If he has a better theology, why wouldn’t he want to defend it? In any case, if he’s not interested in meeting my challenge he should just say so. Montero, however, claims to be a Christian. Buddhists can maintain that all Christian theologies are flawed. Skeptics, for example, can argue that they don’t accept any theology. Of course, not everyone has an alternative theology. If you don’t have one that you are prepared to defend, then you have forfeited the game. What my article discusses is precisely how to defend an alternative theological position. Instead, Montero asserts that this demand “is unnecessary because one could argue that there is no obvious, or clear alternative, but that we know that the trinity is not a possible option.” Already Montero has moved the goalposts and in so doing changed the object of the game without acknowledging it. He should have presented a clear alternative to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is exactly where Montero’s four-part response fails. Similarly, if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you can defend your theology only by showing that Jehovah’s Witness theology is superior to orthodox theology. If I give some reasons for questioning that Jesus is Michael the archangel (as Jehovah’s Witnesses believe), I have not yet shown that Jesus is God. Showing that there are problems with neo-Darwinian evolution is all well and good, but that isn’t enough to establish the truth of a particular form of creationism. There is nothing wrong with the former, but it is not a substitute for the latter. Lesson #1: Don’t Shift the GoalpostsĪ distinction crucial to my article is that there is a difference between expressing objections to someone else’s view and showing that one’s own view is preferable. The Apostle Paul’s use of sports analogies is well known (1 Cor. The use of a sports analogy is not meant to trivialize the subject. In doing so, I will be using American football as a metaphor or analogy. With this brief summary in place, let’s look at the issues raised here and some lessons we can learn from how Montero addresses the issues. In the fourth article, he briefly presents an alternative that he claims is superior (his response to requirements 2, 4, and 5). Montero devotes most of his first three articles to critiquing two of the essential propositions of the doctrine of the Trinity-that there is one God and that the Son is God. Demonstrate that your theology explains the full range of biblical information better than the doctrine of the Trinity. Show that your alternative theology does not suffer from the defects you claim to find in Trinitarianism.Identify the religion associated with that alternative to Trinitarian Christianity.
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