(I had posted this on Facebook a while back and decided it belongs here.)
Someone on another forum recently brought up the question about how one should define a “qualitative” noun, and referred to his findings in studying linguistics that they are nouns that name qualities. I think that would be the necessary definition if one adds the additional feature that informs the Trinitarian’s objective: (1) Quality is stressed AND (2) the indefinite article is to be ruled out as inappropriate. That’s what Trinitarians are really chasing, as they want the text to convey that the Logos is divine by nature, but they simultaneously need it to be inappropriate to include the indefinite article, or at least to have little statistical support for doing so.
My illustration about a quarterback who is called “a MAN” in contexts in which the meaning conveyed is that he is VERY manly demonstrates that a descriptive use, even an emphatically descriptive use, doesn’t rule out indefiniteness. Indeed, the descriptiveness that we infer depends on the noun’s indefiniteness in context. If even emphatic descriptiveness depends on a noun’s indefiniteness, then it can’t be the noun’s meaning to the exclusion of indefiniteness (contra Paul Dixon). As someone put it so many years ago, it seems that certain Trinitarians are playing a game of smoke and mirrors, and gullible people are falling for it, maybe by the millions, because some of them are in positions in which people look to them as authorities. This is why those who teach bear a heavy responsibility.
Decades ago, after reading the odd, theologically motivated arguments on offer from folks like Harner, Dixon, Hartley, etc., I started plowing through books on grammar and linguistics and also wrote grammarians and linguists at college in an effort to find out if anyone other than Trinitarians were saying the sorts of things Trinitarians say about how count nouns function. I found zero support for their contentions in the writings of secular authorities.
In fact, I found that the only people on the planet who are even talking about “qualitative” count nouns are Trinitarians, those who are influenced by them, and those who are interacting with them. In my experience at least, no one else is talking about “qualitative” count nouns. I think that is remarkably revealing.
So I asked myself, “What is the origin of that quirky description?” and I think I may know the answer. It seems to go back to the way theologians were talking in the pre-Colwell era. Harner wasn’t a trained linguist, and so when he decided to do damage control by trying to come up with a solution to the theological problem introduced by the collapse of the Colwell narrative, he may have remembered that book by Arthur Wakefield Slaten entitled Qualitative Nouns in the Pauline Epistles and their Translation in the Revised Edition, and he had his hook. Yes, nouns can be “qualitative,” he may have thought, and maybe that’s the answer to the problem!
Then Dixon came along almost immediately and wrote his DTS thesis, and he ran with the ball Harner put in play, as did Hartley after him, and Wallace as well. However, Harner’s article is highly flawed, not only in the sense that it’s an apology for a Trinitarian view and not a serious piece of linguistics research, and not only in the sense that demonstrably invalid assertions are made, but in the sense that he opened the door to compelling criticism and counterargument against his solution by listing the relevant verses in John’s Gospel, many of which undermine his narrative in that nouns that are actually comparable to QEOS at John 1:1c are all rendered into English by translators with the indefinite article. Oops! Translation practice is inconsistent with apologetically motivated claims.
People who read his article critically can look those verses up for themselves and see how translators render comparable count nouns in a Colwell construction that are not definite, and in doing so will see that every single one of them is rendered into English with the indefinite article, with the one lonely exception: QEOS at John 1:1c.
So Dixon may very well have thought: Oh, oh, Houston, we have a problem! And his solution was truly remarkable. What he did was observe something that is objectively true and then restructure it to fit his subjective theological needs. Specifically, he observed that indefinite count nouns are used in primarily two ways:
1. To categorize
2. To describe ( = “qualitatively”)
Then he arbitrarily and subjectively took the 2nd use and put it in an unnatural category of its own, thereby restructuring objective reality to conform to his subjective theological needs.
With his arbitrary restructuring, count nouns are asserted to function this way:
1. Indefinite nouns = nouns which are only used to categorize, apparently with the implication that these can be rendered with the indefinite article.
2. Qualitative nouns = nouns that stress quality and which are not indefinite, apparently with the implication that the indefinite article shouldn’t be used with nouns in this category.
If you read Dixon’s thesis, you’ll find that he offered no linguistically defensible reasons for this arbitrary subjective restructuring. Why did he do it? He apparently did this because he needed to fix the problem that Harner introduced when he referenced the Johannine texts that clearly undermine the entire approach to a solution. In other words, again, it appears to me that Dixon was doing damage control with respect to Harner just as Harner was doing damage control with respect to the collapse of the Colwell narrative.
It seems that Hartley also noticed the theological problem that Harner clumsily introduced and took another approach to a “solution”: Using mass nouns to inform our understanding of count nouns. His entire thesis therefore appears to be one long category error. In my judgment, the reason he tries to rely on the function of mass nouns to support his take on QEOS at 1:1c is precisely because mass nouns don’t take the indefinite article, and, as some here may know, that’s what this is really about: Trinitarians not only need QEOS to be “qualitative” but they need some means of supposedly invalidating or at least marginalizing the “a god” rendering.
With that long-winded intro, here’s my take on “qualitative” nouns in the context of the discussion with Trinitarians about John 1:1c:
1. I will often put “qualitative” in scare quotes because, as far as I’ve been able to determine, linguists don’t use that terminology.
2. If by “qualitative” we mean nouns that convey quality, nature, or characteristics, but which don’t take the indefinite article, then qualitative nouns are qualities, which are non-count. Only mass nouns function this way, not count nouns, and when nouns that are typically count appear in contexts in which they do function this way, it’s precisely because they are functioning as mass nouns, not as count nouns, in context.
3. If by “qualitative” we mean any noun that is being used descriptively or to stress nature or characteristics in a given context, then both definite and indefinite count nouns can also be so used (with definite nouns this typically happens when the term is used non-literally, e.g. “That man is the Devil himself!”). Moreover, when count nouns (and proper names) are used to stress such a sense, that sense actually depends on the noun’s definiteness or indefiniteness. Since the descriptive stress depends on the noun’s definiteness or indefiniteness, it logically follows that it cannot be the noun’s meaning to the exclusion of definiteness or indefiniteness.
4. Much of the confusion that has been introduced to the dialogue has occurred because people mistakenly assume, as Dixon apparently did, that indefiniteness, “qualitativeness,” and definiteness are interchangeable with meaning itself, when, in reality, these are more like syntactical features that contribute to meaning, but aren’t meaning in and of themselves.
In short, whether wittingly or unwittingly, Trinitarian apologists seem to have been engaged in prestidigitation in an effort to avoid the sense of QEOS at John 1:1c, not to accurately capture and convey it in English. The NEB’s risible rendering, which I contend isn’t even possible, grammatically, is a classic example of this mentality at work: “what God was, the Word was.” That wording creates a question rather than giving an answer: Oh, and what was that? It ultimately results in a statement that is so ambiguous that Trinitarians, Arians, and Socinians alike find it theologically acceptable even if it’s grammatically unacceptable.
See also: https://kazlandblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/what-god-was-the-word-was/
Kazland 