Group agency realism

The case for group agency realism naturally begins with considerations of how, and in what ways, groups can meet conditions of agency. Agents come in many shapes and sizes and degrees of complexity and sophistication. But the account of agency often assumed is a modest one: an agent is anything that has representational states about how reality is, motivational states about how it wants reality to be, and the ability to process rationally and act on those states so as to attempt to get reality to fit its desires. Insects, animals, men, and even robots may all qualify as agents on this account. Houseplants, rocks, stuffed animals, and screwdrivers do not.

That groups, too, can be agents in this sense is standard fare among many philosophers. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to observe how groups can be committed to goals and positions distinct from those of its members. Consider a (fictitious) socially hip restaurant, OrganiCopia. While OrganiCopia's vision is to support the community by serving only local, healthy food products, that vision need not be shared by any of OrganiCopia's employees (including the owners). They might not care a wit about those things. OrganiCopia simply has beliefs and desires none of the employees do. These beliefs and desires, moreover, can be shown to be literally beliefs and desires on standard accounts thereof and not mere proxies.Footnote ² OrganiCopia really believes the local economy and residents should be supported in a certain way and really desires to support them in that way. Furthermore, OrganiCopia acts on those beliefs and desires by buying and serving local, healthy products. It is, to emphasize, properly OrganiCopia that buys and serves these products, not its staff. If I am in charge of ordering OrganiCopia's food, I cannot for that reason boast to my hipster friends that I buy local. No, I buy local on OrganiCopia's behalf. It is true that a group always acts through its members, but in so far as a member is acting to achieve the group's ends, the group acts. By assuming representative roles, the members of a group serve as its mouthpiece and hands, so to speak. It seems, then, that a group can meet the conditions of agency.

Once it is recognized that groups can meet conditions of agency, it is natural to consider next whether they might meet conditions sufficient for personhood, such as being morally responsible, having free will, and having a first-person perspective. The most travelled route from group agency to group personhood is via the first of these, moral responsibility. The moral responsibility of group agents has become a topic of increased public awareness since the rise to power of the modern corporation. That some corporations (and not just their members) have behaved in morally abominable ways is as evident to many as Moore's hands were to himself, even if the implications of such a Moorean fact are not as obvious. It would be quite surprising, then, if it were not possible that group agents be morally responsible in some sense. There are, in fact at least two senses in which groups can be morally responsible agents.Footnote ³ First, group agents can be fit to be held morally accountable for their actions, and so be the proper objects of reactive attitudes such as praise and blame.Footnote ⁴ Suppose an engineering company chooses low-quality building materials to save costs on building a bridge, and, as a result, the bridge collapses and kills several pedestrians. If the engineering company refuses to upgrade on materials when constructing a replacement bridge, it ought to be held morally accountable for that, and is all the more blameworthy if its decision results in further disaster. Especially perspicuous cases are those where someone clearly deserves blame, yet none of a group's members seem culpable.Footnote ⁵ In addition to being morally accountable, groups can also be moral agents in virtue of the moral character they display.Footnote ⁶ For example, an oil company might have an environmentally careless attitude but by fortune avoid catastrophe. Or, a business might adopt and behave according to cut-throat principles but never cut anyone's throat. Nonetheless, the vicious character of these corporations renders them morally blameworthy. Likewise, a relief organization that is prepared to respond as wholeheartedly as possible to a disaster but never has to is nonetheless praiseworthy. Supposing moral responsibility in either of these senses is sufficient for personhood, as I think is plausible, it follows that group agents can be persons in virtue of being morally responsible agents.

