/lit/ - Literature

>>19757929
I am a passive observer of these threads, as I would like to always try to learn more about other religions that I am not familiar with, and since I have an interest in philosophical theology and have dipped my hand into apologetics and polemics for ideas of God’s complexity and simplicity, I thought that this post was interesting.

Ibn Taymiyyah, along with other Muslim scholars such as Al-Ghazali and Al-Baqillani, seemed to of characterized Trinitarian belief as God’s essence along with two concomitant attributes, one being God’s word and the other being God’s life, and since the Trinitarians believed that God’s word was the agent through which God created everything, then therefore God’s word must be God, along with God’s life instilling everything with life, then therefore God’s life must be God.

Except the fact that, such in your case, attributes are merely predicates of the divine essence, such that they are merely descriptions of God’s agency, in that God actually has speech through which He reveals, and God actually has life through which he lives.

Except, in my ideation of Trinitarian dogma, the Trinity isn’t that there is God’s essence, and then two other concomitant attributes that embody the Son and the Holy Spirit. Ibn Taymiyyah characterized Trinitarianism as this belief, and therefore due to his conception of the belief, believed that Trinitarians had no objection to the idea that since God’s word was an attribute and so was life, then it would be arbitrary to say that God’s word is God’s Son instead of God’s life, so there must be two Sons (as pic related suggests), and if God’s wisdom and life precedes from God’s essence, that would mean that God’s essence was before wisdom and life, meaning that God was ignorant and lifeless, meaning that God’s attributes could not be actual persons that have subsistence as persons.

Except that this isn’t actually what Trinitarianism teaches, at least Nicene Trinitarianism. Nicene Trinitarianism doesn’t believe that the Hypostases of the Trinity are attributes, but rather are actual particular subsistences of the divine essence, with the divine essence being identified as one paternal Hypostasis, with this one paternal Hypostasis begetting through self-reflected eternal wisdom a corollary image through which God acknowledges Himself, with this act of acknowledgement being another subsistence, the Son, and their willful communion producing a third corollary Hypostasis that is the Spirit.

These aren’t attributes in the context of predication. They’re three subsistences of one substance, all three being ‘relations’ of the divine essence, the Father, stemming from Him as the Son and the Holy Spirit, and since spiration is distinct from begetting, there cannot be another Son, and since the idea of divine processions is atemporal, there cannot be a time where God is ignorant and lifeless.