R. KENDALL SOULEN
“All musick is but three parts vied and multiplied.”
George Herbert
CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGIANS often discuss the mystery of eternal generation using the vocabulary of Father and Son, as though this were self-evidently the most appropriate available, or at any rate the least inappropriate. Karl Barth thought this was a mistake. He argued that Christians speak least inadequately about the mystery when they alternate between two different scriptural idioms: the Father’s generation of the Son, or generatio, on the one hand, and the Word’s procession from God, or processio verbi, on the other. Barth writes,
Assuredly generatio and processio verbi must be regarded as describing the same material content. But not in such a way that one of these concepts may simply be reduced to the other. . . . The two figures, that of the Son and that of the Word of God, point to an object for which they are not appropriate. But for that very reason each of them must be taken seriously for itself, and neither of them should be dispensed with because the other is suggested.1
Readers familiar with Barth will recognize here one of his most beloved rhetorical figures: signaling a single inexpressible truth by affirming two incomplete truths in its place. Interestingly, though, Barth’s analysis of the vocabulary of eternal generation quickly bursts the bonds of this familiar trope. Examined more closely, the apparently singular image of processio verbi leads to a larger family of images from Scripture and tradition, such as “Light from Light,” “God from God,” Thinker and Thought, Urbild and Abbild, and so on. After reviewing—and approving!—a number of such images, Barth draws an interesting conclusion. Christians, he proposes, speak least inadequately of Christ’s eternal origin when they employ—not two, three, or four images—but all available figures of speech (alle Bildreden).2
Stimulating as it is, Barth’s conclusion raises an obvious question. What are all the ways the Bible prompts Christians to speak about the mystery of eternal generation? Is it possible to map the linguistic terrain, as it were? In this chapter, I want to draw such a map, although it will be closer to a back-of-the-envelope sketch than a detailed fold-out. It will include the patterns of speech that Barth identified—the kinship vocabulary of generatio and the multifaceted language of processio verbi. But it will also include a pattern of scriptural speech that Barth did not mention, which I will call the gift of the Name, or (to invent a fancy Latin expression) the donum nominis.
SCRIPTURE’S THREEFOLD VOCABULARY FOR GOD
To start our investigation, let us bracket the question of eternal generation for a moment and simply ask what kind of nouns the Bible uses to refer to the one God. We get the rudiments of an answer from the following verse:
You O LORD are our Father,
our Redeemer from of old is your name. (Isa 63:16)3
Here the prophet invokes the living God by using three different kinds of nouns: a personal proper name, a kinship term, and a common noun. The nouns signify the same divine subject, of course, but each does so in a distinctive way that is determined by the kind of noun it is.
• The personal proper name YHWH (represented by the surrogate “LORD”) signifies God with an exclusivity of reference that the other two kinds of nouns cannot match. Though void of conventional meaning, YHWH is, as the logicians say, a rigid signifier that denotes but one reality: the living God of the Bible. Moreover, it has the peculiarity of exhausting the set to which it belongs: according to the Old Testament, the living God has but one personal proper name, the Tetragrammaton.
• “Father” belongs to a small set of kinship terms that the Old Testament applies to God, including husband and, at least by implication, mother (cf. Isa 54:5; Deut 32:18). Like kinship terms generally, it lacks the referential rigidity of a proper name (many individuals answer to the title “father”), but it denotes relation to a personal counterpart who bears the corresponding kinship term, in this case, “son” or “sons.”
• Finally, “Redeemer” belongs to a very large pool of common nouns that the Bible applies to God, each of which has its own special shade of meaning and each of which stands ready to be called upon at need, such as “God,” “Light,” “Shepherd,” “King,” “Shield,” and so on.
In one way, our verse from Isaiah is unusual, since Scripture does not often predicate all three kinds of nouns of God in such close proximity. In another way, though, the verse is paradigmatic: all the nouns that the Old Testament predicates of God belong to one of these three classes: personal proper name, kinship term, or common noun.
