If covenantal thinking forms the architecture of Reformed faith and practice, the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation.1 The Trinity is not merely one doctrine among others; besides being proclaimed in Word and sacrament, this article of faith structures all the faith and practice of Christianity: our theology, liturgies, hymns, and lives. This is why so many references have already been made in this volume to the Trinity, to the Trinitarian shape of Christian ontology and epistemology, and to Christianity’s doctrines of revelation and the divine attributes. “In the doctrine of the Trinity,” wrote Herman Bavinck, “beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity.” As the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, “our God is above us, before us, and within us.”2 After tracing the biblical-theological development of the dogma, I will turn to its historical-theological formulation and then to a systematic-theological summary.
Faith in the one God—Yahweh—arose not out of Greek speculation but out of God’s self-revelation to Israel. The same God who forbade idolatry was addressed by Jesus as “Father.” In fact, Jesus answered Satan’s temptation by reasserting Israel’s creed, the Shema: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (Mt 4:10, paraphrasing Dt 6:13). Jesus’ acts of healing are pointers to this God and to no other: “And they glorified the God of Israel” (Mt 15:31). His will is the Father’s will, and his works are “the works that the Father has given me to accomplish” (Jn 5:36). While there may be many so-called gods for the nations, “yet for us,” says Paul, “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1Co 8:6). Turning Gentiles “from idols to serve the living and true God” was as essential a part of the apostles’ message as it had been for the prophets (1Th 1:9; cf. 1Pe 4:3).3chapter 8 Appearing before the Roman governor Felix, Paul entreated, “This I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God” (Ac 24:14–15). Included in that confession is “one God” (Eph 4:6).
If the New Testament affirms monotheism, however, it is also the Christian claim that the Old Testament already anticipates some sort of plurality when three distinct actors appear on the stage of Israel’s history, sometimes even in the same scene, each identified as God. On the basis of the “new thing” that God had accomplished in Jesus Christ, the early Christians were directed by Jesus himself (especially in his postresurrection instruction reported in Lk 24) to reread the Old Testament texts with him at their center. Similar to the messianic passages in the Psalms and the Prophets, the “Angel of the LORD” theophanies simultaneously distinguish the Angel from and identify him with Yahweh (Ge 18; 22:11–18; 32:24–30; Ex 3:2–6). He is the Angel of God’s Presence (Isa 63:9), which connects him to the Shekinah presence (the kābÔd or Glory-Spirit) of God himself. An especially interesting scene opens up to us in Zechariah’s vision of a courtroom scene, with Yahweh himself (the personal name, not just the title) identified with the Angel of the LORD (Zec 3:1–4).
To be sure, the New Testament is more redolent with passages elaborating this earlier revelation. This is for obvious eschatological reasons: the Son was not eternally incarnate, but was made human “when the fullness of time had come” (Gal 4:4; cf. Ro 1:1–6). Central to the early development of Trinitarian thought was the simple fact that faithful Jews had come to believe that God had acted just as he had promised, but that the events of the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit had shed new light not only on the ministry and teaching of Jesus but on the whole history of redemption. The confession “one God in three persons” arises naturally out of the triadic formulas in the New Testament in the context of baptism (Mt 28:19 and par.) and liturgical blessings and benedictions (Mt 28:19; Jn 1:18; 5:23; Ro 5:5–8; 1Co 6:11; 8:6, 12:4–6; 2Co 13:13–14; Eph 4:4–6; 2Th 2:13; 1Ti 2:5, 1Pe 1:2). Each person is equally worshiped as God—first by Jewish believers who stood as resolutely as ever against the pagan polytheism that surrounded them. Long before the dogma of the Trinity reached its formal refinement, believers were placing their faith in, worshiping, praying to, and being baptized into the reality of which it speaks.
In Jesus’ own baptism, there are not simply three names but three actors—the Father who speaks (“This is my beloved Son”), the “beloved Son” who is baptized, and the dove who hovers above Jesus, suggesting reference to the Spirit hovering over the waters in creation and concurring with the benediction on all that God has made (Mt 3:13–17; Mk 1:9–11; Lk 3:21–22; Jn 1:32–34). Jesus also identifies himself as the Lord of the Sabbath (Lk 6:5). The Jews believed that the Messiah would be David’s descendant, but Jesus points out to the religious leaders that David himself called this future son his Lord in Psalm 110:1 (Lk 20:41–44).
In John’s Gospel, the self-identification of Jesus with God appears in the opening verses, as an intentional echo of the prologue in Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [kai theos ēn ho logos]. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (Jn 1:1—3). He is “the only Son from the Father” (monogenous para patros, v. 14) and “the only begotten Son [monogenēs theos], who is in the bosom of the Father” (v. 18 NKJV).
The Word is simultaneously distinct from God the Father (“was with God”) and one in essence with the Father (“was God”). Therefore, two crucial points are already made: The Word is a person distinct from the Father who is nevertheless identified also as God. This distinction of the Son from the Father and their unity in essence consistently reassert themselves throughout the fourth gospel, with Jesus’ appropriation of God’s personal name (Yahweh, I AM), existence, and attributes (Jn 6:35, 48, 51; 8:12, 58; 9:5, 28; 10:11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1, 5) and reach their climax in Jesus’ Upper Room Discourse in chapters 14–16, where the Spirit’s distinct person and unity with the Godhead are also underscored, and in Jesus’ high priestly prayer in chapter 17. All of this provides the basis for the ancient doctrine of perichōrēsis—the interpenetration and communion of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in, with, and through each other. After examining Jesus’ scarred body after the resurrection, a doubting Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28), and Jesus declares his blessing on all who will come to share this confession (v. 29).
In the Apocalypse, Jesus appears to John as the “Alpha and the Omega … who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev 1:8). “I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades” (vv. 17–18 NIV). In fact, as Gerald Bray observes concerning this opening chapter of Revelation, we encounter both the voice of the Father (v. 8) and the voice of the Son (vv. 17–18), and John received his vision “in the Spirit” (v. 10). “In the famous letters to the seven churches (chs. 2–3), it is Christ who speaks, yet each letter concludes with the solemn command: ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”4
It was the teaching of Jesus himself, through his self-identification with the Father and the Spirit (Mt 22:44; Jn 5:19–47; 6:26–58; 7:28, 37–38; 8:12–38, 48–59; 10:1–18, 25–38; 11:25–26; 14:1- 14, 20; 15:1–9, 26; 16:7, 14–15, 25–28; 17:1–26; 18:37; 20:22) that motivated the practice of Trinitarian faith even before the dogma was fully formulated, and this clear testimony of Jesus to his equality with the Father was not lost on the religious leaders (Jn 5:18). The christocentric reading of Israel’s history is the most original and widely practiced way of interpreting the Old Testament, as when Paul treats the names Yahweh and Jesus as interchangeable: “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them [the fathers in the wilderness] did and were destroyed by the serpents” (1Co 10:9, emphasis added).
Brevard Childs also notes that Jesus “assumes the titles of God by explicit reference to the Old Testament.”5 “In addition, Jesus shares or fully assumes the functions of the God of the Old Testament.” Jesus takes Yahweh’s judgment seat (2Co 5:10 with Ecc 12:14), at whose name “every knee shall bow … and every tongue shall confess” his sovereign lordship (appropriating Isa 45:23, where Yahweh claims this worship for himself alone). “The Old Testament ‘day of the Lord’ is now identified with the coming of Jesus (1Th 5:2). Similarly, many of the liturgical forms of Israel’s worship of God have been transferred to Christ. Christians now ‘call upon the name’ of Christ (Ac 19:13; Ro 10:14; etc.), and baptize ‘in his name.’ Angels worship him (Heb 1:6) and give praise to God and ‘the Lamb’ (Rev 5:13).”6
The fact that this son of Mary and Joseph has been demonstrated to be the “Son of God in power … by his resurrection from the dead” (Ro 1:4) causes all of the canonical testimony to coalesce around him as the one who is named first in his works and only consequently in his person. Even the preexistence of the Son is clearly proclaimed in the Pauline corpus (Ro 8:3; 2Co 8:9; Gal 4:4; Php 2:6; Col 1:16–17). Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” and “by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him…. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Col 1:15–16, 19). Given the Jewish context, perhaps no stronger assertion of Christ’s deity could be made than the announcement given by all of the apostles that there is no other name in heaven or on earth by which we may be saved (Jn 1:12; Ac 3:16; 4:12; 5:41; Ro 10:13; Php 2:9; 1Pe 4:14; Rev 2:13). This could mean only that Jesus of Nazareth was none other than Israel’s Great King, Yahweh, whose name alone was to be invoked.
There are clear passages in the Old Testament that indicate also the distinct personality of the Holy Spirit (rûah) and yet identify this distinct person as God. This is demonstrated with great narrative force in the creative brooding of the Spirit over the waters in the beginning, his “new creation” leading of the Israelites through the waters of baptism in the Red Sea, and his filling of the temple in the land of Canaan. In the Old Testament, we find numerous references to “the Spirit of God.” Identified by the divine name (Ex 31:3; Ac 5:3–4; 1Co 3:16; 2Pe 1:21), the Spirit also has divine attributes ascribed to him (omnipresence, Ps 139:7–10; omniscience, Isa 40:13–14; 1Co 2:10–11), as well as divine works (creation, Ge 1:2; Job 26:13; 33:4; providential renovation, Ps 104:30; regeneration, Jn 3:5–6; Tit 3:5; resurrection of the dead, Ro 8:11). The Holy Spirit is also accorded divine homage (Mt 28:19; Ro 9:1; 2Co 13:14). The tandem “attorneys” (paraklētoi) from heaven who deliver Israel and lead the people to the Promised Land, witnessing to the covenant in blessing and curse, are now proclaimed in the upper room by Jesus (Jn 14–16) in terms of their respective missions of “coming” and “going,” “sending,” and “coming again.”
This coming and going in and out of each other in the economy of redemption reveals the perichoretic relationship of these divine persons in their eternal fellowship. In Acts 5, Peter confronts Ananias and Sapphira by telling them that they have lied “to the Holy Spirit” (v. 3); in fact, they have “not lied to men but to God” (v. 4). We read in 2 Corinthians 3:17, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Though distinct from the Father and Son, the Spirit “searches, speaks, testifies, commands, reveals, strives, creates, makes intercession, raises the dead,” and engages in numerous other activities that identify him both as a distinct person (not just an influence) and as God.7 These are indeed the strong verbs that identify the covenant Lord of Israel in the economy of creation, redemption, and consummation.