The above move from agency to personhood may seem too quick for some. Morally responsible agency, in might be objected, presupposes other capacities groups cannot have, such as a rational, first-person perspective or free will. But far from being a reductio, philosophers have argued that group agents can have these capacities, too (Hess (Reference Hess2010) and (Reference Hess2014b) ).Footnote ⁷ Consider first a rational, first-person perspective. Roughly, an agent is practically rational in so far as it acts to ensure its beliefs are well-supported and its desires properly aligned with its larger goals. Group agents that are not practically rational would not be very long-lived. If OrganiCopia did not first have reason to believe what it serves is local and healthy it probably would not remain in business for long. By establishing a system of checks and balances on where its products come from and how healthy they are, OrganiCopia ensures its practical rationality. And, as Hess observes, it is hard to see how this kind of self-assessment is possible without possessing a first-person perspective.Footnote ⁸ A rational group agent does not have identity issues: OrganiCopia is not confused about what its beliefs and desires are, as opposed to, say, its members' or MacDonalds'.

But what about free will? One might think groups cannot have free will because groups are wholly dependent on their members for acting. But the mere fact that a group depends on its members for acting does not rule out free agency. It is possible that the control exercised at the individual level is coincident with the control exercised at the group level. To explain how such joint control is possible, List & Pettit (Reference List and Pettit2011, 162–163), Copp (Reference Copp1979), and others appeal to familiar cases of multi-level causality. Just as there can be higher- and lower-level factors that causally contribute to one event, the action of a group can be regarded as the higher-level event co-realized with the lower-level event of a particular member's being the enactor. Consider the event of a man firing a gun. The higher-level event is the man causing his finger to squeeze the trigger by acting on an intention. The lower-level event is the movement of the particular neurons that mediate the action. If you think the neurons mediating the man's actions do not rob him of the control requisite for acting freely (and, consequently, being morally responsible for the act), then you should also think the individuals mediating a group's actions do not rob it of such control, either. Once it is recognized that a group can perform its own actions on the basis of its own beliefs and desires, all that is needed for those actions to be free (on at least some conceptions of freedom) is that they be guided by a reasons-responsive mechanism internal to the group (i.e. some rational decision-making procedure in the face of alternatives). A number of mechanisms have been proposed – the most common being a voting system of sorts – but we need not endorse any particular account here.Footnote ⁹

Persons: intrinsicist and functional

In so far as it is possible that groups meet the aforementioned conditions of agency and personhood, it is possible that there be group persons. Granted, saying there can be group persons invites the incredulous stare. Is this not just a confusion of what ‘person’ means? Perhaps it is, at least on one conception of personhood. But the conceptual space that personhood occupies is notoriously deep, wide, and slippery. A survey of the literature on personhood, historical and contemporary, reveals no sharp concept thereof. Instead, we encounter many different conceptions of personhood, such as metaphysical (Boethian, Cartesian, Lockean), biological, moral, judicial, medical, etc. It is probably safest to put ‘person’ in the family-resemblance category. We might nevertheless recognize a nuclear family amidst the bunch with metaphysical persons at its core and mere legal persons as, say, in-laws. At the core of the nuclear family will be those properties and capacities commonly agreed to be sufficient for metaphysical personhood, such as being morally responsible, having free will and a rational, first-person perspective.Footnote ¹⁰ Different kinds of persons might belong to the nuclear family by virtue of sharing those core elements. Indeed, how a person comes to have those elements might be precisely what distinguishes one kind from another. After all, some children belong to the family by birthright, others by adoption. Thus, if some x surprisingly meets a sufficient condition of metaphysical personhood, the thing to do is not to disband the family by rejecting those core elements as constitutive of membership, or disown x as a family member. It is, rather, to embrace diversity.