Turning from Old Testament to New, we may at first get the impression that God’s personal proper name has vanished, leaving the work of denominating God to the remaining two patterns of speech. In reality, the Tetragrammaton is as prominent as ever, but the New Testament writers signify it in a new way, in keeping with the conventions of Second Temple Judaism. Rather than employ God’s personal proper name directly, they invoke it indirectly, by employing one or another surrogate in its place (e.g., “LORD,” “Name,” “Power,” “Blessed,” “Holiness,” etc.).4 Once we recognize this, we quickly see that the New Testament writers continue the Old Testament practice of portraying God by using three different kinds of nouns. Consider, for example, this verse from 2 Peter: “For he [ Jesus Christ] received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory” (1:17, emphasis added). The author identifies the one who spoke to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration by means of a common noun (“God”), a kinship term (“the Father”), and a proper name, here designated by the circumlocution “the Majestic Glory,” leaving the Tetragrammaton itself reverently unspoken.
Significantly, the Bible’s threefold vocabulary for God continues to form the bedrock of subsequent Christian tradition. Consider, for example, the opening words of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.” Superficially, we may again seem to have only common nouns and kinship terms. But first impressions can be misleading. The literary backbone of the Nicene Creed—“We believe in one God, the Father, . . . and in one LORD Jesus Christ”—derives verbatim from St. Paul’s confession in 1 Corinthians 8:6: “For us there is one God the Father . . . and one LORD, Jesus Christ.” Paul’s confession, in turn, is a carefully composed literary riff on the Shema, which Jews of Paul’s day prayed daily to magnify God’s (no longer routinely spoken) name: “Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut 6:4 ESV). With supreme calculation, Paul has taken all the Shema’s key theononyms (“YHWH/LORD,” “God,” “one”) and reformulated them so as to place Jesus Christ inside Israel’s primordial confession of faith. Understood in light of its scriptural antecedents, therefore, the Nicene Creed’s confession of “one God the Father” and “one LORD Jesus Christ” is more than an aggregation of kinship terms and common nouns. It is also a carefully crafted echo of the Shema’s confession of the deity who bears the name YHWH.5
Now let us return to the subject of eternal generation. The task we set ourselves was to sketch a map of the biblically authorized ways of speaking of this mystery. Does the threefold vocabulary we have just described provide a clue? I think it does. While Scripture speaks of eternal generation in many concrete ways, these can all be distinguished into three chief domains according to the kind of nouns in play: personal proper name, kinship term, or common noun.
In the rest of this chapter, I want to substantiate this claim by reviewing some evidence from Scripture and tradition, and then offer a brief systematic reflection on the significance of the threefold vocabulary.
SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION’S THREEFOLD VOCABULARY FOR ETERNAL GENERATION
Eternal Generation as Processio Verbi: Common Nouns in the Apologists
The first Christian theologians to reflect extensively on God’s pretemporal relation to Christ were the second-century apologists, and they had a preferred vocabulary for doing this: common nouns drawn from the vocabulary of the wisdom tradition. As Maurice Wiles has pointed out, for the apologists “the ideas of God and his Word or God and his Wisdom” were much more important than “the idea of God the Father and his Son.”6 Tatian, for example, never uses the concept of Son in his Address to the Greeks, and Theophilus does so only rarely in Apology to Autolycus. Instead, both theologians prefer to speak of Christ as the first-begotten Word or Wisdom of God.
This fact is fairly well known, and indeed it accounts for another name by which the apologists are commonly known: Logos theologians. The apologists’ choice of conceptuality is often chalked up to the fact that they were seeking to make Christian faith intelligible and attractive to contemporaries, and no doubt there is something to this. Still, on this score at least, we cannot fairly accuse the apologists of abandoning Scripture for Hellenistic fashion because they were in fact echoing the Bible’s most common way of portraying God’s generation of a divine counterpart before the creation of the world. The thickest seam of such language is found in wisdom literature, which describes the origin of divine Wisdom in a host of impressive ways but never in terms of the kinship vocabulary of Father and Son. True, we do find the procreative verb gennaō (“beget”), as when God is said to beget Wisdom “before all the hills” (Prov 8:25) and “before the morning star” (Ps 110:3 LXX). Still, gennaō is but one among several verbs that describe the relation of origin and derivation, most of which are verbs outside the sphere of kinship language.7 Turning to the New Testament writers, they too speak of the preexistent Christ most commonly in the imagery of common nouns inherited from Wisdom literature, as when they call him “the Word” (John 1:1, 18), “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), “the reflection of God’s glory” (Heb 1:3), “the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb 1:3), “in the form of God” (Phil 2:5), and so on.