God reveals himself as the Trinity not only in the history of redemption, but in the personal experience of believers. This is a critical point, especially in view of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s widely influential suspicion (treated below) that it makes no practical difference whether God is one or three since we experience God only as one person. Gordon Fee highlights the significance of the Trinity as an experienced reality in the New Testament, especially in Paul.8 In fact, he develops his approach to the New Testament exegesis of Trinitarian doctrine through the experience of the Spirit, “as the one who enables believers to confess the risen Christ as exalted Lord, and as the way God and Christ are personally present in the believer and the believing community.”9
Fee later writes, “Thus, Paul’s ‘high christology’ does not begin with doctrinal reflection but with experienced conviction. Those who have received the Spirit of God have been enabled to see the crucifixion in a new, divine light. Those who walk ‘according to the Spirit’ can no longer look on Christ from their old ‘according to the flesh’ point of view (2Co 5:15–16). They now know him to be their exalted Lord, ever present at the Father’s right hand making intercession for them (Ro 8:34).”10 Paul’s encounter with the ascended Christ on the road to Damascus was decisive not only for his conversion and calling as an apostle but for his subsequent theological development.11
The doctrine of the Trinity is also evident in the new covenant worship instituted by Christ and his apostles, especially in the formula for baptism and the liturgical elements in public prayers, salutations, and benedictions. Rather than being regarded as a complex dogma with marginal practical significance, worship was a practice that called for further reflection and dogmatic formulation.12 What were observant Jews doing praying and offering worship to Jesus as God and invoking the Father, the Son, and the Spirit for salvation? The friends and relatives of the earliest Christians knew what these practices intended, and it was enough to provoke the most serious charge of polytheistic idolatry.
One of the principal aims of traditional forms of worship and instruction throughout the history of the church (its liturgies, hymns, creeds, confessions, and catechisms) has been to integrate Trinitarian faith and practice into Christian worship and to pass this faith from generation to generation. In the rush to dispense with such formal structures, many churches today leave this central article out in the cold as an abstraction that fails to touch and shape their lives each week. However, if we return to the historical drama and the Trinitarian practices that gave rise to the dogma, its practical relevance for doxology and discipleship will be our presupposition rather than our goal.
Given the context of the New Testament, our focus so far has been on the difficulty that the Trinitarian confession presented in a Jewish milieu. However, subsequent refinement was provoked chiefly by encounters with Gentile (Greek) objections.
The historical development of Trinitarian dogma is one of the best illustrations of the point that Christian theology is always done within a specific context yet with an overriding awareness of Scripture as its source and norm. Had the ancient church simply capitulated to the cultural categories that dominated the age, the dogma would have been aborted early on. Yet it was precisely by employing the categories and terminology available to them that they were able to press beyond the range of this philosophical inheritance and transform both philosophy and theology in the process.13
Both Platonism and Aristotelianism maintained the priority of the one over the many, although they parsed this differently. According to the former, mediated through Philo of Alexandria to early Christian theologians, such as Origen (185–254), the One, by definition, could not be divided.14 Plurality itself is a fall from the unity of being. Consequently, Platonism would give rise to various forms of ontological subordinationism. While Origen sought to uphold a high Christology, there was a clear ontological subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father beyond the economic subordination of the Son in his redemptive mission.
A substance (or essence) is simply something about which something can be said.15 Human beings share certain attributes that distinguish them from birds, for example. Those shared characteristics are the substance of humanity. According to Aristotle, the term ousia (substance or essence) referred both to the individual who bears an essence (prōtē ousia) and to the essence itself (deutera ousia). So, for example, Margaret (prōtē ousia) is a human being (deutera ousia). Essence was therefore the encompassing term for both species and individual. If we simply carry this over into Christian theology, we can see why using the same term for both nature and persons would make the debate more complicated and open to misunderstanding. How can we say that God is one ousia and three ousiai without contradiction?
The Aristotelian objection would encourage Arianism.16 For Arius, a third-century Alexandrian presbyter, the Son was the first created being. “There exists a trinity (trias),” he said, “in unequal glories.” The Father is “the Monad,” so that “the Father is God [even] when the Son does not exist.”17 At this point, the line between heresy and Christianity was as thin as a vowel: Semi-Arians allowed that the Son and the Father were of a similar essence (homoiousios) but continued to deny that they were of the same essence (homoousios). Sabellius, a third-century presbyter in Rome, argued that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are simply “masks” or modes in which the one person of God is experienced by believers. Although Sabellius was excommunicated by the bishop of Rome in AD 220, Sabellianism—also known as modalism—has remained a recurring challenge in church history.18 The dominance of the one over the many, unity over plurality, is the common factor in all of these early departures from the Trinitarian faith.
Arius did have logic on his side, but this logic was restricted to and defined by the conceptual category of essence. Of course, “one in essence, three in essence” is a contradiction that no one affirmed, but Christian pastors and theologians struggled for the right category. By the fourth century, the church had composed sophisti-cated challenges to Arius, with Athanasius as the most notable spokesperson. Yet Athanasius, too, was still using the familiar terminology at hand, with ousia denoting both the essence and the persons.
The real innovation in the debate, with revolutionary implications in the history of both philosophy and theology, occurred when the fourth-century Cappadocian theologians (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea) introduced a distinction between ousia and hypostasis, the former referring to Aristotle’s deutera ousia and the latter to his prōtē ousia. “Persons” finally attained their own ontological status as something more than a subcategory of essence. Thus, faced with the fact of the incarnation, Christians could for the first time talk about persons as sharing in a common essence and yet related to each other as distinct individuals with their own properties of personal identity.19 This breakthrough turned out to have tremendous significance not only for the doctrine of the Trinity but for the concept of human personhood as well. Thus, the formulation of the third-century Latin father Tertullian, “one in essence, three in persons,” was given a deeper conceptual footing.20
However, the term persons generated another set of problems. Taken from the language of the stage, prosōpon in ordinary Greek usage as well as in its Latin form (persona) referred to a role that someone played—the connotation that persona has in English. This could be interpreted in a Sabellian (modalistic) manner, as if the persons are merely masks or roles played by one person.21 Alert to these dangers, the Cappadocians rejected prosōpon, despite its time-honored usage since Tertullian (West) and Hippolytus (East), and stayed with hypostasis.22 The Cappadocian theologians even risked language such as “three beings” on occasion (“three suns,” “light from light,” etc.), although they consistently qualified these analogies by affirming a single ousia shared by the three persons.23
Pneumatology also played an important function in the development of Cappadocian formulations of the Trinity, as Basil’s treatise on the Holy Spirit illustrates.24 Furthermore, according to Basil, it is the persons rather than the nature (or essence) that we encounter in Christ and by the Spirit.25 Thus, it does not make much difference whether one begins with the one God or the three persons. In the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.”26 Thinking of the one without the three leads to Arianism (or Unitarianism), and thinking of the three without the one leads to tritheism (or polytheism).
The catholic consensus emerged with the triumph of a full Trinitarianism at the Council of Nicea in 325 and the simple but precise language of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, known commonly as the Nicene Creed. Yet subtle differences continued to exercise considerable debate and, as we will see, have erupted once again through the revival of Trinitarian theology in our own day.
Differences between the churches of the East and the West are frequently exaggerated in our day, with Augustine often the target of criticism for a more Platonic concentration on the unity of the divine essence that threatened the genuine plurality of the persons.27 By contrast, the East developed its Trinitarian thinking by starting with the person of the Father rather than the shared essence, with the Spirit as well as the Son finding his origin in him.28 Consequently, the East has often suspected the West of exhibiting modalistic tendencies, while the West frequently worries that subordinationism (or tritheism) lurks in Eastern formulations.
Like rumors generally, the East’s concern contains some truth. Augustine and Jerome were also working on a formulation that would affirm unity and plurality. However, the Cappadocian formulation seems to give more ontological weight to persons, while the tendency of Augustine’s thesis is to identify the Father, Son, and Spirit more as relations than as persons in their own right. Of course, Augustine did not reduce the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to fatherhood, sonship, and love explicitly, but this modalistic move is not inconceivable in view of his argument.29
Differences lie more in tendencies of thought than in formal theories, and we may discern these differences in the dominant analogies employed. In the Cappadocian version, the analogy for the Trinity is that of Peter, James, and John sharing a common human essence. Obviously, this could be taken to an extreme (known as tritheism) were it not for the repeated caveats of the Cappadocians that this was merely an analogy and that there were not in fact three Gods but one. However, Augustine offered the analogy of the mind, comparing the divine persons to memory, intellect, and will in the rational soul of an individual. In this analogy, the Father is compared with the mind, the Son with self-knowledge, and the Spirit with the love by which the rational soul loves itself.30 Understandably, this analogy lends credibility to the suspicion of the Christian East that the West lists toward modalism.
Identifying the three persons of the Trinity as real individuals certainly challenges a modalistic theory, but this term has its own baggage. The Roman statesman and Christian philosopher Boethius (480–524) defined person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (natures rationalis individua substantia).31 At least as John Zizioulas interprets the East’s concern, this definition (especially as applied to the persons of the Trinity) set in motion a theologically defective view of persons as autonomous individuals that reaches its fateful climax in modernity.32 But for the Cappadocians, “true personhood arises not from one’s individualistic isolation from others but from love and relationship with others, from communion.”33
According to Zizioulas, this difference between Western (Augustinian/Boethian) and Eastern (Cappadocian) understandings of divine personhood arises from a more fundamental disagreement about whether its source is the shared essence or the person of the Father. According to the East, it is not an essence but the Father’s (a person’s) love that generates the life (including the divine essence) of the Son and the Spirit.34 (The West has typically responded that this formulation is susceptible to an ontological subordination of the Son that deprives him of full deity.) In addition to these concerns, the East has suspected the West of an implicit “binitarianism,” with a weak concept of the full personhood of the Spirit.
There may be some justification for this concern, since Augustine and his heirs (mediated especially through Richard of St. Victor) emphasized that the Spirit was the “bond of love” between the Father and the Son.35 In his On the Trinity, Richard argues that the Father gives without receiving, the Son both gives and receives, but the Spirit is only a recipient of love. But does this not make the Spirit passive both in the intratrinitarian communion and in the economy of creation and redemption? The suspicion of a “binitarian” tendency in Western Trinitarianism had already been exacerbated centuries earlier, at the Third Council of Toledo (589), when the West unilaterally altered the Nicene Creed’s statement of the Spirit’s procession “from the Father” by adding, “and from the Son” (ex patre filioque). Hence, the disagreement about this phrase is called the filioque controversy (discussed below).
