Propositional Attitudes and the Gospel

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved." (Acts 16:31 ESV)

So what does it mean to believe in the Lord Jesus. In this passage I am not quite sure how to take it, however, since I am a Millian heir, I will take the typically referentially opaque context to be substitutable with an identical name or description.

(1) Adam believes that 'Lord Jesus' - in English and he is saved.

However, (1) doesn't seem quite right, so let me try the following revision of (1):

(1') Adam believes in that 'Lord Jesus' in English and he is saved.

Although (1') seems a bit convoluted I'm going to stick with this construction for now. My next concern is how should we take "The Lord Jesus" in this context. 'The Lord Jesus' could either be a definite description or a proper name. As a definite description there is one unique person (or object) that 'The Lord Jesus' picks out and that is the person of Jesus Christ, the second member of the Trinity. 'The Lord Jesus' doesn't seem as if it were a proper name, rather, it seems to ascribe the property of Lordness to Jesus. Take a similar construction:

(2) The King Louis

or

(3) the King of France

Both (2) and (3) seem to be a bit unsimilar to 'The Lord Jesus', we aren't quite sure what Jesus is Lord of, where in (3) 'King' is the King of France, and (2) seems to be incomplete, however there could be several kings, and we could be referring to the King Louis, as opposed to the King Edward. So I think that we could take 'The Lord Jesus' as a definite description.

In this case 'Lord' refers to Yahweh, because 'kurios' is the word for 'Lord' in the Greek OT, so when the NT refers to Jesus as Lord, the NT is making a Trinitarian statement. So, we can get the following:

(4) Jesus is Lord.

(5) Jesus is Yahweh.

but we also hold to the following,

(6) The Father is Yahweh.

Therefore, (7) Jesus is the second member of the Trinity.

So, Jesus is identical with the second member of the Trinity. (I realize that I was brief in my argument from Jesus is Lord to infer that Jesus is identical with the second member of the Trinity, however I'm working on propositional attitudes in this post.)

So a new argument is as follows:

(8) Jesus = Second Member of the Trinity
(9) Adam believes in that - 'Jesus' in English, and Adam is saved.
(10) Adam believes in that - 'the Second Member of the Trinity' in English and is saved.

However my problem is with 'the second member fo the Trinity', because this appears to be a definite description and I am not sure if one can substitute proper names for definite descriptions.

... it's late, more to come later...