In that spirit, there are what I will call intrinsicist persons and functional persons, both of which belong to the nuclear family, the former by birthright and the latter by adoption.Footnote ¹¹ S is an intrinsicist person by virtue of what S is; i.e. S's intrinsic nature. S is a functional person by virtue of what S does; i.e. S's function, behaviour, or performance; in particular, function, behaviour, or performance sufficient for making S morally responsible, free, rational, etc. Persons conceived of as Cartesian substances, I take it, are instrinsicist persons, as would be persons like you, me, foetuses, comatose patients, Zeus, Superman, angels, demons, ghosts, centaurs, satyrs, hobbits, wizards, etc.Footnote ¹² Robots, a DID patient's ‘alters’, and group agents, by contrast, would be functional persons if persons at all.Footnote ¹³ Common to all accounts of group agency realism, so far as I am aware, is the assumption that groups meet conditions of agency and personhood, if at all, functionally. So, for example, if x is morally responsible by virtue of x's function, and x is a person by virtue of being morally responsible, it follows that x is a person by virtue of x's function.Footnote ¹⁴

The group God

The question of whether there are group agents must be distinguished from whether there can be group agents. Regardless of whether there are group agents, it seems clear that if there can be group agents, then the ST God would certainly qualify. Both Social Trinitarians and their critics often liken the ST God to a tightly-knit group like a family, community, team, or society, even going so far as to speculate about the possibility of there being a ‘group mind’ between the Persons (see Leftow (Reference Leftow, Davis, Kendall and O'Collins1999); Craig (Reference Craig, Rea and McCall2009) ). But, for whatever reason, no one party to that discussion seems aware of the equally lively discussion about group agency realism taking place in the next room, despite tantalizing titles like ‘Groups with minds of their own’ (Pettit (Reference Pettit and Schmitt2004) ). In fact, it would be just as well for group agency theorists to hold a cup to the wall, for ST may provide an interesting limit case for group agency models; the practical obstacles sometimes thought to prevent ordinary groups, like corporations, from meeting conditions of agency or personhood might not be obstacles to an ideal group.Footnote ¹⁵ And the divine Persons, epistemically and functionally unified as tightly as they are, would doubtlessly be an ideal group. Granting the possibility of group agency realism, the question, therefore, is not whether the ST God qualifies as a group agent or person; the question is why the ST God would not.Footnote ¹⁶

Here might be a reason: as mentioned above, accounts of group agency realism often exploit the possibility that a group's attitude differs from its members'. Is such a difference possible in the present case? I do not see why not. Clearly if each individual Person is omniscient they will always agree on the truth of a matter, preventing an alethic divergence between each other and the group. But the Persons and the group may well differ in their non-propositional attitudes. Imagine that each of the divine Persons, in deciding which world to create, has unique preferences about which aesthetic features creation should display. Imagine also that they are agreed to settle such matters by majority preference. A scenario of the following kind then is at least possible. Of features F₁–F₃, the Father prefers F₁ and F₂ but not F₃, the Son prefers F₁ and F₃ but not F₂, and the Spirit prefers F₂ and F₃ but not F₁. The result is a majority preference for each of the three features. It is at least possible, in other words, that the group's preference state about which features the world displays differ from each of its members'. Is it so odd to think a community of perfectly rational and loving yet unique persons could settle matters in so harmonious a way, adopting not one's own preferences but the group's? And who knows what those preferences might really be?

The group God, therefore, will share the beliefs of its members but could have its own preferences; preferences that the members carry out on behalf of the group. Those preferences may be reflected in the classic economic distinctions between the Persons, as each reveals a distinct but common commitment to the overall plan of creation, fall, and redemption. The Father knits me in my mother's womb and prepares for me a way that I might walk in it. The Son opens for me that way, ransoming me from sin and death. The Spirit guides me to and along that way, confirming in me the knowledge and love of God all the while. While each act is traditionally appropriated to one of the three, they are all coincidently acts of the group, God. As for the conditions of personhood, again, it seems that if ordinary group agents can meet those conditions, so, too can the ST God.Footnote ¹⁷ The way in which the ST God meets the conditions of having free will and a rational, first-person perspective, so far as I can tell, is not significantly different from how an average group agent might.Footnote ¹⁸ We might well imagine one of the Persons speaking in the first-person not as Himself but from the perspective of the group, as, for example, when God declares, ‘I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me’.

