“Coexistent, coequal, coeternal.” These are the three adjectives typically used to describe the persons of the trinity. The Athanasian creed has given Christianity a fear complex when describing the trinity: it is the creed that deals most explicitly with the idea of the trinity, but also the only ecumenical creed with explicit anathemas. Thus, the trinity, like few other concepts in Christianity, is considered “untouchable” – a sacred cow of the Church.

I’ve written before on the danger of letting the sanctity of the doctrine turn into tritheism. I believe this is a more dangerous heresy than Modalism, and also one that has been more accepted by orthodox churches – simply because the lack of discussion around it leaves people unable to distinguish between true trinitarianism and heretical tritheism.

Let’s look at these three adjectives then: Coeternal is an entirely proper description of the trinity. God has always had a spirit (Genesis 1:2), and the Word of God is preexistent as God Himself is (John 1:1). All three “persons” of the trinity were present and active in creation, though it is better to see it as God performing multiple actions in creation than to see it as a joint effort of some sort, as the latter is a tritheistic supposition.

Coexistent is also proper. Sequential Modalism, the idea that God transforms from one form to another throughout history, as I’ve said before, is irresponsible exegesis. Jesus acted concurrently with the Holy Spirit (Matthew 3:16) and with the Father (Matthew 26:39), and the Spirit acts concurrently with the Father (Isaiah 61:1). It is not the case that the procession of the Spirit or the begetting of the Son diminishes the essence of the Father in any respect.

There is, however, nothing to be said for Coequal. Phillipians 2:6 (“Who [Jesus], being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped”) on the surface appears to speak to this. However, this in reality speaks against such a conception:

In what sense are the persons of the trinity coequal? Not in function. The Son is begotten of the Father (John 1:1), and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26). That precludes coequality of function. There would be no purpose to a trinity then; it would necessitate a divine triumvirate. So are they equal in authority? That doesn’t even make sense. There is but one authority, and the authority of the Son is not separate from the Spirit’s, nor is that of either separate from the Father’s. Equality of authority presupposes separate authority, which again leads to the supposition of a divine triumvirate.

This is what Phillipians 2:6 is speaking of. Jesus Christ is in very nature God: He shares the same essence of authority. Their authority is not identical yet separate; it is the same in essence and identity. One cannot infer the coequality of the persons of the trinity from this passage: what one can and should infer is the doctrine of the full humanity and full divinity of Christ. Though Christ was in nature God, He put on human flesh and came in humility – for the part of His humanity, essentially disavowing for a short time equality with God. That is what the passage speaks to. Though Jesus was in nature God, insofar as He was human, equality with God was not something to be grasped for, and we are to follow that example.

The assertion of coequality “And yet they are not three gods but one” makes grammatical sense, but not logical sense, as if I asserted to mix yellow and blue paint “And yet it is not green paint but purple” that comes out. Though the idea of coequality may have been a step in the right direction for pagans accustomed to a hierarchy of gods, it is nevertheless a wrong idea of itself, especially in a cultural context already familiar with monotheism, away from which it is most certainly a step in the wrong direction.

The following is loosely transcribed from a speech I gave at George Mason University

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union was in trouble. It had been on a protracted economic slide for many years, and showed no sign of lifting. Mikhael Gorbachev, leader at the time, fancied himself a reformer, and went on a spree of deregulation and privatization. But coming from such a regulated environment, the sweeps of deregulation were not – and could not be – total. People were free to do things they were not before, but the perverse incentives still existed. The house of regulatory cards collapsed: capital fled the country in a firesale, and with it went all potential for the future of the Soviet Union.

Now we’ll come back to that story later, and talk about Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is an unpopular issue among Libertarians, most of whom are against all regulation at all times. Though it would indeed be ideal to have a completely deregulated market, this is not what we have, and we must be careful how we get there.

Let me start off with a brief explanation of what net neutrality is. It is in no respects a price cap. It is what we have now and have always had, though it has yet to be codified into law. Imagine, if you will, a line with you on one end, and Google searches, Youtube videos, and Rush Limbaugh podcasts on the other. Between us on my end is my service provider AT&T, and on their end, their respective servers, each of whom we pay respectively for access to each other. The key stipulation of net neutrality is that AT&T must treat all traffic I want the same. Whether I want to listen to Rush Limbaugh podcasts or send my friends Rick Astley videos, AT&T may not filter or give preferential treatment to data coming from one server over another.