Yet however biblical their inspiration, the Logos theologians famously failed to resolve some key questions. Was God’s generation of Wisdom inherent in God’s very identity as God, and thus as eternal as God himself? Or was it God’s first act of creation, and thus temporally subsequent to God himself? In its prolixity of images, wisdom literature could be interpreted in either direction, and it must be said frankly that even the New Testament’s Christ hymns are not wholly free of this ambiguity (cf. Christ as “the firstborn of all creation,” Col 1:15). This leads us to consider the role played by another vocabulary of divine generation, that of divine kinship.
Eternal Generation as Generatio: Kinship Nouns in Origen and Athanasius
One the of key breakthroughs in the development of Trinitarian theology in the ante-Nicene period is often said to be the idea of eternal generation, which freed the concept of generation from one element of subordinationism, namely, temporal secondariness. The credit for this development usually goes to Origen. While Origen could express the idea of eternal generation in more than one way (as, for instance, the image of Light from Light), he did so quite often by reasoning from the language of Father and Son. His choice of vocabulary was no accident. Unlike most common nouns, kinship terms are inherently reciprocal in character. If God is eternally Father, as Origen held, then the Son too must be eternal, for, as Origen writes, “one cannot be a father apart from having a son.”8 Origen’s reasoning remained potent a century later, when Athanasius championed it in his campaign against the Arians. Athanasius sought to sharpen Origen’s insight into the eternal relation of Father and Son by emphasizing the distinction between the Father’s begetting of the Son and the Father and Son’s creation of the world in the power of the Spirit. The first is an eternal and necessary act of nature; the second a temporal and contingent act of divine will.
Still, even the concept of eternal generation as expressed in the language of kinship is not impervious to subordinationist interpretation. After all, fathers are commonly understood to be superior to sons in power and authority, and this might seem especially true in the case of one who is eternally Father vis-à-vis one who is eternally Son. Perhaps because they sensed this lingering vulnerability, the bishops gathered at the Council of Nicaea sought for yet another way to express the relation of God and Christ, one that would express not only their co-eternity but their co-equality. And this brings us to the historical role played—and not played—by a third vocabulary.
Eternal Generation as Donum Nominis: God’s Proper Name in the Gospel of John and the Nicene Creed
I have already pointed out that allusion to the Tetragrammaton is basic to the structure of the Nicene Creed. The Creed’s confession of “One God” and “one LORD Jesus Christ” echoes Paul’s confession in 1 Corinthians 8:6, which in turn evokes the Shema’s confession of the deity who bears the name YHWH. Had the bishops gathered at Nicaea been able to recognize this allusion and its full theological significance, they might have been able to enlist it in their battle against the Arians. Nevertheless, for reasons mostly beyond their control, they couldn’t, and so they didn’t.9 Instead the bishops expressed the equal dignity of God and Christ in another way, by means of the extrabiblical terms ousia and homoousios.
As it happens, the choice was a happy one. The parallel between the oldest dimension of the Creed (its allusion to the Divine Name) and its most novel (ousia/homoousios) is really quite extraordinary. Both shore up the vocabulary of divine kinship at exactly the needed point by indicating that the Son is not merely coeternal with the Father but coequal as well. The Creed’s ancient Pauline vocabulary makes this point by implying that God the Father and Jesus Christ jointly bear the Divine Name; the bishops make the same point using the term homoousios.
At the same time, it must be conceded that the two forms of expressions are similar in another way: both are concise to the point of obscurity. They affirm that God and Christ share a common divine dignity, but neither casts much light on how this unity comes to be or how it comports with the fundamental biblical datum that the Father is “the one God.”
In time, Christian theologians felt compelled to answer such inevitable questions. One way they did so was by elaborating the conceptuality of divine essence already present in the Creed. An example of such elaboration is the scholastic teaching known as “essential communication,” according to which the Son is homoousios with the Father because the Father communicates or shares the divine essence with him. This event is understood to be identical with the eternal begetting of the Son (generatio) or the procession of the Word (processio verbi), and I will have more to say about it in the next section.
Long before, however, the New Testament writers had already answered the same question in the Bible’s own native idiom of the Divine Name. How can Christ share in the Father’s unique dignity as God, as 1 Corinthians 8:6 implies he does? According to one stream of biblical witness, the answer is clear: God the Father has given him the Divine Name. We encounter this simple yet profound idea in Philippians 2:5–11, a text virtually as ancient as 1 Corinthians 8:6. There Paul affirms that God gave Jesus Christ “the name that is above every name” (an allusion to the Tetragrammaton), so that all creation would confess that Jesus Christ is “LORD” (another such allusion), to the glory of God the Father.