But it is clearest of all that the ST God would be a moral agent. In fact, Social Trinitarians face something of a dilemma here, for they should be eager to affirm that the Triune God, and not just the individual Persons, is morally praiseworthy and worthy of worship. The Trinity as a group, for example, is praiseworthy for having achieved salvation for humankind. No one individual Person of the Trinity can claim to have achieved salvation for humankind on His own. Further, the Triune God is praiseworthy just for having the character of a perfectly loving community. But being morally praiseworthy and worthy of worship are sufficient for personhood. Non-persons cannot be morally praiseworthy and worthy of worship. The dilemma, then, is this: either

or

If the Social Trinitarian accepts (A) then (B) must be rejected. On the other hand, if the Social Trinitarian accepts (B), then (A) must be rejected. Social Trinitarians cannot consistently affirm both. The view recommended here – that the ST God is three intrinsicist persons in one functional person – gives a clear way out of the dilemma by denying (B). But does the Social Trinitarian want to say that God is literally a person? Is this one too many persons for orthodox comfort? Does this not jump out of the philosophical frying pan but into the theological fire?

The quaternity worry

I began this article by quoting two philosophers who charge that ST is a non-starter because, on ST, ‘God is not a person.’ That, I hope is now clear, is a non sequitur, supposing groups can be persons. I also quoted a Social Trinitarian who responds to the charge by appealing to a non-realist group agency view. But pointing out that the ST God, like other groups, acts as if it were a person does not help: the charge, after all, is precisely that the ST God is not really a person. On the view developed here, God really is a person, albeit a functional person. But a functional person is a person nonetheless, as a functional person actually meets sufficient conditions of personhood.Footnote ¹⁹ But maybe a realist view is susceptible to a different charge. William Hasker writes:

And of the possibility that ‘the Trinity is a mind composed of the minds of the three persons', William Lane Craig says:

A straightforward quaternity of persons would no doubt be problematic. But alleging that the view developed here entails a quaternity of persons as imagined by Hasker and Craig would be misleading at best. God is not, after all, four persons of the same kind,Footnote ²⁰ but three intrinsicist persons and one functional person. According to the creeds, the three Persons or hypostases are homoousios, of the same kind or nature. The Son and Spirit are whatever the Father is, and that, I take it, is what I am calling an intrinsicist person. This leaves open the question of whether they might together constitute a person of a different kind, a person that is not a hypostasis. The meaning of hypostasis is notoriously controversial, but it can justifiably be taken to refer to an individual person by underlying essence or nature. A group person is not a person by underlying essence or nature, but is rather underlied by such persons. On this understanding, a group person is not a hypostasis. Furthermore, the creedal declarations are about God's immanent being; they affirm that God, in very being or essence, is three persons. But I am claiming only that the individual Persons constitute a group person in virtue of their function. God is not immanently or essentially a group person.Footnote ²¹ The view is therefore entirely consistent with affirming nothing more about God's immanent being than what tradition has always affirmed; viz. that God is three and only three hypostases in one and only one ousia.Footnote ²²

It is also for this reason that the view cannot be said to do violence to the pronouncement of Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which condemns as heretical Joachim's view that the Persons' unity of essence ‘is not true and proper but rather collective and analogous, in the way that many persons are said to be one people and many faithful one church’ (quoted in Tanner (Reference Tanner1990), 231). Joachim thought that affirming the Persons' unity in any stronger sense would result in ‘not so much a Trinity as a quaternity, that is to say three persons and a common essence as if this were a fourth person’ (ibid., 231). As the council reports, Joachim therefore interprets the Persons' unity as analogous to Christ's faithful, who ‘are not one in the sense of a single reality which is common to all. They are one only in this sense, that they form one church through the unity of the catholic faith’ (ibid., 231; my emphasis). Although seeing the ST God as a group agent or person does – with Joachim – see the Persons' unity as forming a group analogous to a church, it is consistent with affirming – contra Joachim – a deeper, ‘true and proper’ metaphysical sense of unity between the Persons as well.Footnote ²³ The council avoids positing a quaedam summa res by identifying each of the three persons with the unitary substance, essence, or divine nature. But the view proposed here need not be committed to an immanent quaedam summa res, either, but only to what is constituted by and supervenient on the three Persons in virtue of their function. For the quaternity worry to brand the present view as heterodox, further restrictions than those implied by the creeds would have to be defended.

