Positive mysterianism
In contrast, the positive mysterian holds that the trinitarian doctrine can’t be understood because of an abundance of content. That is, the doctrine seems to contain explicit or implicit contradictions. So while we grasp the meaning of its individual claims, taken together they seem inconsistent, and so the conjunction of them is not understandable, in the sense explained above. The positive mysterian holds that the human mind is adequate to understand many truths about God, although it breaks down at a certain stage, when the most profound divinely revealed truths are entertained. Sometimes an analogy with recent physics is offered; if we find mysteries (i.e., apparent contradictions) there, such as light appearing to be both a particle and a wave, why should we be shocked to find them in theology (van Inwagen 1995, 224–7)?
The best-developed positive mysterian theory is that of James Anderson (2005, 2007), who develops Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology so that beliefs in mysteries (merely apparent contradictions) may be rational, warranted, justified, and known. Orthodox belief about the Trinity, Anderson holds, involves believing, for example, that Jesus is identical to God, the Father is identical to God, and that Jesus and the Father are not identical. Similarly, one must believe that the Son is omniscient, but lacks knowledge about at least one matter. These, he grants, are apparent contradictions, but for the believer they are strongly warranted and justified by the divine testimony of scripture. He argues that numerous attempts by recent theologians and philosophers to interpret one of the apparently contradictory pairs in a way that makes the pair consistent always result in a lapse of orthodoxy (2007, 11–59). He argues that the Christian should take these trinitarian mysteries to be “MACRUEs”, merely apparent contradictions resulting from unarticulated equivocations, and he gives plausible non-theological examples of these (220–5).
It is plausible that if a claim appears contradictory to someone, she thereby by has a strong epistemic “defeater” for that belief, i.e., a further belief or other mental state which robs the first belief of rational justification and/or warrant. A stock example is a man viewing apparently red objects. The man then learns that a red light is shining on them. In learning this, he acquires a defeater for his belief that the items before him are red. Thus with the Trinity, if the believer discovers an apparent contradiction in her Trinity theory, doesn’t that defeat her belief in that theory? Anderson argues that it does not, at least, if she reflects properly on the situation. The above thought, Anderson argues, should be countered with the doctrine of divine incomprehensibility, which says that we don’t know all there is to know about God. Given this truth, the believer should not be surprised to find herself in the above epistemic situation, and so, the believer’s trinitarian belief is either insulated from defeat, or if it’s already been defeated, that defeat is undone by the preceding realization (2007, 209–54).
Dale Tuggy (2011a) argues that Anderson’s doctrine of divine incomprehensibility is true but trivial, and not obviously relevant to the rationality of belief in apparent contradictions about God. The probability of our being stuck with such beliefs is a function not only of God’s greatness in comparison to humans’ cognitive powers, but also of what and how much God chooses to reveal about himself. Nor is it clear that God would be motivated to pay the costs of inflicting apparently contradictory divine revelations on us. Moreover, Anderson has not ruled out that the apparent contradictions come not from the texts alone, but also from our theories or pre-existing beliefs. Finally, he argues that due to the comparative strength of “seemings”, a believer committed to paradoxes like those cited above will, sooner or later, acquire an epistemic defeater for her beliefs.
In a reply, Anderson (2018) denies that divine incomprehensibility is trivial, while agreeing that many things other than God are incomprehensible (297). While Tuggy had attacked his suggestions about why God would want to afflict us with apparent contradictions, Anderson clarifies that
…my theory doesn’t require me to identify positive reasons for God permitting or inducing MACRUEs. For even if I concede Tuggy’s point that “the prior probability of God inducing MACRUEs in us is either low or inscrutable,” the doctrine of [divine] incomprehensibility can still serve as…an undercutting defeater for the inference from D appears to be logically inconsistent to D is false. (298–9)
The defense doesn’t require, Anderson argues, any more than that MACRUEs are “not very improbable given theism” (299). As to whether these apparent contradictions result from the texts rightly understood, or whether they result from the texts together with mistaken assumptions we bring to them, this is a question only biblical exegesis can decide, not any a priori considerations (300). As to Tuggy’s charge that a believer in theological paradoxes will inevitably acquire an undefeated defeater for her beliefs, Anderson argues that this has not been shown, and that Tuggy overlooks how a believer may reasonably add a relevant belief to her seemingly inconsistent set of beliefs, such as that the apparently conflicting claims P and Q are only approximately true, or that “P and Q are the best way for her to conceptualize matters given the information available to her, but they don’t represent the whole story” (304).
Anderson’s central idea is that the alleged contradictions of Christian doctrine will turn out to be merely apparent. In contrast, some theologians have held that doctrines including the Trinity imply not merely apparent but also real contradictions, but are nonetheless true. Such hold that there are exceptions to the law of non-contradiction. While some philosophers have argued on mostly non-religious grounds for dialetheism, the claim that there can be true (genuine, not merely apparent) contradictions, this position has for the most part not been taken seriously by analytic theologians (Anderson 2007, 117–26) (For a recent exception, see Beall 2019.)
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