Still, Philippians seems to portray the giving and receiving of the Divine Name as an event that occurs within created time, not before it. As such, it fails to support the idea that the donum nominis is an eternal event, analogous to the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son. This very idea appears elsewhere in the New Testament, however, in the Gospel of John.10
The rich name-theology of the Fourth Gospel defies brief summary. Still, it has two aspects (at least) worth noting: Jesus’s explicit references to God’s “name” on the one hand, and his “I am” statements on the other. The first are sprinkled across the Gospel, but they come to a climax in John 17 in what is commonly known as “the High Priestly Prayer,” but what with equal justification might be called “the Prayer of the Divine Name.” Our LORD begins and ends the prayer by invoking God’s “name,” characterizing it as something that belongs to God alone. He calls it “your name” and declares that he has served it throughout his ministry on earth. He has “manifested” and “made known” “your name,” and he “will” make it known (17:6, 24). Toward the middle of the prayer, however, Jesus characterizes God’s “name” in a remarkably different way. He calls it “your name that you have given me.” The phrase is repeated twice, as though to lend it emphasis (17:11, 12). The phrase suggests a new understanding of the words “your name.” The name is the Father’s first, because (presumably) he received it from no one, but it is also and derivatively the Son’s, because the Father has given it to him (perfect tense, indicating the ongoing result of a completed past action). Thus, as our LORD affirms in the same place, he and the Father are “one” (17:11).
All of this is very suggestive. But are there good reasons to suppose that the donum nominis described in John 17 refers specifically to the name God declared to Moses at the burning bush? And that the giving and receiving of this name is an eternal event between Father and Son?
The answer to both questions is a resounding “Yes!” We see this the moment we turn our attention to the awesome “I am” statements that punctuate the Fourth Gospel like lightning in a storm. Clearly, Jesus’s words echo God’s self-naming at the burning bush. Just so, they set us before a mystery. Is God’s self-naming on the lips of this man?! “The Prayer of the Divine Name” provides the catechesis we need to affirm this mystery with faithful understanding. Yes, Jesus rightly declares God’s name to us as his own name, because it is “your name that you have given me” (17:11, 12).
But when did Christ receive this name? The question would be intolerably presumptuous were it not raised and answered by Christ himself. “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). This extraordinary saying can scarcely mean anything other than that Christ has possessed the divine name from before the foundation of the world. But if so, then God’s giving of the divine name to Christ must also precede the work of creation. In short, the giving and receiving of the divine name is an eternal event. Though revealed in time, it characterizes the relation of God and Christ beyond time. Father and Son eternally share in the dignity and unity of the Divine Name because the Father eternally gives it to the Son and so constitutes the Son as its eternal, coequal bearer.11
To summarize, Scripture and tradition express the mystery of eternal generation using three different forms of speech: the multifaceted processio verbi, generatio, and donum nominis, the gift of the name. And of the three, it is the last that provides the teaching with its most explicit scriptural support.
SYSTEMATIC REFLECTIONS
According to Karl Barth, different ways of expressing the mystery of eternal generation do not affirm different truths; they affirm a single inexpressible truth in incomplete but complementary ways.12 I think Barth was right. Moreover, I think there are probably many legitimate ways to flesh out his intuition. In the rest of this chapter I want to suggest one way.
My suggestion takes its basic steer from one of St. Augustine’s illustrative names for the Trinity, “Unity, Equality, Connection,” which, in the spirit of friendly paraphrase, I will also dub “Uniqueness, Copresence, and Mutual Blessing.”13 Each member of the triad identifies a divine perfection that the persons of the Trinity share in common. At the same time, each perfection has a special affinity with one person in particular. Similarly, I suggest that the three vocabularies of eternal generation “belong” to all the persons of the Trinity, even though each has a special affinity with one person in particular—for much the same reasons as Augustine’s triad.
Eternal Generation as Donum Nominis:
Highlighting Divine Uniqueness
We have seen that while the first two persons of the Trinity eternally bear one and the same Divine Name, they do so in different ways. While I cannot sufficiently argue the point here, I think the same can be said of the Third Person.
