A Philosophical Argument for Conciliar Trinitarianism

This article aims to provide a philosophical argument for Conciliar Trinitarianism, which is the teaching that there is one God, the Father, and two, relationally distinct, divine persons, the Son and the Spirit, who are homoousious (i.e., of the same substance, nature, and/or essence) with the Father, through the causal theory of reference developed by Saul Kripke and Gareth Evans. A deductive argument for Conciliar Trinitarianism (formally known as 'Monarchical' Trinitarianism) is proposed, termed the 'Semantic Argument', which enables one to affirm the veracity of this position, and also preserve monotheism and divine equality, while avoiding modalism and tri-theism altogether. This is that, the article demonstrates that if the proper name 'God' was baptismally fixed to the Father through Scripture and the first two ecumenical councils (with further ratification being made by the other five ecumenical councils), then any attempt to apply this same proper name nominatively to the Son or Spirit creates what I term the ‘Trinitarian Dilemma’, which is an unavoidable choice between modalistic collapse and tri-theistic fragmentation. Common (‘Egalitarian’) Trinitarian approaches, including social models and Latin Trinitarian strategies, face this dilemma inescapably, and so the solution thus lies in adopting Conciliar Trinitarianism and, therefore, recognising that the Father alone bears 'God' as a proper name (as the dominant source of the Godhead), while the Son and Spirit are called 'God' predicatively (by virtue of possessing the divine substance, nature and or essence) or metonymically (as perfect representatives of the Father). This semantic framework thus successfully preserves both the full equality of all three Trinitarian persons and the strict monotheism confessed by the Church