Nevertheless, the asking price for the view that God, in addition to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a person still might seem steep. To avoid the letter of heresy is not to enjoy the spirit of orthodoxy. So perhaps another benefit can be thrown in: the notion of ‘corporate personality’ constitutes independent biblical support for the view (or one similar), and with it an effective counter is made to Dale Tuggy's divine deception argument against ST.

Divine deception?

Dale Tuggy thinks the alleged consequence of ST that ‘God is not a person’ also underwrites a distinctively moral objection to ST. He writes, ‘if Social Trinitarianism were true, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would have engaged in wrongful deception via both Old and New Testament revelation’ (Tuggy (Reference Tuggy2004), 269). The deception is that the three persons ‘passed themselves off as one personal being, while in fact they were three personal beings' (ibid., 273). Tuggy recognizes that not all acts of deception are wrong, but nonetheless thinks this one is. To help us see how, he invites us to consider a parallel case.

Suppose Annie, a lonely foster child, receives a phone call one day from a man named Fred claiming to be her father. Fred legally adopts Annie, but for unknown reasons, Fred will not see Annie in person. They grow close over the years, communicating by phone and by email. Finally, after years of lovingly raising Annie from a distance, Fred announces that he will pay her a visit. But, to Annie's surrise (and horror), not one man greets her, but three men – Don, Jon, and Ron – each of whom played an essential role in raising Annie over the years, though taking care to make themselves indistinguishable and so appear as one, Fred. Don, Jon, and Ron, Tuggy thinks, are morally blameworthy for not letting Annie in on the tri-parent situation. Annie ‘could have been introduced to one or more of the three instead of the fictional “Fred” ’, Tuggy suggests, or ‘she could have been told that she had three dads' (ibid., 272). Instead, she was led to trust and believe in and grow childlike affections for someone who does not even exist. M utatis mutandis, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are guilty for similarly deceiving their early followers. But because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cannot possibly act wrongly, ST should be rejected. Tuggy outlines the argument as follows:

1. (1) If ST is true, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit acted like Don, Jon, and Ron.

2. (2) Don, Jon, and Ron acted wrongly.

3. (3) Therefore, if ST is true, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit acted wrongly.

4. (4) But it is false that any member of the Trinity has acted wrongly.

5. (5) Therefore, ST is false.

Granting (2), the main premise of the argument is (1). If (1) is to be true then the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit need to have acted like Don, Jon, and Ron in inducing the belief that they are only one person, when in fact they are not one but three persons. Just as Don, Jon, and Ron passed themselves off to Annie as one person (i.e. Fred), the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit passed themselves off to the ancientsFootnote ²⁴ as one person (i.e. Yahweh). But on ST

Tuggy goes on to produce a ‘sampling of scriptural evidence’ for the claim that the Lord/Yahweh was believed by the ancients to be ‘a wonderful person, not a wonderful thing (or quasi-thing), community of divinities'. Thus he concludes: ‘In revealing themselves, the Three need only have emphasized their functional unity; introduction of the fictional “Yahweh” seems unnecessary and wrong’ (ibid., 280).