• The First Person eternally bears the divine name (1) by receiving it from no one, (2) by communicating the name to the Second Person in one way, that is, by “giving” it to him, and (3) by communicating the name to the Third Person in another way, namely, by constituting him the Spirit who proceeds from the name’s primordial bearer(s).14 In each case, the First Person does not communicate the name to those who already exist, but the communication of the name constitutes those who receive it, each in a different way.
• The Second Person eternally bears (i.e., has) the divine name by “being given” it by the First Person.
• The Third Person eternally bears (i.e., conveys) the divine name by being constituted the Spirit who proceeds from its bearer(s).
Thus each person bears the Divine Name in a distinctive way. Still, the First Person has a special affinity with the name because he bears it a se, without receiving it from another. Just as it is impossible to “go behind” the First Divine Person to someone or something more ontologically basic, so it is impossible to “go behind” the Tetragrammaton to some more primordial name. In this respect, the First Person’s relation to the Divine Name is similar to his relation to the first member of Augustine’s triad, the concept-name “Unity.” As Thomas Aquinas observed, we perceive “Unity” in the First Person as soon as we conceive him at all, even if, by an impossible hypothesis, the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity were not. Similarly, we conceive the First Person as the bearer of the Divine Name as soon as we conceive him at all, even if, by an impossible hypothesis, we abstract him momentarily from the Second and Third Persons.
Having noted the analogy, however, we can immediately see that the First Person’s affinity with the Tetragrammaton is vastly more intimate than with the concept-name “Unity.” However apt, “Unity” cannot distinguish the Living God from the pantheon of putative deities. The Tetragrammaton alone can do that, from among all the names under heaven. The Tetragrammaton is the primordial mark—not merely of the unity but of the uniqueness of the one true God. As the primordial bearer of this name, the First Person of the Trinity is not merely one; he is this one. He is unique (cf. Deut 6:4). When, therefore, we affirm that the First Person eternally gives his name to another and eternally breathes a Spirit that is the Spirit of the LORD, we are declaring something that is inherently good news, an eternal gospel as it were. We affirm that the First Person does not jealously hoard his name but shares it, so that the Son and the Spirit too are uniquely themselves because they share—in equal but different ways—in the unity and uniqueness of the Divine Name.
Let me return briefly to the teaching known as essential communication, according to which the First Person communicates his divine essence so as to multiply the number of those who instantiate it without dividing the essence itself.15 Opponents of the teaching often accuse it of being a Neoplatonic intrusion into the mind of the church. On the contrary, I have suggested that it is a remarkably faithful paraphrase of a pattern of speech central to the gospel. Insofar as the doctrine has a problem, it is merely that its advocates sometimes overlook the fact that it is a paraphrase. Misled, perhaps, by the aura of dignity that surrounds the term divine “essence,” they overlook the reality it signifies: the Divine Name. The remedy is not to reject “essence” talk, but rather to so prioritize the Bible’s testimony to the Divine Name that it continuously funds, rules, and chastens what we mean by it.
Eternal Generation as Generatio: Highlighting Divine Copresence
Our remaining vocabularies of eternal generation say exactly what the first said but in ways that highlight other dimensions of the same mystery. Consider “Father” as a designation for the First Person. While we could conceive the First Person as bearer of the Tetragrammaton without being required to contemplate any other divine person, we cannot do the same while thinking of the First Person as “Father.” The kinship term requires us to think “forward,” so to speak, to the one of whom God is the Father, namely, the Son. The reciprocity previously signified by verbs (“the One who gives the Name,” “the One who receives the Name,” etc.) is now implied by the vocabulary itself. For this reason, the terms “Father,” “Son,” and (by extension) “Spirit” permit simple, unambiguous identification of the three persons, which is possible but more cumbersome in case of our first vocabulary.
Even so, kinship is not an “all-purpose” Trinitarian vocabulary. Instead, like the first terminology we examined, kinship tends to foreground one person in particular, in this instance, the Second Person, the “Son.” This is evident from the fact that we call the First Person “Father” with respect to the Son, not the Spirit. “Spirit” is not a kinship term at all, and so stands outside the vocabulary’s central idiom. And even when we consider “Father” and “Son” as a pair, “Son” has material priority. The Bible does not use kinship terms of God to pick out who the Father is. That is a foregone conclusion. The Father is the one who bears the divine name a se. “You, O LORD, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name” (Isa 63:16). Rather, divine kinship language serves to pick out who among many possible contenders is the Son. It is there that the emphasis falls in both testaments: “Israel is my first born son” (Exod 4:22). “This is my Son” (Matt 3:17). The same accent echoes in the famous adjective μονογενὴς (John 1:18), formerly (and perhaps correctly) translated “only begotten” (KJV) and now translated “only” (NRSV) or “one and only” (NIV).