In connection with so central a doctrine, any nuance is significant, but we should be wary of exaggerated contrasts of East/West formulations. After all, the Western father Tertullian had already pioneered the formula “one in essence and three in persons” in the second century. In addition, he even affirmed the Father as the source of the Godhead and the procession of the Spirit “from the Father through the Son.”36 Although Augustine, writing a century later, seems to have missed the crucial insight of the Cappadocian distinction between essence (ousia) and person (prosōpon), Tertullian did not.37 Furthermore, Athanasius in the East was still using ousia to refer to both the essence and the persons seventy years after Tertullian’s death. It was not until the Cappadocians brought their crucial insight to bear that the East had the conceptual tools to express Tertullian’s formula. Augustine’s principal work on the Trinity was written chiefly to refute Arianism, not to provide a thorough treatment of the topic. His primary concern was to challenge the Arian claim that there was a time when the Son was not, by observing that the eternal Father cannot exist without the eternally begotten Son. Understandably, then, the language of relations was prominent.
This being said, it is true that Augustine and Jerome failed to understand the meaning, much less the achievement, of the Cappadocian development.38 Augus-tine expressed confusion at the Cappadocian formulation, in part because of his lack of fluency in reading Greek. The East denied that there were three Gods, and the West rejected the modalistic heresy of one person with three personas. Nevertheless, there are obvious differences in emphasis. Eager to emphasize the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father against Arianism, adoptionism, and subordinationism, Augustine placed his emphasis on the unity of essence. “Whatever … is said of God,” he wrote, “is said of the Father, the Son and the Spirit triply, and equivalently of the Trinity singly” (emphasis added).39 This is certainly true with respect to the undivided essence shared by the divine persons, but it cannot be said (and Augustine did not suggest that it could be said) that the Father is begotten and the Son begets. The persons are indeed a triple repetition of the same essence, but they are not triple repetitions of the same person.40 Though never denied, the distinct characteristics and reality of the persons become marginalized in Augustine’s emphasis on the one essence.
This somewhat modalistic tendency in Augustine’s thinking becomes more evident in his psychological analogy of the Trinity (in The Trinity) as “memory” (the Father), “understanding” (the Son), and “will,” which is love (the Spirit). One mind with three faculties expresses a rather different set of assumptions from the East’s typical analogy of a family or Peter, James, and John sharing the same essence as human. The language of the divine persons as relations exacerbated the East’s suspicions. Clearly, relations do not act, think, speak, or will, as do persons. Furthermore, a single mind with three faculties is rather different from three distinct agents-in-relation. The psychological analogy becomes an explicit proposition in Augustine’s treatise: “these three constitute” not only one divine essence but “one mind.”41 Is it any wonder that the most popular analogies employed in Western teaching on the Trinity lean in the modalistic direction, such as the shamrock, a triangle, and water as ice, steam, and liquid?
Although Colin Gunton overstates his case against Augustine, there are weak nesses that the great theologian bequeathed to Western Trinitarian thinking. There does seem to be a tendency in Augustine’s thinking to consider the eternal (hypostatic) Word in more abstract terms rather than as “the concrete person of the Son in relation to the Father and the Spirit.”42 Gunton presses, “Is the basis of Augustine’s deity personal? What is finally real about him, the community constituted by the relatedness of Father, Son, and Spirit to each other, or something else?”43
In the economy we encounter distinct agents engaged in mutual mission yet each in his own way. Augustine’s formula that God’s external works are undivided (which was also affirmed in the East) can either mean that in every external work the persons act together (mutually), or be taken to imply that their actions are simply the same. I concur with Robert Jenson’s judgment on this point that Augustine assumes the latter, wary of attributing “differentiation in God’s intrinsic agency.” Jenson concludes,
Either, he thinks, Father, Son, and Spirit must simply do the same thing, or simply different things; the possibility of a mutually single act cannot occur to him. Thus he supposes, for example, that the Son’s appearances in Israel could as well be called appearances of the Father or of the Spirit [The Trinity 2; 3.3] or that when the voice speaks to Jesus at his baptism—a chief text of original Trinitarianism—the speaker is indifferently specifiable as the Father or the Son or the Spirit or the whole Trinity [1.8].44
The tendency to regard the persons simply as triple repetitions of the same substance (without adequate regard for the personal attributes) is evident in Augustine’s interpretation of the external works of the Godhead. Although Augustine himself did not argue the point, the logic of his argument is not inimical to the speculation of the medieval theologian Peter Lombard: “As the Son was made man, so the Father or the Holy Spirit could have been and could be now” (Sentences 3.1.3). This raises the question as to whether the persons have any personal attributes that distinguish them from each other. In sharp contrast, Jenson notes, Augustine’s counterpart in the East, John of Damascus, says, “It was the Son of God who became the son of man, so that his individuating property might be preserved. As he is Son of God he became a son of man” (emphasis added).45 John of Damascus recognized that there were attributes that were shared as the common essence of the persons (essential attributes) and attributes that were unique to each person (personal attributes). Since the latter were incommunicable, the Son alone is the proper subject of incarnation. Lombard’s point was never accepted officially by the Western church, it should be noted. Nevertheless, how could it ever have even emerged except as an extreme (though logical) inference from the Augustinian line of thinking?
The fourth-century Western theologian Hilary of Poitiers, after spending time with Eastern bishops, came to understand their suspicions of modalistic tendencies in the West, and he attempted to bring together the Eastern emphasis on distinct persons (hypostases) and the Western emphasis on one essence (ousia).46 Manlion Simonetti judges concerning Hilary’s principal treatise, “The De synodis, a work of rare intelligence and penetration, reveals for the first time in a Western theologian a full awareness of the complex religious reality of the East.”47
At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the position enunciated in the Athanasian Creed (a sixth-century creed wrongly attributed to Athanasius and used only in the West) became established, with the explicit condemnation of the Trinitarian views of Joachim of Fiore as tritheistic (on Joachim’s continuing influence, see comments on Moltmann below, “Privileging the Many,” pp. 296–99). This council even cited the insightful comment of Cappadocian father Gregory of Nazianzus to substantiate its argument: “The Father is one (alius), the Son another (alius), and the Holy Spirit another (alius), yet there is not another thing (aliud).”48 This is but another way of saying, “one in essence, three in persons.” Thomas Aquinas appropriated and refined the Augustinian interpretation of the Trinity and the Boethian definition of persons.49 The common Trinitarian faith was affirmed, but with distinct accents and conceptual frameworks, sometimes leading to tension on important points.
The sixteenth century saw a rise of neo-Arianism, especially through the efforts of Michael Servetus and the rising movement known as Socinianism, which came to full flower in modern rationalism and Unitarianism. In his Institutes Calvin moves from the polemic against idolatry to the doctrine of the Trinity. Apart from the knowledge of God as Trinity, “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.”50 Calvin was especially attracted to “the Athanasius of the West,” Hilary of Poitiers, mentioned above (“East-West Tensions,” p. 287). Through his own study of the Eastern writers (especially Basil and Gregory of Nyssa), and his significant appreciation for Hilary, Calvin’s Trinitarian thought is more sympathetic to the “Cappadocian revolution.”
Although deeply indebted to Augustine on many topics, including the Trinity, Calvin displays his independence, criticizing Augustine’s psychological analogy and his failure to understand the significance of the Cappadocian insights: “With what great freedom does Augustine sometimes burst forth?” he asks. “How unlike are the Greeks and the Latins?” Jerome attacked the notion that there are “three substances” in God, but he is “confused” by the word hypostasis, Calvin writes, and therefore rashly dismisses unfamiliar terms.51 After scolding Jerome for his intemperate objections to the Eastern bishops, Calvin explains that Augustine was more moderate both in his tone and in his objections.52
Whereas Augustine tended to reduce the divine persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) to relations (fatherhood, sonship, bond of love), Reformed theologians emphasized that the persons were real and distinct in the fullest sense. Like Hilary, Calvin combined the Western emphasis on God’s essential unity—shared consubstantially, with no member ontologically subordinate or inferior to another—with the Eastern emphasis on the distinct reality and mutuality of the persons.
Rather than focus on the essence (almost as if it were its own hypostasis—a fourth person of the Trinity), Calvin emphasized that each person is the bearer of the divine essence. In other words, there is no “God” or “divinity” floating somewhere behind or above the persons of the Godhead.
With ancient precedent—for example, Epiphanius (Refutation of Heresies 69)—Calvin employs the term autotheos (lit., “self-God”) for the way in which the Son and the Spirit as well as the Father are “God.”53 Since self-existence is a divine attribute, the Son’s deity must be as underived as the Father’s and the Spirit’s. His person, not his divine essence, is begotten of the Father. Much of Calvin’s autotheos is founded on Augustine’s comment that Christ “is called Son, with reference to the Father (ad patrem) and God with reference to himself (ad seipsum)” Yet he also appealed to Cyril of Alexandria.54 Without in any way surrendering the ecumenical view of the Father as unbegotten, the Son as begotten, and the Spirit as proceeding, Calvin nevertheless insisted that each person was a subsistence of God a se (i.e., from himself). This was, after all, the implication of having life in himself, even if his person is eternally begotten (Jn 5:26).
In making this point, Calvin highlighted the distinction between the shared divine essence and the unique attributes of the persons that distinguish each from the other. The essence is unbegotten, but only the Father is unbegotten in his personhood. Granted, autotheos is a bold way of stating this ontological equality of the persons in their distinct subsistence, yet Warfield’s verdict seems correct: “By this assertion the homoousiotes of the Nicene fathers at last came to its full right and became in its fullest sense the hinge of the doctrine.”55
Calvin’s insistence on each person as autotheos in his shared essence, yet the Father as the source of the persons of the Son and the Spirit, navigated between tendencies toward subordinationism on one side and modalism on the other. Gregory of Nyssa says exactly what Calvin does about there being no greater/lesser in the nature, but only with respect to the persons.56 In fact, in nearly the same words Calvin’s repeated stipulation was already said by Nyssa: “Every operation which extends from God to the creation … has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.”57 The persons, not the natures, are caused.58 Even in the way that Calvin defends the consubstantiality (essential unity) of the Godhead, then, the persons are center stage.