Notice that Tuggy assumes that Fred and Yahweh, as personae fictae, are reducible to their respective members; thus he asks whether the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, acted like Don, Jon, and Ron, not whether Yahweh acted like Fred. But as we have seen, such a reduction cannot be taken for granted, supposing Fred and Yahweh are group agents; and group agents, on any realist account, have ‘knowledge and the ability to intentionally act’. And if we suppose Fred and Yahweh have acted wrongly, they must be regarded as persons and not just agents given that moral responsibility is sufficient for personhood. If Fred and Yahweh are persons, is not a crucial assumption of Tuggy's argument undercut? Not quite. What matters is not simply Annie's belief that Fred is a person, but Annie's belief that Fred is a certain kind of person; namely, the kind of person that cannot be a group person. If Annie were led to believe, either by just the men or by Fred also, that Fred is the kind of person that cannot be a group person, the deception remains. And how could she not have believed this? Two thousand years of western thought have bequeathed to Annie an extraordinarily narrow, individualistic conception of personhood. She could scarcely have believed Fred is a group person.

But why think what twenty-first-century Annie believes about personhood is anything like what the ancients believed?Footnote ²⁵ Are we really to imagine that there is no relevant epistemic distance between Annie and the ancients in this respect? The crucial question, then, is this: were the ancients led to believe, by either just the individual Persons or the group God also, that God is the kind of person that cannot be a group person? The answer is that this is very unlikely indeed. It is not only likely that the ancients did not share our modern unduly individualistic conception of personhood, but it is not unlikely that they had a conception of personhood broad enough to recognize the existence of ‘corporate personalities' akin to group persons. Further, even if it cannot be shown that they did in fact view God as a ‘corporate person’, we do not have evidence ruling that possibility out.

The ancients and corporate personality

The idea that the ancient Israelites not only had the conceptual space to recognize the existence of group persons but actually did so has been commonly accepted since the publication of an important pair of essays by H. Wheeler Robinson.Footnote ²⁶ Robinson's study of Hebrew anthropology led him to propose that they believed a group could ‘function as a single individual through any one of those members conceived as representative of it’ (Robinson (Reference Robinson1980), 25). Hebrew thought, he argues, is suffused with cases where ‘the group possesses a consciousness which is distributed amongst its individual members and does not exist simply as a figure of speech or as an ideal’ (ibid., 30). ‘Corporate personality’, as Robinson calls it, is thought to underlie such familiar Hebraic themes as iniquities being visited upon one's descendants, blood guilt, Levirate marriage, holiness, and collective responsibility. According to Robinson, there are four salient features to the Hebrew concept of corporate personality:

A brief review of how each of these features is present in the thought of the ancients is in order.

(1) That a corporate personality was believed to overlap past, present, and future generations is demonstrated by the importance of ancestral ties and Levirate marriage. The patriarchal narratives show that the Israelites thought of themselves as their ancestors and future lineages; families, clans, and tribes are ‘conceived realistically as a unity’ in Robinson's words (ibid., 28). This was made possible by the particulars of Hebrew anthropology. They believed that a man's identity or personality was indefinitely extendable beyond his particular bodily locale, enabling him to be present at distant times and places through various peoples and objects.Footnote ²⁷ A man was thought to be literally present at the evocation of his blessing, curse, message, or name; a man's family and possessions were believed literally to bear his personality. This helps to explain why, after Achan stole booty from Jericho, the booty as well as Achan's ‘sons and daughters, his cattle, donkeys and sheep, his tent and all that he had’ (Josh 7:24) were destroyed. This also explains how Israel could attribute their subsequent military defeat to Achan's plunder blunder: Achan's sin was Israel's sin. ‘Examples of this kind’, Aubrey Johnson summarizes, ‘serve to explain the fact that any association of individuals suggestive of homogeneity, such as Jehu's confederate circle, a set of infidels, or even . . . the Babylonian pantheon, may be treated as a kin-group forming a single נֶפֶשׁ or corporate personality’ (Johnson (Reference Johnson1961), 8–9; footnotes omitted).Footnote ²⁸ The lattermost example is instructive because, as Johnson goes on to argue in detail, it shows that the application of the concept was not restricted to human beings (more on this below). Hence prophets and Angels of the Lord are portrayed as real extensions of the Lord's personality, often speaking on behalf of Yahweh in the first person (e.g. Gen. 16:7–14; 18–19; Num. 20:14–21; Jud. 6:11–24; Jer. 9:1ff.).

