In a video which is modestly titled, “The Trinity explained PERFECTLY! – No analogies REQUIRED! [MUST WATCH]” (June 8, 2024), Christian apologist Sam Shamoun of Answering Islam attempts to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in 12 minutes. Unfortunately, all his argument shows is that he holds to an anthropomorphic notion of God, and that he rejects the notion that God has one Mind. To cut a long story short: he thinks God has three minds, each with its own thoughts, volitions and emotions (including the emotions of anger and sadness), and that all of these minds are somehow identical with one and the same being (God), sharing the same existence. He further argues that just because we don’t see a being that’s more than one person in the human realm, it doesn’t follow that there can’t be a multi-personal Being in the Divine realm. Confused? So am I.

Here is Sam Shamoun explaining the concept of a person, as applied to God:

[3:16] By “person,” in reference to the Father, in reference to the Son, in reference to the Holy Spirit, I do not mean … [3:29] a flesh-and-blood human being. No. The term “person” in reference to the Godhead means: the Father has emotions. He loves. He gets angry. He gets hurt. He gets disappointed. He has a desire. He has a volition. He has will. He has a mind. He has thoughts. He has cognition. He’s aware. He’s aware that He exists. He’s aware of His own existence. He’s aware that other[s] exist. That’s what I mean by “person.” … [4:24] That’s what I mean when I say, “The Father is a person, the Son is a person, and the Holy Spirit is a person.” … [4:39] The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that there is one eternal being of God, and yet there are three persons that possess this being, that have eternally existed as God… [4:57] The state in which they exist is the state of God being God.

So according to Sam, one and the same being has the following thoughts: “I am the Father,” “I am the Son and not the Father,” and “I am the Holy Spirit, and not the Father or the Son.” Does it make sense to ascribe these incompatible thoughts to the same being?

One way to escape this contradiction is to simply deny that God has volitions, feelings or thoughts, as inner states of mind. According to this account, which is widely accepted by Catholic and Orthodox Christian theologians, we can only ascribe intelligence and love to God analogously. What we really mean is that God acts in a way that could be described as intelligent or loving, not that He has inner mental states like ours. God is purely active; hence He has no subjective feeling of “what it is like” to be God, which means that He could not be called sentient. Thus it would be a mistake to envisage each of the Divine persons as literally thinking to itself, “I am the Father/Son/Holy Spirit,” so no contradiction relating to a Mind thinking incompatible thoughts arises. The Divine persons don’t think to themselves at all. According to this account, God only has one Mind, not three, but it is a Mind which is utterly unlike ours. And on this particular point, they are surely right. The notion of God’s having three minds flies in the face of Scripture, which affirms that He has one mind – see, for instance, “Who can know the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:34). I would also argue that it is contrary to reason to assert that one and the same being has multiple minds. Why wouldn’t you call them multiple beings, in that case?

Now, I imagine that Sam Shamoun would reject this Catholic-Orthodox account of the Divine Mind because it makes God too remote. And I can understand why. After all, doesn’t the Bible itself declare, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9)? How can we worship a God Who doesn’t have thoughts? That would mean that God never thinks about each of us, individually. Why love a God like that? (Incidentally, I very much doubt that most lay Catholics or Orthodox Christians envisage God in this highly abstract way, but the simple fact is that Catholic and Orthodox theologians do, although I should add that Orthodox theologians commonly draw a distinction between God’s essence, which is utterly unknowable, and God’s energies, which are “God’s knowledge, power, and grace directed toward creatures,” as South African theologian Robert Falconer puts it here.)

But here’s the thing. Sam Shamoun is a Christian apologist who evangelizes to Muslims. They’re the people he is trying to convert, not Western atheists and agnostics. And the simple fact is that Muslims are very much closer to Catholic and Orthodox theologians in their way of thinking about God than they are Sam’s unabashedly anthropomorphic model of God. The Islamic doctrine of Tawhid categorically denies that God shares attributes with any creature; Sam, on the other hand, affirms that God, like ourselves, has thoughts, volitions and feelings – including negative ones. And for this reason alone, I can’t see many of them buying into his account of the Trinity. They might listen to a Thomist, however.

Of course, I am well aware that the Catholic and Orthodox accounts of the Trinity have problems of their own: they postulate that three individuals can all possess the same Divine Mind, and be identical with the same Being. For my part, I find philosopher Joshua Sijuwade’s account of the Trinity a promising one. Sijuwade is a Catholic advocate of a monarchical Trinity, who follows the early Church Fathers in identifying the one God with the Father (and not, as St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas held, the whole Trinity). Sijuwade’s view fits explains awkward Scriptural passages like John 17:3, where Jesus addresses the Father as “the only true God.” Only the Father is the Source of all that is. If (following an old analogy) we think of the Father as the Mind of God, while the Son is God’s idea of Himself and the Holy Spirit as the love between them, then it follows that although the Son and the Holy Spirit are not the Mind of God, they are inseparably bound up with it, as God’s nature is to know and love. Hence we can speak of all of them as “of one being.” Sijuwade has his own analogy for the Trinity, which he defends in a recent paper titled, “The Love Argument for the Trinity: A reformulation” (TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, March 2024).

However, Sijuwade’s account, which he outlines in the video below, is in tension with the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council (which Catholics regard as an ecumenical council) that “there is only one true God, eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable, incomprehensible and ineffable, Father, Son and Holy Spirit” – a problem which Sijuwade candidly acknowledges.

Another potential problem with Sijuwade’s view of the Father alone as ungrounded is that he regards the existence of God as being in the end a brute fact: that is, he sees God as a Being who has no explanation, rather than viewing Him as self-explanatory.

Perhaps the most perceptive criticism of Sijuwade’s views comes from philosopher Steve Nemes (who is a non-Trinitarian Christian): if the Father is (logically) prior to the Son, then the Father has to be complete without the Son. He has to be something before He generates the Son, where “before” refers to logical rather than temporal priority. (See this video from 8:45 onwards.) Sijuwade responds by rejecting the notion of a “logical moment” when the Father is without the Son. And if we view God as a Mind whose nature is to think and love, then the notion of a “logical moment” when that Mind is without its thought of itself does seem to make no sense. Sijuwade defends his view of the Trinity in this 14-minute video here:

UPDATE: Sam Shamoun has recently announced his conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism, which he discusses in a video here (January 27, 2025). From what Sam says, he seems to have been moving in that direction for several years. While Sam’s testimony is a deeply moving account on a personal level, he has not yet clarified whether he now rejects his anthropomorphic model of God, and whether he now affirms that God has one Mind. I also can’t help wondering whether he has read the works of Thomist philosopher Ed Feser (and especially his work, “Five Proofs of God”), but that’s another story. At any rate, I have invited him to take part in the discussion, if he wishes to.

What do readers think? Does the notion of the Trinity make any sense at all?