Augustine proposed “Equality” to signal the divine perfection that comes into focus as we shift our attention from the “priority” of the First Person to the “centrality” of the Second. I would add, as a friendly gloss, “Presence” or even “Copresence.” Generation per se, in the sense of (for lack of a better term) ontological origination, is indeed all but inescapably implied by the Bible’s language of divine Father and Son, of begetting and being begotten, and occasionally this connotation comes to the fore (e.g., Ps 2:7; Acts 13:33; Heb 1:5–6). Even so, it remains safe to say that the primary theme of divine kinship language is not the movement of origination itself but the personal relationship of mutual availability, copresence, and love to which it gives rise.
I conclude this section by noting what I regard as another happy correspondence between the language of Scripture and the technical nomenclature of the doctrine of the Trinity. Just as the Divine Name provides the biblical original of which “divine essence” is a reasonable conceptual clarification, so the kinship language of “Father” and “Son” (and “Spirit,” when taken in conjunction with former) provides the original of which “person” or “hypostasis” is a reasonable redescription. The Divine Name is one, but those who bear it are three.
Eternal Generation as Processio Verbi: Highlighting Divine Connection
We conclude by considering a third way we can express the mystery of eternal generation. The last region on our map bears the legend processio verbi, for God’s utterance of the divine Word (cf. John 1:1; Heb 1:3; etc.). When we examine this region more closely, however, we discover that it is not a homogenous terrain. Beneath the legend “processio verbi” we discover a colorful patchwork of names for the Second Person, such as Splendor, Image, Wisdom, and so on. Each of these imparts a distinctive shade of meaning to our idea of eternal procession.16 At the same time, a moment’s reflection confirms the fact that the forms of speech gathered here have something in common. They are all instances of the same kind of word, a kind paradigmatically represented by the word “word” (verbum) itself: they are common nouns.
This fact is relevant for understanding the role that the multifaceted processio verbi has played in the development of Christian doctrine. The apologists needed a vocabulary common to the Bible on the one hand and their intellectual context on the other in order to expound Christ’s divine origin in a way that was faithful to Scripture and intelligible to their contemporaries. The translatability (grammatical and conceptual) of terms such as Word, Image, Wisdom, and so on belonged to the essence of their appeal in the second century, as it has ever since.
From a systematic point of view, processio verbi’s reliance on common nouns suggests an affinity with the Holy Spirit, not in the sense that it refers to the procession of the Spirit (which of course it does not) but in the sense that it refers to the procession of the Son using a kind of vocabulary that is characteristic of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the nameless person of the Trinity, but what this really means is that it is characteristic of the Holy Spirit to be named personally by means of nouns common to the other persons of the Trinity. Each person of the Trinity is “Holy,” each person is “Spirit.” Still, as Augustine observed, it is especially characteristic of the Third Person to be named personally by words held in common, and in this way to especially manifest the divine perfection of “Connection” in the life of the Trinity.
As a way of speaking about eternal generation, the vocabulary of common nouns extends itself naturally to all three persons in a way that the kinship vocabulary of generatio does not. True, “Word,” like the “Son,” refers uniquely to the Second Person, and not to the First or Third.17 Nevertheless, when we speak of the Second Person as Word, for example, it comes naturally to speak of the First Person as “God” and the Third Person as “Spirit” or “Breath.” The three common nouns connect the persons of the Trinity into a single, unified portrait for the contemplation of faith, one with resonances in both Scripture (cf. Ps 33:6) and daily life. The abundance and plasticity of common nouns makes possible many such portraits, some emphasizing divine oneness (“Light, Light of Light, Spirit of Light”), some divine threeness (“Lover, Beloved, Love”), some somewhere in between (“Memory, Understanding, Will”). In this way, too, the vocabulary of common nouns exhibits the charism of Connection, mediating between donum nominis’s emphasis on unity and generatio’s on diversity.