Although this autotheos view may at first appear to be even more radical to Eastern theologians than to Western, John Zizioulas makes the same point (without reference to Calvin) in describing the East’s position:
The Father as “cause” is God, or the God in an ultimate sense, not because he holds the divine essence and transmits it—this would indeed endanger the fullness of the divine being of the other persons—but because he is the ultimate ontological principle of divine personhood. If this is truly understood, apprehension that the causal language of the Cappadocians endangers the fullness of deity of the Son and the Spirit may disappear. For, in fact, the equality of the three persons in terms of substance is not denied by the Father’s being the cause of personhood; it is rather ensured by it, since by being cause only as a person and for the sake of personhood the Father guards against locating substance primarily in himself.59
Unfortunately in my view, not all Reformed theologians countenanced Calvin’s concept of the persons as autotheos with respect to their essential attributes.60 Nevertheless, they continued his emphasis on the distinction between the attributes of the one God and the distinct personal properties of the three persons. Essential attributes are shared equally by the three persons. All three persons are infinite, sovereign, loving, and omniscient. However, only the Father begets, only the Son is begotten, and only the Spirit is spirated. The Heidelberg theologian M. F. Wendelin wrote that “the persons of the Son and Spirit have an origin; the essence does not. Person generates and is generated; essence neither generates nor is generated.”61 This had been precisely Calvin’s point in referring to the persons as autotheos. Even in human generation, it is persons who are begotten, not human nature. In every external work of the Godhead, the Father is the source, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit is the one who brings about the intended effect. It is one thing to say that each person is mutually engaged in every external work of the Godhead and quite another to say (as Augustine implies) that each person simply does the same work. The latter view reflects a latent tendency toward modalism.
The fuller development of this distinction between essential attributes and personal properties highlighted the unity of the Trinity without subordinationist or modalistic tendencies and highlighted the real differences between persons without tritheistic tendencies. Calvin writes,
For in each hypostasis the whole divine nature is understood, with this qualification—that to each belongs his own peculiar quality [emphasis added]…. In this sense the opinions of the ancients are to be harmonized, which otherwise would seem somewhat to clash. Sometimes, indeed, they teach that the Father is the beginning of the Son; sometimes they declare that the Son has both divinity and essence from himself, and thus has one beginning with the Father. Augustine well and clearly expresses the cause of this diversity in another place, when he speaks as follows: “Christ with respect to himself [ousia: nature] is called God; with respect to the Father [hypostasis: person], Son.” … Therefore, when we speak simply of the Son without regard to the Father, we well and properly declare him to be of himself; and for this reason we call him the sole beginning. But when we mark the relation that he has with the Father, we rightly make the Father the beginning of the Son.62
This is not to suggest that Calvin is “Augustinian” when talking about the unity and “Cappadocian” when considering the persons. Rather, he understands the essential unity and diversity of persons as interdependent. The persons are God, and apart from the persons there is no divine nature. “And that passage in Gregory of Nazianzus vastly delights me: ‘I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one.”63
Reformed theologians even spoke of these distinct personal attributes as incommunicable. According to Amandus Polanus, “A person of the Deitie is a subsistence in the Deitie, having such properties as cannot be communicated from one to another.”64 Richard Muller notes concerning these writers that “subsistence” gave more ontological weight to persons than persona allowed, given its Sabellian (modalistic) associations.65 Wendelin proposes, “A divine person is usually described as an incommunicable subsistence of the divine essence” (emphasis added).66 Though sharing a common essence, each person has his own “life, understanding, will, and power, by which he is in continual operation,” according to Edward Leigh.67 With such statements we are at a rather far remove from Augustine’s conviction that the Godhead consists of one mind and will.
The formula “distinction without division” guides Calvin’s understanding of the Trinity. “Indeed, the words ‘Father,’ ‘Son,’ and ‘Spirit’ imply a real distinction—let no one think that these titles, whereby God is variously designated from his works, are empty—but a distinction [contra Sabellians], not a division [contra Arians]” (emphasis added).68 According to Calvin, then, “It is not a mere relation which is called the Son, but a real somewhat subsisting in the divine nature” (emphasis added).69 This, it seems to me, is identical to the Cappadocian construction, even as articulated by Zizioulas when he explains that, against the semi-Arians, the Cappadocians argued that the Father’s “unbegottenness” identifies his person and not his essence.70
Because of this distinction, Reformed theologians could speak without contradiction of the Father as the principium and “the ‘origin of all divinity’ (originem totius Deitatis).’ “71 Each person enjoys the aseity proper to the essence, but for the Father alone it is also an attribute of his person. He is “unbegotten” (agennetos), while the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. Yet this in no way means for the Reformed that the Father is first in nature or cause. In fact, Reformed theologians agreed that the category of causality is inappropriate among the persons.72
Wary of overstatements concerning East-West disagreements, Gerald Bray nevertheless concludes that Calvin pulled together important threads from both to form a more integrated fabric: “By claiming that the Son and by extension the Holy Spirit also are God in the fullest sense of the word, Calvin not only attacked all forms of Origenism [subordinationism], but also the Sabellianism [modalism] latent in the Western tradition.”73 In Origenism, persons have priority over nature; in Sabellianism, nature has priority over persons, but we affirm the reality of persons and the one nature together.74 Further, Calvin emphasized that the Father, Son, and Spirit are not just relations but persons while also underscoring that they are persons in relation. To know one person is to know something about the others. “It was on this principle that Calvin and the other Reformers rejected the conventional division of labour within the Godhead,” writes Bray, “according to which the Father is Creator, the Son is the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is the Sanctifier of the people of God.” This view, criticized by Calvin, was semi-Sabellian, “because it treated the persons as channels for the threefold activity of God,”75 more than three persons working in tandem.
Although Colin Gunton goes too far in reading Calvin’s formulation as an explicit repudiation of Augustine in favor of the East, he correctly surmises that the Reformer’s views represent an advance in Western Trinitarian theology, particularly in his “concern for the particularity of the persons” and their distinct agency in the economy of grace.76 Gunton is justified in concluding that Calvin recognized the revolutionary insight of the Cappadocian treatment of hypostasis (person) and wished that this had received greater appreciation and attention in Western theology.77
For Calvin, Bray notes, the divine persons work together yet differently in every external work: “Father: beginning; Son: arrangement; Spirit: efficacy.”78 This helps to avoid the pitfalls of both Eastern (subordinationist) and Western (modalistic) leanings. Formulas, such as this one, are replete in these systems of Protestant orthodoxy. Interestingly, Luther’s important pupil Martin Chemnitz pointed out that Paul’s doxology in Romans 11:36 (“From him and through him and to him are all things”) was explicitly Trinitarian, each clause referring to a different person of the Godhead.79 Calvin writes,
It is not fitting to suppress the distinction that we observe to be expressed in Scripture. It is this: to the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of all that activity. Indeed, although the eternity of the Father is also the eternity of the Son and the Spirit, since God could never exist apart from his wisdom and power, and we must not seek in eternity a before or an after, nevertheless the observance of an order is not meaningless or superfluous, when the Father is thought of as first, then from him the Son, and finally from both the Spirit.80
Essences do not enter into relationships, but the divine persons who share that essence do. We are addressed, judged, redeemed, and raised to everlasting life by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, who are one God.
In evaluating the common analogies employed in the East and the West, Calvin also reminded his readers to avoid speculations from human analogies projected literally and univocally in an attempt to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity.81 This is surely relevant in contemporary debates, as we will see. The key in the thinking of all these writers is that Calvin and later Reformed theology expressed dissatisfaction with Augustine’s psychological analogy, yet they were also eager to point out that the divine persons are not persons in exactly the same sense as human beings.82 Our terminology is important only insofar as it preserves us from confusion and error. Nevertheless, let us not speculate beyond the simple formula, “one essence, three persons,” Calvin says.83 “Here, indeed, if anywhere in the secret mysteries of Scripture, we ought to play the philosopher soberly and with great moderation…. Let us then willingly leave to God the knowledge of himself.”84 However “persons” can be appropriately applied to both God and humans, we will never know exactly where the analogy breaks down—but it does.85
Socinianism (forerunner of Unitarianism) sowed the seeds of Protestant defection, coming to full flower in the Enlightenment. Once religion is reduced to that which may be known by universal reason, morality, or experience, the Trinity can hardly be considered an essential dogma. According to Kant, “The doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, has no practical relevance at all, even if we think we understand it; and it is even more clearly irrelevant if we realize that it transcends all our concepts. Whether we are to worship three or ten persons in the Deity makes no difference.”86 According to Schleiermacher, since theology is reflection on pious experience, and we do not experience the Trinity, “Our faith in Christ and our living fellowship with him would be the same” without it.87 Alar Laats does not overstate the matter when he judges that “the reduction of the role of Christ to a moral teacher in the liberal theology of the [nineteenth] century happened because of the eclipse of the doctrine of the Trinity.”88
It was Hegel who first provoked renewed attention to the Trinity with his philosophy of “Spirit” and history, drawing significantly on the combined influences of Joachim of Fiore’s Trinitarian historicism and the radical pantheistic mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme. However, it was not so much the historic doctrine itself that interested him but the use to which it could be put in a speculative ontology of being-as-becoming. Since then, mainline Protestantism, especially in the wake of Karl Barth, has experienced a revival of interest in Trinitarian theology that is as evident in recent Roman Catholic theology. At the same time, this revival has reignited historical debates concerning the unity of essence and plurality of persons. In many respects, contemporary debates in Trinitarian theology reflect the legacy of Barth and Hegel.