(2) Here Robinson begins by citing Johannes Pederson's Israel: Life and Culture, where it is pointed out that an individual Moabite, mō’ābhi, was taken to represent the real type mō’ābh, a group personality. Robinson discusses similar examples where individuals represent corporate personalities, such as the unchaste woman of Ezekiel 16 and 23, the wife and mother of Isaiah 54:1ff., Gomer of Hosea, and, most intriguingly, the divine–human figure of Daniel 7. Of the lattermost, he writes, ‘the human figure coming with the clouds of heaven is explicitly identified as the people of the saints of the Most High. This means that their unity is so realistically conceived that it can be concentrated into a single representative figure’ (Robinson (Reference Robinson1980), 29–30). One important analogue of this in the New Testament is Paul's conception of the Church as ‘the body [σῶμα] of Christ’ (1 Cor. 12:27). The meaning of σῶμα here cannot be divorced from the Hebrew anthropology Paul inherited, which conceives of man not as an individualistic, private self, but collectively or holistically as bodily-organs/members-animated-by-breath/soul (Robinson (Reference Robinson1909); cf. Robinson (Reference Robinson1977) ). So when Paul ‘took the term σῶμα and applied it to the Church,’ as John A. T. Robinson explains, ‘it directed the mind to a person; it did not of itself suggest a social group’ (Robinson (Reference Robinson1977), 50–51). He continues:

Hence Paul says to the Galatian church ‘you are all one person [εἷς ἐστε] in Jesus Christ’ (cf. 1 Cor. 10:17; 12:12; Rom. 12:5). Robinson in fact labours to show how the concept of σῶμα is the ‘keystone’ to all of Paul's theology and the body of Christ is its defining structure. The concept of corporate personality, wedded as it is to the concept of σῶμα, is therefore just as foundational.

(3) The Israelite conception of corporate personality offers a tidy explanation for those otherwise odd cases when an author oscillates between plural and singular referents with no apparent concerns about inconsistency (e.g. Gen. 49; Deut. 29:1–5; Is. 22:15ff.). Sometimes this occurs with single terms like a'dham, which have built into them a plural–singular ambiguity.Footnote ³⁰ At other times the author appears to switch abruptly from a plural subject to a singular one and back. Such transitions are apt to generate puzzlement among contemporary readers, who want to know whether the ‘I’ of the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 44) and the Servant of Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah refers to a particular individual or metaphorically to a group. H. Wheeler Robinson answers that it is both, only the latter is not metaphorical. The psalmist cries out as himself and as the community; the Servant is both the prophet himself and the nation of Israel. Aubrey Johnson discusses still more putative examples in the Bible and in other Ancient Near Eastern texts.Footnote ³¹ An especially clear example in the New Testament is the episode where Jesus confronts a man with an unclean spirit, who replies: ‘I am Legion; for we are many’ (Mark 5:6ff.).Footnote ³²

(4) The final feature of corporate personality Robinson discusses is its persistence in Hebrew thought even after an increased awareness of one's own individual responsibility and relationship with God is apparent. This is because, to the Hebrew, morality and relationships in general were essentially social, defined by the ties that existed between those in the community and, even more importantly, between the community and God. The Jewish notion of the covenant is a clear reflection of this. A covenant is rarely (if ever) made with just an individual, but with a group; and not just a group physically present, but with future generations (e.g. Deut. 29:15; cf. Wilson (Reference Wilson1989), 187; Kaminsky (Reference Kaminsky1995) ). Thus, Robinson:

