur, and circular reasoning.

No, it does not. The doctrine of the Trinity is a contradiction, and nothing Tennant has presented has addressed the core reasons why it is a Trinity. He’s attempted to talk around the issue and acted as if the objections do not apply (that’s the special pleading) while using bad analogies to support the claims.

Objectively, the Trinity has no meaning. Tennant himself has argued quite aggressively that it is inexplicable! Meaning is an explication, and so Tennant—by arguing in favor of inexplicability—has established that there is no meaning at all to derive from the doctrine. There might be some ontological concept of a Trinity, but we don’t have access to it so it’s completely irrelevant: we can’t actually formulate an explicable formulation of the Trinity.

This is a massive concession!

Once you get past the word salad and the doublespeak, we find that he is admitting that the doctrine of the Trinity—as we understand it subjectively—is inexplicable. Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity—as we understand it—has no meaning. So when he says…

…he is admitting that the objective meaning is beyond our explication. If we could comprehend that meaning, then that would be an explanation and the doctrine wouldn’t be inexplicable anymore.

By Tennant’s own argument, there exists no known explicable doctrine of the Trinity. If there were an explicable doctrine to us, he wouldn’t have said it remains subjectively inexplicable. It can’t be both explicable and inexplicable to us at the same time. The doctrine we have—the one he enunciated—is not the objectively ontologically explicable one, it’s the contradictory one. We don’t have an objectively ontologically explicable formulation of the Trinity. If we did, it wouldn’t be inexplicable anymore.

If Tennant is correct when he says…

…then when he says…

…he’s deceiving himself. We can’t explicate it—to ourselves—while it remains subjectively—to us—inexplicable.

A contradiction can be described in logical form, but the contradiction has no meaning. Tennant has described the Trinity in logical form, and we can understand that form in logical terms, but it conveys no meaning because it is either a flat contradiction (as an argument), fallacious reasoning (as an argument), or else a meaningless collection of words (not an argument at all). That is the concession that Tennant has made.

Tennant has proven that there is absolutely no reason to believe in the Trinity, because the Trinity is meaningless. By his own argument, we do not possess (nor can we) a doctrine of a Trinity that is explicable. It’s impossible. Whatever the nature of God is, we can’t describe it (that’s what inexplicable means). When we describe a three-in-one God, that is an explication, but if our non-ontological explication is inexplicable, then the claim that God is three-in-one is not an explication at all (by contradiction). All we can describe is a contradiction, which by definition is not the ontological reality of the thing.

An ontologically explicable doctrine of the Trinity is not available to us. No alternative non-ontologically explicable formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity can serve as a suitable replacement for the real thing. Any conclusions drawn from the inexplicable will themselves be inexplicable.

Believing in the doctrine of the Trinity has no bearing whatsoever on the actual nature of God. Tennant has taken great pains to separate the two. He is right to claim that if there is some nature where God is one-in-three, there is no way for us to understand that. And that includes making the claim that God is one-in-three, because there is no correspondence between our subjective non-ontological understanding of God as one-in-three and the actual unknowable ontological reality of God as three-in-one. There exists no logical bridge between the explicable and the inexplicable.

Contradictions convey no meaning. If you, the reader, believes in the doctrine of the Trinity, your belief is logically meaningless. You are in the same boat as someone who doesn’t believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. Your belief—by itself—does not add to, or subtract from, your understanding of actual reality.

This is not precise, and we can be more precise. We do know and understand exactly what it means to draw a distinction between ways of being: it is called a logical contradiction. That’s exactly and precisely what it means to draw that distinction. There is no ambiguity.

Nope, it does not logically follow that “being” is not a univocal term. That clearly begs-the-question. No one would say that being was not univocal unless one had already concluded that it was not univocal.

Ouch. There is nothing in logical analysis that requires us to make a consistent account of inconsistency. What logical analysis requires is for us to reject inconsistency. Tennant wants badly for us to take inconsistency and force consistency upon it, a rather obvious impossibility. This is why his argument flails about so much. He uses thousands of words to say nothing substantive.

When we subject the doctrine of the Trinity to logical analysis, we find that it forces us to reject it because it is logically inconsistent.

All attempts to date to prove the doctrine of the Trinity from logic have failed. Tennant wants to take that failure and reason that it might still be true despite the fact that all attempts to prove it have resulted in failure. That’s nothing more than the claim that the Trinity might be true without providing any reason that it might be true.

That might be okay in other arguments, but the reason proofs of the Trinity have failed is because the canonical formulation of the Trinity is a contradiction. It can’t possibly be true without altering its form. But doing so would mean that the doctrine of the Trinity was no longer the doctrine of the Trinity.

There is no “might be true” in this case, and retreating to ignorance does nothing to alleviate that fact. Every analogy is a bad one. Every argument is fallacious. The only retreat is to stop making logical claims and declare the whole thing an unknowable mystery inaccessible to reason. But Tennant’s own views on logic have cut off that escape route. He’s trapped in a no-win situation.

Tennant is begging-the-question again. He’s assuming the conclusion—that being is not univocal—in order to reject modalism. This is why, throughout this article, I’ve noted that the actual logical conclusion of Tennant’s arugment, if he were to pursue it to its logical conclusion, is that modalism is true. I’m not saying that I believe this, I’m saying that once you remove Tennant’s invalid reasoning and are left with only his premises, what remains is a logically valid proof of modalism.

Or to put this as simply as possible, Tennant acknowledges that without the non-univocal understanding, what is left is modalism. Since we know that his argument for a non-univocal understanding is unsound, then modalism must be true because that is the only thing separating Modalists from Trinitarians.

Unless one presupposes it, testimony of scripture does not describe the doctrine of the Trinity. Simple as.

Non-obvious error? Maybe we’ll worry about that when were done with the numerous obvious errors.

This is an error in reasoning. A logical contradiction is a formal fallacy. It is fallacious in form not in context (or else it would be an informal fallacy). If a claim is a contradiction internally, it must be a contradiction externally, because the form remains unchanged.

Let’s say this again for emphasis. Contradiction is a formal fallacy. Tennant’s entire argument is that the context of the argument determines whether or not there is an actual or apparent contradiction. But a contradiction is not context-dependent, it is form-dependent. Changing the context does not eliminate the original contradiction.

Tennant, having been influenced by polytheists and mystics, has become a relativist. Just as the mystics claim that there are greater truths beyond the ones we know, here Tennant is claiming that there is a greater truth beyond the law of non-contradiction. He’s free to make such a claim, but it is just a subjective belief. But in terms of the objective laws of logic, he’s just plain wrong.

“Let me give you a context-based argument to show that it isn’t a formal logical fallacy.”

*Sigh*