Karl Barth’s radical rethinking of the entire liberal trajectory included a profound recovery of interest in the Trinity, but he has been criticized in the recent revival of Trinitarian reflection for so emphasizing God’s absolute subjectivity in self-revelation as to undermine the genuine plurality of persons. By Moltmann and others, the fault for this alleged tendency in Barth is credited to an allegedly modalistic tendency in Augustine and the Western tradition more generally, as well as to a modern concept of person inherited from German idealism.89
In Barth’s section in Church Dogmatics where he elucidates what it means to say that God is personal, he insists that the only God with whom we have to do is this triune God.90 Allegations of modalism on the basis of Barth’s preference for modes of being over persons are historically untenable. Although the terms sound similar, mode of being (as a synonym for person) has frequently been used in Western theology in opposition to modalism.91 At the same time, Barth does tend to collapse the persons into the essence in his thinking.92 Barth’s adoption of Augustine’s definition of the Trinity as “a threefold repetition” or a “threefold way of being” is a marvelous way of indicating the unity of the divine essence, but also like Augustine, Barth marginalizes the distinctness of the personal properties.93
Where Barth sounds more explicitly modalistic is in the way he defends his reticence to adopt the term persons: in modern thinking, he said, persons connotes an individualistic conception that cannot fail to imply tritheism. He seems to suggest that if person meant what it did in premodern theology, we could speak of three persons, but given the modern connotations, we cannot.94 Barth’s emphasis on the I-Thou relation that obtains between God and humanity is not as thoroughly developed with respect to the intratrinitarian life. Not only a plurality of Gods, but “a plurality of individuals … within the one Godhead,” is to be denied, according to Barth. “The name of the Father, Son and Spirit means that God is the one God in threefold repetition … The truth that we are emphasizing is that of the numerical unity of the essence of the ‘persons,’ when in the first instance we employ the concept of repetition to denote the ‘persons’ (emphasis added).”95 Rather, in the church doctrine “we are speaking not of three divine I’s, but thrice of the one divine I,” resting on the “identity of substance.”96
Whereas for the classical Reformed tradition each person derives his deity from himself but his personal existence from the Father, for Barth the latter is again collapsed into the former:
As God is in himself Father from all eternity, he begets himself as the Son from all eternity. As he is the Son from all eternity, he is begotten of himself as the Father from all eternity. In this eternal begetting of himself and being begotten of himself, he posits himself a third time as the Holy Spirit, i.e., as the love which unites him in himself.97
Largely in reaction to Barth and Rahner, but sweeping Augustine and Western theology generally into its critique, the theological pendulum has swung toward emphasizing the three persons over the one essence. The most enthusiastic advocate of plurality today is Jürgen Moltmann, who challenges Karl Rahner’s claim that tritheism is the greatest danger and holds Barth and Rahner up as evidence for the more perennial Western threat of modalism.98 Moltmann’s critique of classical Trinitarian formulations is part of his more general challenge to classical theism. He has referred to his view as “trinitarian panentheism” or social trinitarianism.99 With this trajectory, a more Hegelian Trinitarian ontology can be detected even among some of Barth’s own students.
Strangely (given the Jewish roots of Christian monotheism), Moltmann argues that the problems with classical monotheism begin with Aristotle. From the “one God” to the “one emperor” (Alexander the Great), the “monarchical structure” of the cosmos leads to despotism all the way down the ladder. Monotheism also gave rise to patriarchalism and the subjugation of the body to the soul.100 Moltmann’s aim is to articulate a social doctrine of the Trinity (as divine community) that can become the basis for a democratic socialism that encompasses all of creation. On Moltmann’s reading, the East and West had a monarchical conception of God, whether the monarchy of the Father or that of the one essence, respectively, and even in Rahner and Barth the three persons are subordinated to the lordship of the one God through his self-revelation.101 These approaches have strengthened the basis for domination and passivity. Instead of starting with “the external lordship of God,” according to Moltmann, we should start from “the internal community of God.”102
Although he praises the Cappadocians for creating space for the concept of person, Moltmann also applauds Boethius for his definition of person, which—in refusing to reduce person to social roles—opened the door to the human rights tradition in Western political thought.103 Richard St. Victor also receives high marks in Moltmann’s account.
Nevertheless, “It was Hegel who carried this line of thought one step further: personal being (Personsein) means to dispose of oneself to others and to come in others to oneself. This deepening of the concept of relationships in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity can lead to an understanding of the social character (Sozialität) of the human person.”104 The Western individualism that makes Barth and Rahner wary of referring to the divine “persons” could have been avoided had God been understood in Trinitarian rather than theistic terms. So the same history leading to the modern concept of person that made Barth wary of the term in relation to the Trinity makes Moltmann attracted to it.
What then is the unity of the persons? Appealing to John of Damascus, Moltmann posits that the unity consists of the perich#x014D;rēsis (mutual indwelling) of the persons.105 However, as with many of his appeals to the Eastern tradition, Moltmann fails to recognize the complete solidarity of East and West regarding the unity of the Godhead in essence. Where Moltmann substitutes perich#x014D;rēsis (mutual intercommunion) for essential unity, he fails to recognize that for the Eastern as well as Western theologians perichōrēsis presupposed this unity of essence. In part, he is motivated by a concern to see the Trinity as an open society that draws creatures into its perichoretic fellowship: “The divine Trinity is so inviting and so strong that the divine life reflects itself in true human community and takes human community up into itself, ‘that they may be all one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us [John 17:21].’”106
Social trinitarianism, especially as advocated by Moltmann and Richard Swinburne, has been widely criticized by patristics scholars for misrepresenting the views of the Christian East (particularly the Cappadocian fathers). For example, Sarah Coakley has offered a thorough rebuttal of social-trinitarian interpretations of these theologians.107 “In point of fact, Gregory of Nyssa is closer to the Latin tradition than to social trinitarianism.”108 While social trinitarianism offers at crucial points a useful therapy against modalism, its denial of the unity of the Trinity in the substance or essence that they share in common is exegetically and ecumenically untenable. No less forcefully than Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus declared, “When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For Godhead is neither diffused beyond these, so as to bring in a mob of gods; nor yet is it bounded by a smaller compass than these, so as to condemn us for a poverty stricken conception of deity; either Judaizing to save the monarchia, or falling into heathenism by the multitude of our gods.”109
According to William Alston, “Moltmann is setting up false dichotomies”—either perichōrēsis or a single substance. “This view is based either on a gratuitous insistence on a homogeneity of substance (gratuitous because not required by the category of substance itself), or on taking the unity of divine substance as an ‘addition’ to the ‘fellowship’ of the Father, Son, and Spirit.”110 The fact is that Nyssa and the rest did not see things in this way. The two fit together just fine.
More fundamentally, Moltmann’s view surrenders the first half of the Trinitarian formula, “one in essence,” in his effort to project what he considers to be an ideal society (democratic socialism) onto the Godhead.111 However, instead of correlating a robust Boethian definition of persons with an equally robust affirmation of essential unity, Moltmann dispenses with the latter. Instead of saying that God is one in essence and three in persons, he says, we should think of “three persons, one community.”112 The unity of God subsists neither as “homogeneous substance nor as identical subject.”113
The unity of the divine tri-unity lies in the union of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, not in their numerical unity. It lies in their fellowship, not in the identity of a single subject The fellowship of the disciples with one another has to resemble the union of the Son with the Father. But not only does it have to resemble that trinitarian union; in addition it has to be a union within this union (emphasis added).114
In that last sentence, the specter of univocity is once again raised. As a consequence, “we must dispense with both the concept of the one substance and the concept of the identical subject. All that remains is: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the three Persons with one another, or: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the triune God.”115 “God,” thus understood, is a community rather than an essential unity. “If the unity of God is not perceived in the at-oneness of the triune God, and therefore as a perichoretic unity, then Arianism and Sabellianism remain inescapable threats to Christian theology.” In this definition, Moltmann is clearly motivated by his presupposition that whatever this unity is, it must be the kind of unity that can be shared with creatures univocally. Only this can sustain “the concept of a unity that can be communicated and is open.”116 Understandably, then, the ecumenical doctrine of God’s essential unity must be found wanting. The “triune God” is for Moltmann merely the community of three divine beings.117
Having offered a biblical-theological interpretation and engaged historical formulations, I will suggest two guidelines for systematic-theological reflection on the Trinity.
At the risk of oversimplifying, the East favors the analogy of a family—of course, a patriarchal family with the Father as its source. If taken univocally, this analogy would lead to tritheism. The same is true of the Cappadocian analogy of Peter, James, and John as three persons (hypostases) who share the same human essence (ousia). However, the Cappadocians were very clear about the danger of univocal definitions. Often lacking this kind of reserve, some contemporary Trinitarian theologies treat analogies as univocal definitions. Instead of allowing the reality of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to transform our concept of persons, Barth rejects the term person because of what it means in modern anthropology. Similarly, Moltmann takes the Cappadocian analogy literally while rejecting the Cappadocian affirmation of essential unity.
In adopting an analogical approach to divine and human persons, we must also recall that creatures are analogical of God rather than vice versa. As Athanasius reminds us, God’s fatherhood is not an analogy of human relations, but vice versa.118 Therefore, we cannot begin with our concept of ideal human personhood or society. Augustine’s psychological analogy played too great a role in the development of his Trinitarian thinking, but he still held to the ecumenical formula. Moltmann’s political analogies, however, lead him to deny it. In The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Moltmann criticizes Barth and Rahner for surrendering the Trinity to the image of “the absolute, identical subject,” just as monarchical monotheism in Christian antiquity had been the product of an imperial hierarchicalism with one ruler.119 Aside from his controversial genealogy of this theory, Moltmann’s own projection of an ideal society of democratic socialism onto God is even more explicit.120
As in his treatment of God’s attributes, Moltmann’s discussion of the Trinity exhibits impatience with the incomprehensibility of God. “To talk about ‘the mystery of the Trinity’ does not mean pointing to some impenetrable obscurity or insoluble riddle,” Moltmann insists.121 Robert Jenson expresses the same impatience with mystery.122 As God’s supposed incomprehensibility and aseity give way to the clear and distinct idea of God, we are at last able to recognize the kind of God that Moltmann has identified. Thus, there is little need for analogical provisos.
The most obvious point at which the doctrine of analogy is dissolved in Trinitarian thinking is with respect to the relationship between the immanent and economic trinities, which is basically the same as the distinction between God-in-himself and God-in-relation to us. It is one thing to say that the God who reveals himself in his external relations in the world is the same God who exists in the mystery of the internal relations of the Godhead, and quite another to say that this revelation is exhaustive or univocal. Here, as in all of our thinking about the Trinity, there are two dangers to be avoided: (1) the immensely popular move of simply collapsing the immanent into the economic Trinity (encouraged by Barth and many of his students) and (2) the tendency to allow for a contradiction between the hidden and revealed God (sometimes evident in Luther’s Bondage of the Will). We are on safer ground in saying that the revelation of the Trinity in the economy truly reveals the immanent Trinity (contra equivocity) but is always analogical rather than univocal.123
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit do not differ in their divine essence and attributes. However, there are also personal attributes that cannot be shared. For example, the Son cannot be eternally spirated (see “Reformed Contributions to Trinitarian Reflection,” pp. 288–94); neither the Father nor the Spirit can be begotten. The Son cannot be the origin of the Godhead, and the Spirit cannot be the incarnate Word. The danger of modalistic habits of thinking emerges when we correlate the Father with creation, the Son with redemption, and the Spirit with the new birth. Rather, in every external work of the Godhead, the Father is always the source, the Son is always the mediator, and the Spirit is always the perfecting agent.