Without net neutrality however, AT&T suddenly gets the right to charge me for access and to charge Google for getting their data to me. Content providers and websites get double charged. What this means is the death of free on the internet. Those increased charges aren’t going to be absorbed by Google; they’re going to be passed to the consumer. No more free Gmail, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook; and what of small blogs like this one? The single most important reason the internet has taken off so quickly as a tool of commerce and communication has been the low barriers to entry. If we take that away, we essentially kill the internet. Without the ability to pay double, we’ll be relegated to the lowest tier of access. People will get slow, if any, access to the material of all but the well-endowed, and that’s a best-case scenario. Countries like Iran and China use a nonneutral internet to outright filter political speech.

Now that Net Neutrality has been established as an unequivocally good thing from a consequentialist standpoint I ask further, what right does a service provider have to decide what constitutes a good or bad use of the bandwidth I’m paying for? I believe in consumer sovereignty in the marketplace. Consumer sovereignty is exercised through market competition as consumers flock to those who best meet their demands. Unfortunately the government has given regional monopolies to telecoms all over the United States – Verizon in the Northeast, AT&T and the former Baby Bells in a lot of other places, for example – stifling the potential exercise of consumer sovereignty.

This is where we get back to the Soviet Union. Total deregulation would be a good thing, but fiddling around at the margins is not necessarily so: it can even be disastrous. Am I saying that net neutrality legislation is ideal, or even good? Not in the least. What I am saying is that it is ultimately harmful to our infrastructure and to consumers if we allow a nonneutral internet before intra-regional competition can be firmly established nationwide. Deregulation is good, but in states of transition, we must take care to deconstruct our house of cards in such a manner that it does not first collapse upon us.

We Libertarians and free market types very often allow ourselves to be defined by our opponents. Oppose regulation, they insinuate, and you are therefore in favor of all the dirty and devious practices a business might engage in. I’ve met more than a few who actually are.

But opposition to regulation does not have to pigeonhole us into support of business practices; it just means we have to be nuanced. Nor is it impossible to make such a mindset sink in over time. There is a major parallel in the gradual acceptance of Enlightenment ideas around the time of the American founding, with the issue of free speech. People often lobbed criticisms at free-speechers of being factional or divisive. Now, a few centuries later, a particular phrase commonly attributed to Voltaire is burned into the American collective consciousness: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

This must be our attitude towards the private sector. I’ve heard people convince themselves that a nonneutral internet would be a good thing, simply because that is the position that net neutrality proponents have pigeonholed opponents into. Likewise with Apple’s arbitrary and draconian app store policy, or Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy. None of these are good for the consumer; we often delude ourselves into thinking that market competition always delivers good results. Competition is not guaranteed to deliver good results; what it is guaranteed to do is deliver what consumers demand at as high of a cost as they’ll take, and deliver that better than the public sector.

These costs are not always monetary. A loss of net neutrality would be a huge cost on internet use, albeit indirect. Apple’s lockdown on iPhone apps, though they have every right to do it, deprives the consumer of utility. Our position need not be that everything coming from the private sector is golden. Regulation is not the solution and will lead to worse problems in the long run, but even we market types can sometimes forget that the government is not the only sovereign. We have sovereign power as consumers: We need consumer activism, something that, oddly enough, now comes mostly from the Left.

Market consumer activism needs to be focused on the idea of personal responsibility as part of a larger cultural paradigm shift. Instead of crying to the government to regulate what we don’t like, we can do something about it ourselves. Too long have we been of two minds that it is acceptable to continue using the products of a detestable corporation as long as we call on the government to take care of them. Would Windows have marketshare upwards of 90% if not for this attitude? We can and should be proactive in changing the behavior of the private sector without supporting legislation and regulation. If we will not accept their costs, they can do nothing but relent.

Let us then not waste our breath defending the actions of Apple, Microsoft, and AT&T from proponents of regulation. Let us instead channel the outrage into legitimate, noncoercive, means. “I disapprove of what you produce, but I will defend to the death your right to produce it.”