Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion

When I reflect on the discussions I’ve had over the years about the trinity, with its various doctrinal merits and deficiencies, I am often reminded of two complementary Jane Austin novels, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. In the former work, Austin explores the engagement of two very stubborn characters as they grapple with their own pride and prejudice in the search for truth about the other. In her latter work, Austin addresses the opposite temper, one which is too easily persuaded from conviction. A sense of the struggle between the stubborn and the relenting comes out in the following excerpt from Persuasion, involving an event where a stubborn young girl found herself in a sick bed after refusing to yield to another stubborn man’s advice.

Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now, to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

While I disagree with Austin’s general view of human character (that all virtues are kept virtuous through balance and proportion), she nevertheless shines as a masterful observer of the underlying dynamics that so often shape and override our surface dialogues and disagreements. For my part, I have rarely seen these three dynamics of pride and prejudice and persuasion more fully expressed in the Church than in the discussion and debate over the trinity and its rival viewpoints.

Thus while most of this site is devoted to reasoning logically and biblically with trinitarians, it seems necessary to also address these underlying dynamics that rise up in all of us, when they turn sinful and hinder the genuine pursuit of truth.

The first time that I was ever sanctioned by trinitarians came when I was in college. I had been appointed to a position of leadership in my Christian fellowship quite accidentally, due to a miscommunication, so it wasn’t a particular injustice when I lost that position over my views — I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But it was still a very public disgrace, so I remember it well.

The end result was that I was accused of pride (“arrogance”) for believing that I might be right where the rest of the Church historically and today has been wrong. Of course I would later find that the issue of church consensus is much more complex than one man contra mundum, but as a Protestant I had made a commitment to follow scripture wherever it leads, regardless of consensus, so I left confused as to why consensus had any relevance to the truthfulness of the claims I was making.

This experience together with many others helped me to recognize the degree of prejudice that trinitarians often bring into their discussions. What I found over the years is that trinitarians regularly come to a conversation,

1. Assuming that their own view is wholly accurate and without fault, and
2. Assuming that all major alternative views have already been discovered and refuted.

Rather than pursue truth and a clearer understanding of scripture, it seems that the task for the (already inerrant) trinitarian is to identify which stock error is being defended by his friend, and then to disabuse him of that error. I’ve been accused of arianism more times than I can recall (including in the above discussion), not because my view actually has anything to do with arianism, but because trinitarians are simply trying to classify me within their existing rubric so that they can know how to respond. Such discussion becomes less about understanding scripture in context, and more about making pre-canned arguments from pre-canned categories of thought.

Of course, the problem of prejudice cuts both ways. First, the bad faith and bad form discussion tactics that are often employed by trinitarians are common, but they are not universal. There are plenty of good, gracious, and intellectually responsible trinitarians out in the world, and we need to treat one another on a case-by-case basis, not according to stereotypes. Furthermore, non-trinitarians with grievances against the trinitarian camp will often treat their opponents with their own form of prejudice, returning evil for evil, and that is certainly not the behavior that Christ exemplifies and teaches (1Pe 3:8-9). Pride and prejudice in persuasion are human problems, not just trinitarian problems, and we all need to guard against expressing them in our debates with each-other.

The prejudice that plagues discussions about the godhead leads to a breakdown of communication, in that it creates a barrier to deeply understanding the opposing point of view. For example, the final straw in the conversation that got me kicked out of my college leadership team came through the following question and answer:

Leader: Do you believe that the Son is a created being?

Me (thinking for a bit): Well yeah, of course I do.

Anyone who’s accustomed to viewing the Bible through trinitarian lenses will of course understand why such a statement would get me kicked off of the leadership team of a Christian fellowship. I was young and inexperienced, so I didn’t understand the impact that the arian controversy had on Christian categories of thought, even to our own day. When I affirmed that the Son was a created being, my leader understood that to mean that I denied the true divinity of Jesus in the same way that Arius did, by making Jesus’ divine nature an entity that was created by the Father, rather than an entity eternally proceeding from the Father.

But the claim that I had attempted to defend before receiving that question was that Jesus’ sonship is a property of his human nature, rather than his divine nature. In other words, it is inappropriate to call Jesus’ divine nature “the Son” on its own; rather Jesus’ sonship comes through his incarnation as a man (more or less). So I understood the question in the following way:

Leader: Do you believe that Jesus has a created nature?

Me (thinking for a bit): Well yeah, of course I do.

That’s just orthodox christology to my ears. Because of the incarnation, it’s appropriate to say that the Son is a created being. It’s equally appropriate to say that the Son is an uncreated being. He is both truly God and truly man. This duality of meaning that we see in a single question and answer reflects a broader breakdown of communication between trinitarians and other schools of thoughts. It is very easy to speak past one another, bringing to the text and the conversation a deep set of presuppositions that prejudices our interpretation of the Bible and each-other.

Living as a theological black sheep who still loves trinitarians and the broader body of Christ forces me to cultivate a practice of “listening from the ground up” whenever I encounter views of the Bible (or of other matters) that are foreign to my own way of thinking. This essentially involves finding a point of common ground underneath the disagreement (usually the authority of scripture), then rebuilding in my own mind the reasoning that my friend uses to reach his different conclusions.

The value of this practice is that it helps one to understand the root cause of the disagreement, and to clarify areas where one or both sides needs to improve its view. Perfect consensus is rarely achieved in any case, due to the subtle influences of pride and prejudice and persuasion by things other than the text (like creeds and the ever-coveted stamp of orthodoxy). But for the truth-seeker, the exercise is an invaluable way to prune bad ideas in one’s own thinking, and strengthen the good.

Perhaps the most fruitful conversation I’ve ever had on the trinity came when a very patient friend listened to my view from the ground up, and challenged me in two legitimate areas. I believe it was the first time anyone ever brought a legitimate criticism against my view, rather than a straw man. And it happened because he actually took the time to rightly understand my line of reasoning, from the ground up, and to deal with the problems that he found along the way. He saw the following two flaws:

1. Associating Christ’s sonship with his human nature cannot explain the preincarnate sonship that Jesus had with the Father.
2. My treatment of Jesus’ sonship had me speaking like a nestorian, separating Christ into two persons (a human and a divine) rather than uniting him as one.

My friend had his own quite severe form of heresy in his own view, being a defender of orthodoxy while unaware that he himself was quite unorthodox. So if I cared only about winning the argument, I could focus all of my rhetoric on that error and ignore my own issues. But someone who genuinely wants to know the truth of what the Bible teaches needs to set aside his pride and his prejudice toward being right (confirmation bias), and be willing to be persuaded by a good critique when it comes.

In the end, these valid critiques drove me back to scripture, and helped me to develop a stronger and more robust system of the godhead that can make a better stand against trinitarian thought. This is how we grow, listening to the critiques of others, and working to understand them from the ground up. Patternists can and should learn from trinitarian critiques, and trinitarians should likewise foster a greater willingness in their own camp to listen and learn from those who have valid challenges against the trinitarian system.

As Anne Elliot points out, there can be great value in a persuadable temper. There can also be great danger. Christians should not be easily tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine (Eph 4:14), but neither should we be so stubborn as to resist valid correction. Where Austin views balance as the guide to mediate these two extremes, consistent Christians should measure all things by the word of God, and be stubborn or persuadable insofar as a doctrine aligns with or chafes against it. As one friend of mine put it (though unnuanced by the evident need for apologetics), “When I open my Bible, I open my mind. When I close my Bible, I close my mind.”

For the Christian, humility does not mean that we forgo strength of assurance or conviction. Rather, it means that we submit to God as our authority, then build and rebuild our convictions around his word alone.