Once again, and now for a last time, I wish to register what I regard as a happy correspondence between the mediating vocabulary that we just explored and an aspect of technical Trinitarianism, in this case the teaching that speaks of the persons of the Trinity as three modes of subsistence (tropos hyparxeos). The similarity is that both mediate between the emphases of unity and distinction. Just as the motif of donum nominis anticipates what later Christian tradition calls communicatio essentiae, and generatio anticipates the three persons or hypostases, our last vocabulary suggests a kind of mediating path between these two insights. God, Christ, and the Spirit simply are different modes of being of the one divine essence, distinguished by their relations to each other: as God, God of God, and Spirit of God.
CONCLUSION
Barth challenged Christians to speak of the mystery of eternal generation in every available way. I have proposed that in practice this means cultivating three patterns of scriptural speech: one that emphasizes the First Person and the mystery of divine uniqueness at the source of the triune life; one that emphasizes the Second Person and the mystery of divine copresence at the heart of the Trinity; and one that emphasizes the Third Person and the mystery of connection mutual blessing that glorifies the Trinity in eternity and time. My hope is that by cultivating these three forms of speech Christians might speak of the mystery of eternal generation—not adequately, but perhaps a little less inadequately.
1. Karl Barth, CD I/1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 493.
2. Barth, CD I/1 (501).
3. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this chapter come from the NRSV.
4. Sean M. McDonough, YHWH at Patmos: Rev. 1:4 in Its Hellenistic and Early Jewish Setting (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999) offers an excellent overview of beliefs and practices connected with the Divine Name in Second Temple Judaism. Julius Boehmer, Die neutestamentliche Gottescheu und die ersten drei Bitten des Vaterunsers (Halle: Richard Mühlmann Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1917), provides an inventory of every word and phrase in the New Testament reflecting the impact of reserve before the name of God, totaling many hundreds of instances.
5. For a recent discussion of 1 Cor 8:6 and the Shema, see Erik Waaler, The “Shema” and the First Commandment in First Corinthians: An Intertextual Approach to Paul’s Re-reading of Deuteronomy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
6. Maurice Wiles, “Eternal Generation,” in Working Papers in Doctrine (London: SCM, 1976), 18–27, esp. 18. See also Alasdair Heron, “Logos, Image, Son: Some Models and Paradigms in Early Christology,” in Creation, Christ, and Culture: Studies in Honour of T. F. Torrance, ed. Richard W. A. McKinney (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1976), 43–62.
7. Further obscuring matters is the fact that in the ante-Nicene period words derived from the root gennaō (beget) were not rigidly distinguished from their equivalent terms derived from the root ginomai (become). See G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), 37–54.
8. Origen, Princ. 1.2.10. See Peter Widdicombe, The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 69.
9. For a fuller discussion, see R. Kendall Soulen, The Divine Name(s) and Holy Trinity, vol. 1, Distinguishing the Voices (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 47–60.
10. My account of the Tetragrammaton in John has been especially helped by Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 2:754–56; Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” Vigiliae Christianae 57, no. 2 (2003): 115–58; and Richard Bauckham, “Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of John,” in Contours of Christology in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
11. Though affirmed without specific reference to the Tetragrammaton, the idea of the Father’s giving his own divine names to the Son is found, for example, in Hilary of Poitiers. “The names (Word, Wisdom, Power) have been transmitted from the Father to the Son (via the birth). This does not mean that the Father loses the name, nor is he in any way diminished by this transmission. The perfect begetting of the Son does not lead to loss in the Father, while it does produce perfection for the one who is born.” See Mark Weedman, The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 138. On the correspondence between “has been given” and “has been begotten” in St. Augustine, see Keith Johnson, “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” TrinJ 32 (2011): 141– 63.
12. Barth’s own suggestion was that generatio emphasizes redemption, while processio verbi emphasizes revelation. Barth, CD I/1, 496–501.
13. See Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 1.5.5.
14. I leave the question of the filioque open for the purposes of this chapter.
15. For an excellent treatment of the subject, together with John Calvin’s (idiosyncratic) opposition to it, see Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). While Ellis favors Calvin’s critique of the doctrine, his book is illuminating and fair-minded.
16. See Aquinas, ST 1.34.2, ad 3.
17. In this sense, the common noun “Word” becomes a “personal name” in the technical sense. When it is used in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, it picks out a single divine person. My point is that it does so by means of a grammatically common noun, in contrast to a kinship term or proper name.