In my view, John Zizioulas and Colin Gunton overstate the variance between the Cappadocians (East) and Augustine (West) and in the process require a relational concept of person that is susceptible to criticism, at least with regard to human persons.124 However, their concerns with Augustine’s tendency to reduce persons to relations instead of thinking in terms of persons-in-relation seem valid and significant. In the Cappadocian development, as Gunton relates, “The persons are therefore not relations, but concrete particulars in relation to one another.”125 “When we look at Augustine’s treatment of the topic, it becomes evident that he has scarcely if at all understood the central point.” Like Calvin, Gunton concludes that part of it is conceptual: “It is difficult for [Augustine] to understand the meaning of the Greek hypostasis. One reason is that he can make nothing of the distinction so central to Cappadocian ontology between ousia and hypostasis: ‘I do not know what distinction they wish to make’ (v.10).” As a consequence, “he had prepared the way for the later, and fateful, definition of the person as a relation.”126 This is fateful, of course, because it easily reduces the Father to “fatherhood” and the Son to “sonship” and leaves little place for the Holy Spirit—What is his relation other than being a “bond of love"?127
Admittedly, the term person has problems—as all analogies do, particularly when they are predicated on the divine mystery; hence, the frequent preference for subsistence, as in Aquinas and, if forced to choose, Calvin.128 In employing the term person, however, in relation to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, we are in no way bound to a Boethian definition (“an individual nature of a rational essence”) any more than we are to the more obscure concept of persona (“character” or “mask”) taken from the Roman stage.129 There is also no reason (pace Barth) to avoid “person” because of modern assumptions of autonomous individualism.
Again, we must answer that question not by referring to a priori concepts of personhood drawn from our own interpretation of human personhood or ideal community but by attending to the actual history in which the divine persons are revealed. Whatever questions may be raised in connection with human personhood, it seems clear enough from Scripture that the persons of the Godhead are persons-in-relation, not merely persons-as-relations. It is not simply that begetting, being begotten, and being spirated are essential to their identity, but that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are essential to each other’s identity.
Along with their unity in essence and activities, each is an unsubstitutable person who lives and acts differently. This difference never provokes opposition, but love, because each person has something different to bring to the intratrinarian relationship and extratrinitarian works. The Father not only knows his fatherhood from the Son; his person as such is defined by this other who addresses him. Much different from human personhood, the first person’s being the Father of the Son is a necessary rather than contingent aspect of his existence. Precisely because each person is different (i.e., possesses incommunicable properties), each knows himself in and through the other. Not even the Father knows himself as Father apart from the Son through the Spirit.
Furthermore, biblical revelation identifies each of these persons as a thinking, willing, and active agent. Nothing exhibits this fact more than the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) made between the divine persons in eternity, which is presupposed in the way that Jesus speaks (especially in John’s gospel) of his having been given a people by the Father who are and will be united to him by the Spirit after his departure. Although all three persons are mutually active in every external work of the Godhead, they are active differently. The Father is the originating agent, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit brings about the intended effect. In fact, it is precisely this individuation of the persons that Barth mentions as his chief objection to this eternal covenant of redemption formulated in Reformed theology: “Can we really think of the first and second persons of the triune Godhead as two divine subjects and therefore as two legal subjects who can have dealings and enter into obligations one with another? This is mythology, for which there is no place in a right understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity…. God is one God, … the only subject, … the one subject.”130 Even more than in Augustine’s formulation, Barth’s raises the question as to whether the Trinity is not only one God but one person (i.e., subject).
Renewed attention to the distinction between essential attributes and personal properties, a suspicion of surrendering analogical mystery to univocal projections, and the expectation that the reality of the Trinity in covenant history will provoke revisions of our “unbaptized” philosophical categories remain crucial aids in our Trinitarian reflection.
With the filioque debate (see also “East-West Tensions,” p. 284) the subtle differences between the East and the West opened into a formal schism. From ekporeuomai, the term procession refers to the mode by which the Spirit is related to the Father (the Greek view) or to the Father and the Son together (the Latin view). With the ecumenical consensus of East and West, the First Council of Constantinople (381) added to the creed agreed on at Nicea (325) the following phrase concerning the Holy Spirit (taken from Jn 15:26): “the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.” This is why the Nicene Creed is formally called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. However, when Visigothic Spain renounced Arianism and embraced catholic Christianity, the Council of Toledo (589) added to the last clause (“who proceeds from the Father”) the words “and the Son.”131 Eventually, however, the filioque clause (“and the Son”) became widely popular in the West, provoking condemnation by Patriarch Photius I of Constantinople in 864. After Benedict VIII included the filioque for the first time at Mass in Rome (1014), the Western church adopted the amended text—and this was a major cause of the East-West schism in 1054. In spite of deeply entrenched divisions and mutual condemnations, remarkable gains have been made in ecumenical discussions in the last half century on this question.
Before the acrimonious history following the Council of Toledo, Western theologians (such as Augustine) could say that the Spirit takes his origin from the Father as principle (principalis) of the Godhead, even as Cyril of Alexandria could argue (against the Nestorians) that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.132 In fact, Greek fathers from Epiphanius to as late as Cyril of Alexandria referred to the Spirit’s procession from the Father and the Son.133 However, the introduction of the filioque clause at Toledo brought to a head the deeper divisions between the East and West over the monarchy of the Father that we have already explored. More than Augustine, Thomas Aquinas developed a strict doctrine of the Western filioque.134
While Calvin’s interest in patristic sources has long been recognized, it has become customary in recent decades to recruit him as a witness for the prosecution against Augustine and in defense of the East.135 With good reason, Calvin believed that a clear distinction between the essence that each person shares from himself and the persons that are generated by the Father helps us to avoid ontological subordination and modalism simultaneously. “In this sense the opinions of the ancients are to be harmonized,” he suggests, “which otherwise would seem … to clash.”136 Calvin eagerly affirms that “in the Father is the beginning and source,” but of the persons rather than of the essence.137 A little later, Calvin adds, “For even though we admit that in respect to order and degree the beginning of divinity is in the Father, yet we say that it is a detestable invention that essence is proper to the Father alone, as if he were the deifier of the Son.”138 So the Father “is the beginning of deity, not in the bestowing of essence …, but by reason of order.”139 “Thus [the Son’s] essence is without beginning; while the beginning of his person is God [the Father] himself.”140 This line of argument was followed by later Reformed theology.
To the extent that the East affirms that the essence does not beget and is not begotten or spirated—that essence simply refers to something capable of bearing certain attributes—it avoids ontological subordination. The essence is not a person. Although the Cappadocians insisted on the Father (a person) rather than the essence as the source of the Godhead, they rejected any suggestion that the essence (or substance) is caused.141 However, while affirming the Father as the source (principium) of the persons, Reformed theologians have been wary of causal language applied to either the essence or the persons. For example, seventeenth-century theologian Herman Witsius argued that while the East’s intentions were sound, “This language of causation … is ‘inaccurate,’ not to mention ‘harsh, indistinct, and unscriptural.’”142 Especially given the fact that Scripture identifies the Son as the Word, and the Spirit is associated with engendering the effect of that Word, communicative categories seem more judicious than causal ones in considering the intratrinitarian relations.
On the filioque question directly, the Reformed orthodox continued to defend the Western position. Calvin reminded readers of the passages in which the third person is identified in the scriptures as both the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Christ.143 Besides having the original version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed on their side, the Greeks concentrated on John 15:26, where Jesus says that the Spirit is sent from the Father.144
Although Barth was a staunch defender of the filioque, it is interesting that some of his leading students have rejected it largely out of consideration of this key verse.145 Departing from Barth’s conclusion, they nevertheless do so in faithfulness to his strict identification of the economic and immanent Trinities. Yet, as John Owen noted in the seventeenth century, these passages in John’s gospel reveal the economic rather than the immanent Trinity—the work of the divine persons in redemption rather than their ontological relations.146 In my view, not much is gained by either side of the controversy from these key biblical passages for just this reason. The same is true of passages in Paul (Ro 8:9; Gal 4:6). At the end of the day, it does not seem that the controversy can be settled by proof texts but by more fundamental and general exegetical assumptions concerning the basis for the divine unity. The complicated issues involved in this debate should not be lightly dismissed. Nevertheless, I share the judgment of Kallistos of Diokleia that the filioque question, by itself, does not threaten the ecumenical consensus.147
1. A good example is the marvelous integration of covenant theology and the doctrine of the Trinity in Douglas F. Kelly, Systematic Theology: The God Who Is: The Holy Trinity (Ross- shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2008).
2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation (ed. John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 2:260.
3. Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 362. “Paul even invokes the classic covenant formula, ‘I will be their God, and they shall be my people,’ when admonishing the Christians to lead a holy life separate from unbelievers (2Co 6.17),” Childs notes.
4. Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 150.
5. Childs, Biblical Theology, 363: “In Heb 1:8 he is identified with the ‘God’ (theos) of Ps 45:7. He is ‘Lord’ (kyrios) in Ro 10:8-13 with reference to Dt 30:14. He is the ‘first and last’ of Isa 44:6 in Rev 1:17; the ‘I am He’ of II Isaiah in Jn 8:28, and the ‘one who is and was and who is to come’ of Rev 1:8 with an allusion to Ex 3:14.”
6. Childs, Biblical Theology, 363–64.
7. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 98.
8. Gordon Fee, God’s EmpoweringPresence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994).
9. Gordon Fee, “Paul and the Trinity,” in The Trinity (ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 49.
10. Ibid., 62.
11. Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).
12. On the link between Christology and worship in early Christianity, see Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
13. For a superb treatment of these early developments, with particular attention to the ways in which the tradition redefined the language that it borrowed, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).
14. John Zizioulas, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution,” in Trinitarian Theology Today (ed. Christoph Schwöbel; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 52–53.
15. Aristotle defines substance (ousia) in chapter 5 of his Categories. Numerous unnecessary problems in contemporary theology result from erroneous conceptions of substance or essence. Often, it is assumed that a substance is a particular “stuff,” but the term itself is much more limited and less metaphysically freighted. For an outstanding definition and its use in Trinitarian theology, see William P. Alston, “Substance and the Trinity,” in The Trinity (ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins), 179-202.
16. Bray, Doctrine of God, 127: “Origen, as a Platonist, had believed that an ousia which existed in one hypostasis could reproduce itself in a second, or even in a third…. Arius, however, was an Aristotelian who believed that if it was necessary to use a different name to describe an object, that object had to be a different thing (ousia).” See also Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversity, 318 -381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988).
17. Quoted from Arius’s poem “Thalia,” in Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 102.
18. Main lines of modalistic anti-Trinitananism can be discerned in the teaching of Michael Servetus (sixteenth century), Emanuel Swedenborg (eighteenth century), Friedrich Schleiermacher (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries), and Oneness Pentecostals in our own day.
19. Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 9. As Gunton observes, the Aristotelian point motivated the Arian objection, namely, “that it violates sacred and traditional ontology and divides up the being of God…. By insisting, to the contrary, that God is eternally Son as well as Father, the Nicene theologians introduced a note of being in relation. Such is the impact of the doctrine of the incarnation on conceptions of what it is to be.” Note that “being in relation,” not being as relation, was the patristic doctrine of the East as well as the West.
20. This formula first appears in chapter 2 of Tertullian’s AgainstPraxeas, NPNF2, 3:598. Furthermore, the fact that Ter- tullian was an early Latin theologian shows the danger in making sharp East-West antitheses.
21. Zizioulas, “Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 46: “This modalistic interpretation made it impossible to understand how stories require us to believe. It would also make it impossible for the Christian to establish a fully personal dialogue and relationship with each of the three persons of the Trinity.”
22. Zizioulas, “Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 46. By the way, the narrative thus far at least rules out the widely assumed antithesis between the East and the West, which Zizioulas encourages. Not only Jerome, and to a lesser extent Augustine, but Origen and Athanasius, too, just assumed the identity of ousia and hypostasis—even as, in the latter case, the goal was to refute subordinationism and Arianism. Furthermore, as even Zizioulas 23 notes here, hypostasis had been regarded as synonymous with prosōpon by both Tertullian and Hippolytus. While the distinction between ousia and hypostasis would clear a path away from Arianism, and the refusal to identify hypostasis with prosōpon would offer a way out of modalistic tendencies, these are for the most part generational rather than geographical developments.
23. See, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods,” To Ablabius, in NNF2, 5:330–36.
24. Basil, St. Basil the Great on the Holy Spirit (Popular Patristic Series; Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 39.
25. Ibid., 41.
26. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40: The Oration on Holy Baptism, ch. 41, in NPNF2, 7:375.
27. For a sympathetic, well-researched interpretation of Augustine’s Trinitarian thinking, see esp. Michel René Barnes, “Rereading Augustine’s Theology of the Trinity,” in The Trinity (ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins), 145–76.
28. This has long been a standard critique by the Christian East and has been elaborated more recently by John Zizioulas, but among the many contemporary advocates of this position in the West, see especially Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. For a helpful counterargument, see J. Thompson, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
29. See Augustine, The Trinity (The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation; trans. Stephen McKenna; Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1963), 45.
30. 30. Ibid., 464.
31. Boethius, De trinitate, in Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy (trans. S. J. Tester, H. F. Stewart, and E. K. Rand; Loeb Classical Library 74; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973). Cf. L. W. Geddes, “Person,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al.; New York: Encyclopedic Press, 1913), 11.
32. Zizioulas, “Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 58.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 59.
35. Augustine, The Trinity 6.5.7. In the twelfth century, Richard of St. Victor modified Boethius’s definition of person in a more emphatically individualistic direction: “something that exists through itself alone, singularly, according to a rational mode of existence.” He also concluded that God existed in three persons in order for there to be a third person for the Father and the Son to love and to be the bond of their love (On the Trinity, in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham [ed. Eugene R. Fairweather; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956], 330). Therefore, the more individualistic definition of person and the tendency to treat the Spirit as a bond of love rather than a full partner within the intratrinitarian exchange became more pronounced through Richard of St. Victor. The Father and the Son are givers, but the Spirit is the gift they share in common.
36. Tertullian, Against Praxeas, in NPNF2, 4:599: “But as for me, who derive the Son from no other source but from the substance of the Father …”; “I believe the Spirit to proceed from no other source than from the Father through the Son.”
37. Tertullian was just as able in distinguishing ousia and hypostasis in Latin (essentia and persona). Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo were united in affirming the plurality of persons as well as the unity of essence, just as Origen in the East and Jerome in the West both had difficulties making these connections.
38. “I do not know what distinction they wish to make,” Augustine conceded in The Trinity (5.10).
39. Augustine, The Trinity 5.9 (PL 42, col. 917; subsequent references in this chapter are to this edition): tantamque vim esse eiusdem substantiae in Patre et Filio et Spiritu sancto, ut quidquid de singulis ad se ipsos dictur, non pluraliter in summar, sed singula- rieter accipiatur (“and the effect of the same substance in Father and Son and Holy Spirit is, that whatsoever is said of each in respect to himself, is to be taken of them, not in the plural in sum, but in the singular”).
40. Although Augustine did not indulge such speculations, it is his emphasis that may be discerned in extreme formulations such as Cornelius Van Til’s that God is both one in person and three in person, which John Frame supports in The Doctrine of God: A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2002), 228. According to classical Trinitarianism, God is personal but not “a person"; otherwise, there is either a fourth person or one person with three masks or appearances (i.e., modalism). Frame adds, “It is not evident to me why triunity should not be considered an attribute of God” (228). The main reason one might put forward is that it denies God’s simplicity and confuses persons with essence. The brilliance of the Cappado-cian revolution in Trinitarian formulation was that the Arian objection—namely, plurality in the divine essence (ousia)— no longer had any foundation because the plurality referred to the persons (hypostases) rather than to the essence. If we adopt Frame’s suggestion, the further insight from Reformed treatments of the distinction between essential attributes and personal properties is totally lost.
41. Augustine, The Trinity 10.18–20.
42. Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 44.
43. Ibid., 47-48.
44. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology; Vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 111.
45. John of Damascus, Expositio fidei 77.5–8, in Jenson, The Triune God, 112.
46. Manlion Simonetti, “Hilary of Poitiers and the Arian Crisis in the West,” in Patrology (ed. Angelo Di Berardino; Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1988), 4:33-43.
47. Simonetti, “Hilary of Poitiers,” 44.
48. Ibid.
49. On his elaboration of Boethius’s definition, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 3, q. 16, art. 12, ad 2um.
50. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.2.
51. Calvin writes (ibid., 1.13.5), “For he suspects poison lurking when three hypostases in one God are mentioned! … This would be true even if he spoke sincerely, rather than tried willingly and knowingly to charge the Eastern bishops, whom he hates, with unjust calumnies! Surely he shows little candor in asserting that in all profane schools ousia is nothing else but hypostasis, an opinion repeatedly refuted by common and well- worn usage. Augustine is more moderate and courteous, since even though he says that the word hypostasis in this sense is new to Latin ears, yet he leaves to the Greeks their manner of speaking so much that he gently bears with the Latins who had imitated the Greek phrase.”
52. Ibid.: “And Augustine’s excuse is similar [to that of Hilary]: on account of the poverty of human speech in so great a matter, the word ‘hypostasis’ had been forced upon us by necessity, not to express what it is, but only not to be silent on how Father, Son, and Spirit are three.”
53. B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Calvin and Augustine (ed. Samuel Craig; Philadelphia: P&R, 1956), 187-284, esp. 254.
54. Ibid., 282-84.
55. Ibid., 284. Regarding homoousios, see “The Problem of Plurality in God” (p. 280).
56. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Trinity and of the Godhead of the Holy Spirit: To Eustathius, in NPNF2, 5:338.
57. Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods,” in NPNF2, 5:334.
58. Ibid., 5:336.
59. John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 130, emphasis original. I am grateful to Brian Hecker for providing this reference.
60. Theodore Beza believed that generation equals communication of essence (see Muller, PRRD, 4:258-59). In other words, if the Father communicates the person, then he communicates the essence. “The Son,” Beza said, “is of the Father by an ineffable communication from eternity of the whole nature” (Theodore Beza, Axiomat. de trinitate, Axiom 14, quoted in PRRD, 274). So too the Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard wrote, “The Greek doctors call only the Father autotheos kai autoousios, not because there is a greater perfection of essence in the Father than in the Son, but because he is agennētos [unbegotten] and a se ipso [has life in or from himself] and does not have deity through generation or spiration” (Johann Gerhard, as quoted in PRRD, 261).
61. M. F. Wendelin, as quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:261.
62. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.19.
63. Ibid., 1.13.17. While intending no parallels in terms of content, we can see the same tendency in Arius and Jerome that we find in Barth and Rahner, namely, to presuppose as givens certain philosophical definitions (such as nature and person) rather than challenge these time-honored usages by the sheer fact of the Trinity. Why should we either endorse or overreact against certain Trinitarian formulations too closely associated with idealism any more than we endorse or overreact against the Cappadocians in relation to their Platonist inheritance? The point is to find terminology that makes the point-and redefine it if necessary. We should allow the matter itself to burst the wineskins of usage.
64. Amandus Polanus, as quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:177.
65. Muller, PRRD, 4:178.
66. Ibid., 4:179. Similarly, John Owen says that the names Father, Son, and Spirit are “not diverse names of the same person, nor distinct attributes or properties of the same nature or being,” but real persons with “incommunicable properties.” “Thus the Trinity is not the union or unity of three, but it is a trinity in unity” (John Owen, as quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:194).
67. Edward Leigh, as quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:179.
68. Ibid.
69. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.6.
70. Zizioulas, “Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 49-50.
71. See Muller, PRRD, 4:253; cf. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.18.
72. Muller, PRRD, 4:253.
73. Bray, Doctrine of God, 201.
74. Ibid., 202.
75. Ibid.
76. Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 94. On the same page, Gunton adds, “In his discussion of the persons of the Trinity in Book I of the Institutes, John Calvin engages in a discussion with the Western tradition, calling in evidence the theology of Tertullian and Hilary of Poitiers against Jerome, and, indirectly, Augustine.” Besides the emphasis on the particularity of the persons, Gunton refers to Calvin’s “concern to avoid what we can fairly call individualism in a repeated denial of the loneliness and isolation of God, something Aquinas noted but did not develop.” It seems clear from this passage of the Institutes, however, that Calvin is actually trying to harmonize Augustine and the Eastern theologians rather than pit one against the other. It is really Jerome whom he targets as uncooperative in this respect.
77. Ibid., 94.
78. Bray, Doctrine of God, 203.
79. Martin Chemnitz, Loci theologici (1591) (trans. Jacob Preus; St. Louis: Concordia, 1989), 1:74-76.
80. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.18.
81. Ibid.: While we must not “suppress the distinction that we observe to be expressed in Scripture,” Calvin cautions moderation: “I really do not know whether it is expedient to borrow comparisons from human affairs to express the force of this distinction. Men of old were indeed accustomed sometimes to do so, but at the same time they confessed that the analogies they advanced were quite inadequate.”
