Does Trinitarian seem too broad to you?

Question

I may be a dopey dumb Catholic, but if I had to say something about "most Christians" it's that they're Trinitarians. I realize that there are non-Trinitarian Christians out there. But how on earth can you scope a question for Trinitarians? There's no moral authority for Trinitarians. (Except maybe St. Athanasius?)

So, outside of asking historical questions, how is trinitarian doing anything but working against the rules and inviting widely diverging perspectives to compete for sanctimonious truthhood?

Answer 1

Answer take 2. Because I missed the point the first time around.

This meta post seems to have gotten started of all the wrong foot by ⓐ talking about the problem being whether the topic was too bread or narrow and ⓑ dragging a bunch of sectarian terminology into the discussion as if it mattered.

As far as I can tell the only real question here is whether the usage of the tag is sufficiently distinct from trinity to warrant a separate tag. I read through all the 20 some questions with the tag and the only one I found that was using "trinitarian" as a scope as opposed to just the Trinity being the topic was this one. Arguably that question should be "What does the Trinity have to do with sin anyway?", so I don't see any harm in re-tagging it.

Having a tag around for one question with dubious scope doesn't seem useful. All the others are asking directly about the Trinity itself. As such I've merged them into the trinity tag.

I think that solves this issue, but it could be worth going through the trinity tag looking for things that should also have non-trinitarian if that is either their topic or scope, and also look out for whether the usage of persons-of-the-trinity makes any sense at all.

Answer 2

Trinitarian is generally too broad in my opinion unless the question specifically address the concept of the Trinity.

If the question asks him Trinitarians address the theory of evolution, that's not properly scoped.

If the question asks whether Trinitarians agree that John 1 indicates that Jesus the Son and God the Father are one and The same, that's properly scoped.

It's all a matter of context.

Answer 3

Question scope is not limited to just groups that have some authority in place. Any doctrinal position can function to define the scope of a question. What types of questions this is appropriate for varies by context, but it is workable.

True, there is not "authority" on Trinitarianism. But there is very broad agreement on it. As such those that hold a classical Trinitarian position are a fairly defined subset. Some other issues are naturally directly tied to other issues and thus it makes sense to ask about them in relation to the doctrinal position rather than any specific group that holds that position.

Only domain knowledge in the specific area being questioned will be a useful guide for judging whether there are likely too diverse a set of possible answers or whether the question is reasonably answerable. There is no blanket rule that such questions of this sort would be either too broad or or sufficiently scoped.

Answer 4

I believe that trinitarian is too broad for the scope of the site, if I cite J. Edgar Hoover's writings about the Trinity and you cite Margaret Sanger's writings about the Trinity then, who am I to judge who the worse expert is?

Because of this, other than asking if there are Patristic writings about the Trinity, there can be no non-denominationally scoped questions on the Subject.

What questions from a trinitarian viewpoint wouldn't have as their subject the trinity? Furthermore, what questions from a modalist viewpoint wouldn't have hypostatic-union as their subject?

My opinion is that the viewpoints alluded to in the tags should be ones with identifiable authorities contemporary to us, not ancient ones that need our filters. (Unless we're asking a question from the perspective of an ancient Christian).

Now, I realize I probably nuked half of my bogative answers with that statement, but that's probably how things should have been done in the first place. But, I think this makes a pretty good argument for favoring tradition over sentiment in general and could make for better criteria for stellar answers.