Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of the Trinity, Part 11.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Well, today we bring our study of the doctrine of the Trinity to a close.

You'll remember I have defended a model of the Trinity according to which we think of God

as an infinite, unembodied soul, but a very special sort of soul, namely a soul so richly endowed with rational faculties

that God has three sets of rational faculties, each sufficient for personhood, so that God is a

tri-personal being. And I explained last time that this doctrine or model does not feature, but neither

does it preclude the notion of relations of derivation between the three members of the Trinity.

We can think of them as simply three co-equal members of the triune God, or we can add derivative relations if we

want to, and it seems to me that this is a positive feature of the model.

Now today I'd like to wrap up by offering a plausibility argument for the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity belongs to revealed theology, not natural theology.

That is to say, you will not be able to prove that God is a tripersonal being through the resources of human reason alone.

You might be able to prove that God exists, but you wouldn't know that God is a Trinity.

Rather, this is a matter of divine revelation, and one accepts this doctrine based upon God's self-revelation in Scripture as a tripersonal

being, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Still, we can ask if there are any arguments that we might give that would support the plausibility

of this doctrine that would say, yes, this teaching, this doctrine is a credible

teaching. And so I want to close our discussion of the Trinity with a plausibility

argument that has been defended by a number of contemporary Christian philosophers for God's being a plurality

of persons, not simply one person but a plurality of persons. And the argument goes like this.

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