Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays' Trinitarian speculations violate Paul's prohibitions against foolish questions and ceaseless word-wrangling

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled 

Ares redivivus

Apostate Dale Tuggy's philosophical objection to the Trinity is that it (allegedly) violates the law of identity.

It does.  You insist that Jesus is separate in person from the Father, but that both have identical wills in all things, when in fact it is the "will" that makes the person distinct from another.  Talking about two different people who agree on absolutely everything and have the same identical thoughts is absurd, and we'd only expect false religion to spend 2,000 years trying to prove the impossible.

Some Trinitarians stray from Nicaea's ideas about Jesus and the Father, and allow for Jesus to will things contrary to the Father, but that's only because they are constrained to believe that way by the biblical evidence, not because the Trinity concept allows it.  By the way, you bible forbids the Nicaean concept of Jesus.  

 39 And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will." (Matt. 26:39 NAU)

 If Jesus had infallible assurance that the Father would never grant this request, why did Jesus make the request?  If you had infallible assurance that your boss would not let you go home from work early, would you still ask "Boss, if it is possible, let me go home early, yet not as I will, but as you will" ?  Of course not. You'd only ask such a thing if you didn't know whether the boss would allow it. In which case Jesus is asking an identical question because he wasn't sure whether God would allow it, but he probably concluded soon after that God wouldn't allow it.  The point is that you cannot reconcile Matthew 26:39 with your Nicaean view that Jesus is little more than a perfect reflection of God the Father.

Worse, Jesus makes explicit the disagreement between his personal will and the Father's by saying "not as I will".  The negation is perfectly pointless if Jesus' will was always in harmony with the Father's.  If you and your girlfriend both desire to eat at McDonald's, do you say "if it be possible let's eat somewhere else, yet not as I will, but as you will" ?  Obviously not...unless you are just playing games.

I think this is the part where you answer one logical contradiction with another, and account for Jesus' will not being in harmony with the Father's by pretending Jesus was only speaking here "from his human nature", not his divine nature.

Ok, then what?  Was Jesus' human will at variance with the Father's will, yes or no?    Or must I become an expert on Monothelitism before you will deem me worthy of response?

Are you quite sure that when the gospel authors said "Jesus" did this or that, they sometimes meant only his human nature and sometimes meant only his divine nature?  You'll forgive me if I don't assume the gospel authors were as paranoid about upholding systematic theology and inerrancy as today's fundagelicals.  I'd rather believe the gospel authors were far less sophisticated than this, a theory more consistent with the way things were in the 1st century...which means when they attribute words to Jesus, they are necessarily implying that ALL of Jesus was in support of what he was saying/doing...and not merely his "human nature".

And that's to say nothing of the fact that having "two natures" constitutes logical contradiction.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that if we are to presume Christ was consistent and perfect, this would demand that BOTH his natures are in agreement with whatever he did or said.  So, Steve, who asked the Father for the possibility to avoid their cup of suffering there in Matthew 26:39?  Jesus?  Or the second person of the Trinity?

One issue this raises is how to define identity.

An issue which I'm sure kept Jesus' original followers up late at night, shivering with fright about the consequences of getting any of this stupid sophistry wrong.

For instance, I've argued that if A and B can be put into point-by-point correspondence, then that's a rigorous definition of identity. However, reflection symmetries meet that condition, yet reflection symmetries remain distinguishable by virtue of chirality.

Unfortunately, the bible says enough about Jesus to forbid concluding that he was in perfect harmony with the Father, so take your Nicaean "light from light" and shove it up your word-wrangling strife-loving bible disobeying ass.

But another issue is whether ancient people operated with a stringent definition of identity.

Yeah, the fact that Nicaea didn't happen until about 300 years after Jesus died, sort of deprives you of all sense of purpose in life.  I suggest you write a monograph on the shit and have it peer-reviewed.

Let's take hypothetical example. In paganism, the gods are not indestructible. One god can kill another god. In that event, he ceases to exist. No more body. No more consciousness. Yet it's possible to recreate him through sorcery.
Suppose Zeus gets really miffed with Ares and zaps him out of existence, but Hera brings him back through some magic ritual. There's a gap in his existence: from existence to nonexistence to reexistence. Would pagans regard Ares redivivus as one and the same individual?

Did you miss the part of the NT that forbids you from engaging in stupid questions?

While some metaphysicians might balk, I have no reason to think ordinary ancient people would regard Ares redivivus as a different individual from his former self.

And atheists have no reason to think Jesus' original followers would have viewed him as "light from light".  Sometimes biblical authors accidentally let the inconvenient historical truth come out.  Paul in Acts 13:33 applied the "This day I have begotten you" Sonship  Psalm 2:7 to the point in time when Jesus resurrected:  

32 "And we preach to you the good news of the promise made to the fathers,
 33 that God has fulfilled this promise to our children in that He raised up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, 'YOU ARE MY SON; TODAY I HAVE BEGOTTEN YOU.'
 34 "As for the fact that He raised Him up from the dead, no longer to return to decay, He has spoken in this way: 'I WILL GIVE YOU THE HOLY and SURE blessings OF DAVID.' (Acts 13:32-34 NAU)

 I think this is the part where you insist that anybody who thinks this is saying Jesus was begotten of God on the day he rose from the dead, are morons for not realizing that the need to defend inerrancy is always more important than the need to understand biblical authors correctly.  Never mind that being begotten on a specific day was the original intent of this Psalm:

“Today” points to the fact that the words were announced on the coronation day, the day on which the divine decree became effective.

Craigie, P. C. (2002). Vol. 19: Word Biblical Commentary : Psalms 1-50.

Word Biblical Commentary (Page 67). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

So, Steve, when the the divine decree in Psalm 2:7 become effective in Jesus' case?  On the day he rose from the dead, as Paul taught and as the original context of the Psalm would require anyway?

Or did I forget that rule of interpretation that says NT authors are always allowed to take the OT out of context and still be correct to do so?