As already mentioned, Johnson (Reference Johnson1961) argues that Robinson's four features of corporate personality are found applied to divine beings also, plausibly even to the Hebrew conception of God. While important differences between their conceptions of God and man should not be forgotten (such as the corporeality of man versus the incorporeality of God; e.g. Job 10:4; Is. 31:3), the many parallels are equally important. It is indisputable that Yahweh was thought of in a ‘strongly anthropomorphic fashion’, where ‘psychical functions of an emotional, volitional, or an intellectual kind are ascribed to Yahweh, as when he is said to be compassionate and merciful, to love, and to hate, to be angry’, etc. (Johnson (Reference Johnson1961), 13). Such parallels should not be surprising given the classic Hebraic conviction that man is made in the image of God.

This is most evident in their belief that Yahweh's personality, like man's, could be indefinitely extended in various ways, such as by the presence of His messengers, blessings and curses, the invocation of His name, and the journeys of the Ark of the Covenant. More significant is the extension of Yahweh's personality through the Spirit and Word. Of the former, Johnson cites the example of the Spirit among the heavenly host that volunteered to help Israel defeat King Ahab (1 Kings 22:19ff.). ‘In light of the Israelite conception of man,’ he writes, ‘it would seem that this רוּחַ, as a member of Yahweh's heavenly court (or Household!), should be thought of as an individualization within the corporate רוּחַ or ‘Spirit’ of Yahweh's extended personality’ (Johnson (Reference Johnson1961), 16). Of the latter, Johnson cites the example of Yahweh sending forth his Word into the world to beget a plentiful harvest among men (Is. 55:10ff.). ‘The “Word” (דָּבָר) is one with the thing (דָּבָר) which is to be performed; it has objective reality, and thus forms a powerful “Extension” of the divine personality’ (Johnson (Reference Johnson1961), 17). A further parallel is the oscillation between the singular and plural perspective where divine beings are the subject,Footnote ³³ such as when Yahweh (singular) is identified with the three ‘men’ or messengers that appear to Moses in Genesis 18–19 (cf. Gen. 3:22; 11:5ff.; Is 6:8). This plural–singular oscillation is also found in ANE writings contemporaneous with the Hebrew Scriptures. An especially intriguing example is taken from cuneiform inscriptions depicting Ba'al as a deity ‘who is both three in one and one in three’ (Johnson (Reference Johnson1961), 29)!Footnote ³⁴ Johnson closes by observing that the concept of corporate personality could furnish ‘a new approach to the New Testament extension of Jewish Monotheism’ (ibid., 37). Such an approach is quite complementary to that of recent authors who argue that Paul, as faithful a son of Israel as there could be, had no difficulty incorporating Jesus into the Shema (1 Cor. 8:1–6) without compromising its meaning or abandoning monotheism.Footnote ³⁵ Both H. Wheeler Robinson and Johnson draw from this the general lesson that ‘psychology and theology move pari passu’ (ibid., 1).Footnote ³⁶ If there can be a corporate personality made up of human beings in Hebrew thought, so, too, can there be one made up of divine beings.

To summarize, ‘the modern concept of individualism’, L. G. Perdue aptly states, ‘was not known in ancient Israel and early Judaism’ (Perdue (Reference Perdue, Perdue and Blenkinsopp1997), 237). They and their first-century heirs, unlike us, were a collectivist culture.Footnote ³⁷ Admittedly, the concept of corporate personality, particularly as put forward by Robinson, is not uncontroversial. Even so, it is safe to say that the ancients probably did not share Annie's narrow twenty-first-century beliefs about personhood, and that what they were led to believe about God is not what Annie was led to believe about Fred; i.e. that he is the kind of person that cannot be a group person. The ancients, unlike Annie, had the conceptual space to recognize the existence of group persons. Social Trinitarians should consider thinking more like the ancients than like Annie. Premise (1) of the divine deception argument is undercut, if not rebutted.