82. On Calvin’s criticism of Augustine’s psychological analogy, see Institutes 1.13.18.
83. Ibid., 1.13.20.
84. Ibid., 1.13.21.
85. That which seventeenth-century divine Robert South said of the Socinians can easily be a warning to us all—that “all that they urge against a triple subsistence of the divine nature is still from instances taken from created natures, and applied to the divine” (Robert South, as quoted in Richard Muller, PRRD, 4:211).
86. Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni; trans. Allen W. Wood, George di Giovanni, et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 264.
87. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), 741; cf. Gerald O’Collins, “The Holy Trinity: The State of the Questions,” in The Trinity (ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins), 1–25.
88. Alar Laats, Doctrines of the Trinity in Eastern and Western Theologies: A Study with Special Reference to K. Barth and V. Lossky (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 160.
89. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 142.
90. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2, pt. 1, 268.
91. According to modalism, there is one mode of being with three personalities, but orthodoxy teaches three modes of being/subsistence sharing one essence.
92. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 1, 361. He can even speak of the Trinity as a “threefold way of being,” which at least echoes Augustine’s tendency to marginalize the distinct personal properties in favor of essential unity. His recurring emphasis on the absolute subjectivity of the one Lord, though not formally inaccurate, often displays a tendency toward investing the essence itself with personhood. “God reveals himself as Lord; in this statement we have summed up our understanding of the form and content of the biblical revelation”—and this in the section defining the Trinity. See similar expressions on pages 314 and 334.
93. Ibid., 334. This thesis, “reduced to its simplest form,” says Barth, is that “the threefold yet single lordship of God as Father, Son and Spirit, is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity.”
94. Ibid., 357: “What is called ‘personality’ in the conceptual vocabulary of the nineteenth century is distinguished from the patristic and medieval persona by the addition of the attribute of self-consciousness. This really complicates the whole issue.” Karl Rahner has also been singled out on the Catholic side as aiding and abetting the semimodalistic view of the Trinity, and for reasons similar to Barth’s. However, we do not have the space to interact with Rahner here.
95. Ibid., 350. Also on 353 he uses the formula repetitio aeter- nitatis in aeternitate.
96. Ibid., 351. Acknowledging that Protestant liberalism was basically modalistic (Sabellian), Barth nevertheless interpreted this as a reaction to tritheism, although it is difficult to identify anything like a resurgence of tritheism in this period. By appealing to “modes of being,” Barth neither rejects the propriety of using the term person nor simply by the phrase implies modalism (359-60). Whether he follows through on the claim consistently, Barth insists that the threeness is essential to the divine being.
97. Ibid., 483.
98. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 150, 174–76.
99. A nice summary of the position more fully developed elsewhere (especially in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God) is found in Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and Jürgen Moltmann, Humanity in God (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1983).
100. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 92–93.
101. Ibid., 94.
102. Ibid., 95.
103. Ibid., 97.
104. Ibid., 98. It is not exactly clear what Moltmann really thinks of Hegel. While he refers to him here as an important figure in the rise of a social understanding of personhood, he elsewhere writes, “Ever since Hegel in particular, the Christian Trinity has tended to be represented in terms of belonging to the general concept of the absolute subject: one subject—three modes of being” (17).
105. Ibid., 98.
106. Ibid. Included at this point is a painting by Giovanni Spague, “Trinity,” with its obvious tritheism, followed by several others of the same stripe.
107. See Sarah Coakley, “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” in The Trinity (ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins), 123- 44. Coakley, who specializes in the Cappadocian theologians, notes in comparing Gregory of Nyssa and the social trinitarians (particularly from the analytic school, such as Richard Swinburne), “Freer, and more instrumental, imagery for the divine ‘persons’ is thus also used evocatively by Gregory in his exegetical work, without any apparent concern for philosophical precision” (136). “Gregory is quite clear about the difference between human and divine ‘persons’ ….” He does not start with three; nor is it a “community” of “individuals” -"nor, incidentally, does it—on my reading—prioritize ‘person’ over ‘substance’ (a matter that has become polemical in the thought of John Zizioulas)” (137). In any case, Moltmann’s relation to the tradition is at best confusing, since he alternates between sweeping criticism and appropriation of the Eastern view. On the one hand, the Eastern view is plagued with monarchical (and patriarchal) analogies to the “one emperor, one king” ideology. On the other hand, throughout Humanity in God, he and coauthor Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel refer to the East’s view approvingly as “the social doctrine.” Such contemporary writers also misunderstand contemporary defenders of the Cappado-cian legacy, such as John Zizioulas (see Douglas Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas [London: Ashgate, 2007], 65).
108. Coakley points out that for Gregory of Nyssa, “the language of prosōpon used for the divine entities in the Trinity is best seen as analogical (and perhaps even metaphorical in its original coinage)” (” ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 140).
109. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 38:8, in NPNF2, 7:347.
110. Alston, “Substance and the Trinity,” 197. Similarly, Brian Leftow offers a cogent case for his conclusion that in spite of their qualifications, the various versions of social trinitarianism are finally tritheistic (“Anti Social Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity [ed. Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins], 232).
111. Jürgen Moltmann, “The Reconciling Power of the Trinity in the Life of the Church and the World,” in Triune God: Love, Justice, Peace (ed. K. M. Tharakan; Mavelikkara, India: Youth Movement of Indian Orthodox Church, 1989), 32: “The social doctrine of the Trinity is in a position to overcome monotheism in the concept of God and individualism in the doctrine of man, and to develop a social personalism and personalist socialism. That is important for the divided world in which we live and think.”
112. Moltmann-Wendel and Moltmann, Humanity in God, 96.
113. Ibid.
114. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 95-96.
115. Ibid., 150.
116. Ibid.
117. Parallels with Joachim of Fiore, whose views were condemned as tritheistic by the Fourth Lateran council, are apparent in Moltmann’s appeal to analogies of “the oneness of a ‘herd’ or of a ‘populace’” (Muller, PRRD, 4:35). Moltmann’s frequent appeals to Joachim confirm this impression.
118. Athanasius, Select Works and Letters, in NPNF2, 4:320.
119. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 139: “The primordial image of the ‘absolute subject’ in heaven corresponds to the modern perception of human subjectivity as regards nature and history; and the personal God in eternity corresponds to the bourgeois culture of personality. It is the absolute personality of God that makes man a person.”
120. As Ted Peters notes, although Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s teacher, it was not the philosopher but Alexander’s father Philip of Macedon who bequeathed the goal of a one-world empire with one king (Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993], 40–41). More importantly, Moltmann creates a speculative theology by projecting an ideal human society (The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 100 -101). In fact, his survey in Humanity in God opens with a reference to the correlation of anthropology and theology proper, citing Calvin’s opening to the Institutes. Already we see the importance of method: the tendency to see God and humans as mirrors of each other, along the lines of the imago dei, without establishing whether this is univocal or analogical.
121. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 161.
122. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 2:67.
123. I concur with Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 49. B. B. Warfield’s interpretation of Calvin is exactly right: “This much we know, he says, that God is what his works and acts reveal him to be; though it must be admitted that his works and acts reveal not his metaphysical Being but his personal relations–not what he is apudse, but what he is quoad nos” (Calvin and Calvinism [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931], 154).
124. See Harriet A. Harris, “Should We Say That Personhood Is Relational?” SJT 41, no. 2 (1998): 214–34. This is made especially problematic in Zizioulas’s construction, according to which the unbaptized are mere “biological individuals” (an ontologically “fallen” condition) and become “persons” (i.e., persons-in-relation) in baptism.
125. Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 39.
126. Ibid., 40.
127. Ibid., xxvii. At the same time, we must remember that Gunton’s laudable concern to give ontological status to the persons is precisely the reason why persons cannot be reduced to relations and why Boethius’s definition (correlated later with the term subsistence) had so much appeal. Nevertheless, with Zizioulas, Gunton believes that Boethius’s definition of person as “naturae rationabilis individua substantia, an individual substance of rational nature, is the heart of the troubles” (92).
128. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.2, 6.
129. T. F. Torrance points out, rightly I believe, that Boethius’s definition of person is also evident in Augustine, and together they anticipate the res cogitans of Descartes. See Torrance, 130. Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (ed. Robert T. Walker; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 214.
130. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, pt. 1, 65. He adds, somewhat cryptically, “The thought of a purely inter-trinitarian [sic] decision as the eternal basis of the covenant of grace may be found both sublime and uplifting. But it is definitely much too uplifting and sublime to be a Christian thought” (66).
131. Whether this was inserted as a further strike against Arianism or because of the copy available to them, the spread of this version of the Creed in Latin reached Rome. There, Pope Leo III affirmed the doctrinal point but rejected such changes to ecumenical creeds.
132. Augustine, The Trinity 15.25, 47: PL 42, 1094–95; on Cyril, see A. Maas, “Filioque,” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (ed. Robert C. Broderick; New York: Robert Appleton, 1909), 6:22.
133. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 1, 477, referring to Epiphanius, Ephraim, and Cyril of Alexandria.
134. See Augustine, The Trinity 14.27, 50. Also Aquinas, Summa theologica 1, q. 27, a. 3-4.
135. Cf. T. F. Torrance, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” CTJ 25, no. 2 (November 1990): 165–93. See, more recently, John Heywood Thomas, “Trinity, Logic, and Ontology,” in Trinitarian Theology Today (ed. Christoph Schwöbel; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 75, appealing to Calvin’s Institutes 1.13.18, 20, 24, 26. Thomas writes concerning Calvin’s formulation of the Trinity, “With his customary honesty and impatience with reductionist clarity he admits that he finds himself perplexed at points; but he nevertheless insists that the Father is the principium of the Godhead.” However, in the same section Calvin affirms the filioque.
136. Calvin, Institutes 1.13.19.
137. Ibid., 1.13.20.
138. Ibid., 1.13.24.
149. Ibid., 1.13.26.
140. Ibid., 1.13.25.
141. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 34-35.
142. Quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:254.
143. John Calvin, Commentary on Romans (Ro 8:9), as quoted in Muller, PRRD, 4:254.
144. See Theodore Stylianopoulos, “The Filioque: Dogma, Theologoumenon or Error?” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 31, nos. 3–4 (1986): 255–88.
145. Like Moltmann, Pannenberg rejects the filioque by appealing to passages that treat the economic subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, for example, in John 15:26 (Systematic Theology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991], 1:317).
146. John Owen, Works (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1966), 3:117.
147. Kallistos of Diokleia’s remarks are included in “The Father as the Source of the Whole Trinity,” by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Catholic International (January 1996), 36—49.