I. The Love Argument for the Trinity
According to most Christians (all, by some counts), God is essentially triune. That is, God is three divine persons, but yet—somehow—only one divine being.
A lot of ink has been spilled in support of the claim that the Trinity is logically and metaphysically coherent. But that’s only half the battle: Christians also need to say something about why trinitarianism should be believed, not merely entertained.
Traditionally, Christians have appealed to three sources of revelation to make their case: the New Testament documents, early church tradition, and the judgement of the Council of Nicaea. But appeals to revelation only cut ice for those who already accept Christian “revelation” as authoritative, and so some Christians—Richard of St. Victor, Richard Swinburne, Joshua Sijuwade, and so on—have tried to make philosophical arguments that try to show, from the armchair, that if a perfect being exists, He would necessarily be tri-personal.
The main argument—the Love Argument—runs roughly as follows. Suppose God the Father exists, as all Abrahamic faiths maintain that He does. If the Father exists, He is perfectly loving, and essentially so. After all, perfect love is an attribute God would have by definition. God just wouldn’t be God if He wasn’t perfectly loving.
But, the arguers argue, if the Father is always perfectly loving, He will always be in a state of loving someone perfectly, at every moment He exists. After all, doesn’t it just seem intuitive that someone who is actively in a state of loving someone perfectly is both greater, in some respect, and more loving than someone who only has the disposition to love someone perfectly but doesn’t exercise it?
But if the Father is always in a state of loving someone perfectly, He will eternally generate—or necessarily co-exist with; take your pick—at least one other perfect (and therefore divine) person with whom He can enjoy a perfect, loving relationship. From this, we get something like the claim that God must be multi-personal.
But how do we get from multi-personal to tri-personal? Why think there are exactly three divine persons in God and not, say, two, or ten, or twelve, or 860,527?
Well, arguably—the arguers again argue—there are three (and only three) types of love, types of love that are fundamentally irreducible to one another. First, there’s self-love—the kind of love any self-respecting person should have for themselves; second, there’s love of another—the kind of love we see mutually expressed in two-person friendships and monogamous marriages; finally, third, there’s co-operative love—the kind of love where (a minimum of) two persons co-operate in order to jointly love (a minimum of) of one other person, as with parents who co-operate in order to jointly love their children.
If the Father is perfectly loving, and always loves perfectly, He’s going to have to express each kind of love on this list, since if He failed to express any one of them, at any time, He wouldn’t be the lover-than-which-no-greater-lover-can-be-conceived.
If we accept this, the rest of the argument falls into place. For the Father to express self-love, all He needs is Himself. But for the Father to express love-of-another, and express it perfectly at every moment, there needs to be at least one other divine person for God to love on, and be loved by. And for the Father and this other divine person (let’s call Him, I don’t know, the Son) to express co-operative love, they need at least one other divine person to co-operate in the loving of.
They might even name Him the Holy Spirit.
Now, you might wonder: even if the Love Argument shows that a minimum of three divine persons are needed for God to be perfectly loving, why would the headcount stop there? Well, while the Love Argument doesn’t rule out there being more than three persons in God, it doesn’t give us reason to posit any more than three, and so—by Ockham’s Razor—we should stick with three and go no further.
Put formally, the Love Argument says:
(i) Necessarily, if God exemplifies perfect love, then he causes to exist two other interdependent divine persons.
(ii) God exemplifies perfect love.
(iii) Therefore, necessarily God causes to exist two other interdependent divine persons.1
By my lights, there are about a gazillion problems with the Love Argument. It doesn’t move me much at all. But suppose you’re sympathetic up to this point: does it really make sense to stop at only three persons? Here, I’ll argue no, it doesn’t. Defenders of the Love argument should think God has many more than three persons in His being, and that—probably—the number of divine persons is infinite.
II. God is a Massive Football Team
The Love Argument assumes that self-love, love-of-another, and co-operative love are the only (irreducible) kinds of love that there are. But as I see things, there’s a fourth type of love that Trinitarians are conveniently forgetting: love of large groups—the kind of love fans have for football teams and patriots have for their countries.
There are many non-literal, or at least hyperbolic, uses of the word ‘love’. Locutions like: “You alright luv?”, “Jasmine loves your cookies, Margaret”, and “I am IN LOVE with this Stanley Cup!!” all fall into this bucket. But when we speak of the “love” that fans have for football teams or patriots have for countries, I think we often mean it literally, and are entirely right to do so.
Consider the following symptoms of football fandom and diehard patriotism, and tell me if it doesn’t sound like love. (Btw: the quotes here are swiped from Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan by Alfred Archer and Jake Wojtowicz, a solid book which I heartily recommend.)
“‘dedicated fans’ – fans who attend every home Premier League match and at least five away games – spend an average of £1,888 per person each year on supporting their team. This is “8% of the average UK take home salary’.”2
“Some fans go even further and are willing to give over (parts of) their bodies for fandom, covering their bodies in team tattoos.”3
“For others, “till death do us part” isn’t enough, and they are buried in coffins adorned with their club’s badge and colors.”4
“Other fans express their devotion through the names of their children, like Alyssa and Dan Hoven, fans of the St Louis Blues ice hockey team, who named their son Vlad after their favorite player, Vladimir Tarasenko.”5
As Archer and Wojtowicz convincingly show, there are a range of convincing parallels between football fandom and the truest forms of love. For example:
Like with romantic love, football fans fall in love with teams for their particular quirks and qualities, and will refuse to ‘trade up’ in favour of another team, even if it’s objectively better by every metric.
In romantic and other kinds of love, there are rituals lovers practice to express devotion to their beloved—date nights, wedding ceremonies, romantic walks, and the like. The same is true of football fandom. To swipe an example from the book,
Sports fandom also involves social practices that enable fans to express their attachment to the team. Erin Tarver, for example, describes how as a young fan of the LSU Tigers football team, she would study the sports pages before going to school in the morning, collect LSU merchandise, learn the songs her fellow fans sang in the stadium, and seek out creative ways to display the team colors on her body with nail polish and temporary tattoos6.
When you’re in love, you perceive the world differently. Your beloved’s positive qualities start to seem more salient to you, and their negative qualities are either bathed in a more sympathetic light or overlooked entirely. The same thing happens when you love a sports team: faults you’d make fun of if they were present in other teams are seen in a more sympathetic light when it’s your team. And referees seem increasingly biased in the opposition’s favour even when, objectively speaking, there’s no evidence that they are.
All that’s to say: when we say things like “so-and-so loves Arsenal” or “so-and-so loves the Nation of Austria”, we’re often speaking entirely literally, and it’s entirely appropriate that we do. Love of large groups is a thing.
Is the-love-of-large-groups reducible to any other kind of love? Well, it’s certainly not reducible to self-love or co-operative love. When someone loves a country or a team, they love the country and the team, not themselves; and people can—and do—love countries and teams by themselves, refusing to co-operate with anyone else in the expression of their love.
There’s a sense in which the-love-of-large-groups might be reducible to love-of-another—but only where the meaning of “another” is stretched to refer to groups, qua groups, without reference to any specific individuals who make up the group. (Crucially, someone can love the same team from his ninth birthday to his ninety-ninth, even though all the original members have been swapped out.)
But however we parse the matter, it seems plain that the particular kind of love—love of large groups—is not achievable for God the Father if there are only two other divine persons around. The expression gets it wrong, and obviously so: three is never really a crowd.
But if that’s right, then insofar as one finds the Love Argument persuasive, one should think the Godhead contains many more than three divine persons, since that’s the only way for the Father to express the fourth kind of love—love of large groups—at every logical moment.
How many more than three? Who’s to say. My preferred answer, though, is 8, but 8 flipped sideways. Intuitively, positing an infinite or limitless plurality of divine persons is simpler than positing and finite or limited plurality of divine persons, because the finite or limited posits would have an arbitrary, unexplained limits. For that reason, theists who buy the Love Argument should reject God-as-Trinity and embrace God-as-Infinity.
Sijuwade, J. (2024). The Love Argument for the Trinity: A Reformulation. TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, 9(1): p. 3.
Alfred, Archer and Jake Wojtowicz. (2023). Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan. New York: Routledge: p. 9.
Ibid. p. 10.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 15.
Hey that’s my heresy!
If we are talking *potential* infinite, I think Christians could work with this...