LEWIS AYRES
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:20 – 21)
“Faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.” (Lumen Fidei, 57)
I. INTRODUCTION
Trinitarian theology has a long, complex history and has stimulated some of the most philosophically deep and beautiful reflection in Western thought. The essays in this volume give some sense of that depth and beauty. But even as we find ourselves drawn into the fascinating conceptual structures and details of that tradition, we should not neglect to take a breath and remember where we begin and, I want to emphasize, to where we should constantly return. The language of trinitarian theology begins in the Scriptures, language and life of Israel, and then in the earliest Christians’ use of that Scripture, language and life as a resource for understanding what God had done and was doing in Christ. Classical trinitarian theology arose as a reflection on the Scriptures that those earliest Christians recognized and in the light of their own life in Christ.2 Even if one believes that the formulae and language of the church’s trinitarian faith are a gift enabling an ever truer comprehension of the Father who sent his Son and Spirit — as I do — we should not forget that these formulae and this language should also stimulate and shape our reading of the Scriptures.3
In this essay I have two goals. The first is to suggest some ways in which we may read our Scriptures in the light of classical trinitarian belief, both as part of our attempts to understand the Trinity itself, and to think about how trinitarian faith undergirds the whole complex of Christian faith. There are many ways of so doing, both in the sense that there are many ways in which one might construct such a reading and in the sense that there is a legitimate variety of trinitarian perspectives that one might creatively use. My own reading is the product of my own attention to the Scriptures, but it is also deeply informed by my research on patristic theology, and specifically Augustine. That it is so informed, however, should not make it seem somehow less “scriptural”!4 My second goal — and if the first provides something of the essay’s form, this second provides some key features of its content — is to reflect on the interrelationship between how we imagine the divine unity and how we reflect on Christ’s invitation for us to think about ways in which our existence may reflect that divine unity and indwelling.
II. SEEING AND NOT SEEING
We must to spend a little time thinking about the character of Scripture’s talk about God and about the modes of thinking to which it seems to invite us. What I have to say will probably make more sense at the end of my paper than at the beginning, but saying something at this point will be helpful.
The first eighteen verses of John’s gospel seem to tell a clear story. The Word who is also Life and Light is with God. John the Baptist was sent to witness to the light, and soon after, the light to which he had borne witness came into the world. Many did not recognize him for the light that he was, but those who did knew that this man was the Son of God, the Word, and they saw his glory. The story seems to be one of revelation: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship to the Father, has made him known.” The language of the Word becoming flesh seems to have as one of its main implications the Word becoming visible and known. But the language of visibility and invisibility is actually used here in a far more complex manner.
These few verses of John’s gospel parallel statements about the Word being made visible with statements that the Word was and remains curiously unseen. The Word came and yet was already here; the Word came and yet his own people did not receive him. What, then, does it mean to emphasize that the Word shines and cannot be extinguished? A clue is offered when verse 14 emphasizes that “we have seen his glory,” but who are we? Well, verses 11 – 12 are clear that although “his own . . . did not receive him,” to those who did so receive and believe, to these he has given “the right [power] to become the children of God.” The “we” mentioned in verse 14 seems to be those who have believed: only these can be said to have seen. The seeing that is, then, possible, is not the seeing we understand when we speak of all those with sight seeing that the sun rises or falls; this is a seeing that follows on from belief, and it is only ever analogous to the “seeing” of which we so easily speak.
The paradoxes and ambiguities of this seeing in faith are explored throughout John’s gospel. To take just one example, call to mind John 14. Chapter 13 focuses on Jesus’s washing of his disciples’ feet. But the chapter is framed by an emphasis on Jesus doing this because he knew the time had come for him to depart from the world. The theme is announced at the beginning of the chapter and ends with Peter asking, “Lord, where are you going?” (13:36). The answer he receives is that Peter cannot yet follow. It is this exchange that introduces chapter 14. Christ calls us not to be troubled, to calm our anxiety, and to have faith that while he will go where we cannot yet, he will return for us. But Christ does not only speak of a future bodily return at some distant point; in the middle of chapter 13 he speaks of sending the Spirit to lead us in love, and he speaks of our continuing to live because Christ continues to dwell in us. Here we have it again: going, hiding, and yet being present.
This theme recurs throughout this chapter. Thomas asks his Lord, “How can we know the way [to where you are going]?” (14:5). Jesus answers by saying, first, that he is “the way and the truth and the life,” and then immediately adding, “If you really knew me, you will know my Father as well” (14:7). When Philip, unsatisfied, pursues the point by saying, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us,” Jesus repeats his point: “Don’t you know me Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. . . . Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me?” (14:9 – 10). The true seeing that Christ recommends to Philip is a seeing-in-faith. Christ draws Philip to question his seeing in aid of a deeper seeing and knowing; that which is visible must now be known as a guide to that which lies within and beyond the visible. That which lies beyond and within is known to us through faith, and that faith has a clear content. To see Christ we must see him as the Word made flesh, as the Son of God who comes from his Father, as the one in whom the Father dwells and who dwells in the Father. Knowledge of the Trinity — although we will need to think about what we mean by knowledge here — is at the heart of the Christian’s grasp of who Jesus is.
In just a few verses Christ explains that he will come to anyone who loves him and will “show myself to him” (14:21). Once again the text pushes us to ask what it means for Christ to “show” himself when our seeing of him fails and he himself has also gone away. The answer Christ gives is simply that the Father and the Son will come and be in the one who loves. The manifestation of which Christ speaks, then, does not occur so much to someone but in them.
The character of our “seeing” of Christ thus should be shaped by the complexities of trying to know ourselves as indwelt by Father, Son, and Spirit. Jesus says to Philip in that wonderful Johannine irony, not only “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well,” but also “From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Central to the task of understanding Scripture’s speech about God is the task of understanding what is before us although we fail to see it, attention to why this is so, attention to how we may reform our vision so that we do see. We do not just “see” God in us; rather, the Johannine Christ calls us to consider in more complex ways the very task of seeing and understanding God. In the first place, we may recognize that the central task in any “seeing” of God is the reformation of the heart. In the second place, we must attend ever more closely to what it means for the existence of Father, Son, and Spirit to be unlike objects in the world. As we reflect on how it can be that the divine life indwells us, this truth (and the mysteriousness of God) is driven ever more deeply into our awareness. Then, in the third place, we must not fail to see that if Father, Son, and Spirit indwell us as individuals and as members of Christ’s body, we must divert our gaze also to the fruits of that indwelling, to the love of God shown in the body of Christ in the world.
This, then, is the character of the revealed Word: the paradox that what is made visible reveals and points toward the invisible. God’s revelation takes the form of an invitation into mystery. But that invitation is always in part an invitation to understand ourselves anew, to understand that Christ reveals the Father as the one who is in the Son, as the Son is in the Father — Christ reveals the mystery of the divine life — only to tell us that we have been indwelt by that life already, which thus gives a new character to our search for God.
III. PATTERNS OF NAMING
The language of faith, then, draws us toward the mystery of God and to the mystery of God’s presence in and to the Christian. But, within our search to know the divine life that is already in us, what can we say about the relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit? I want to begin by thinking a little about the manner in which Scripture speaks of those relationships. Allow me to turn to Romans 8, a text not normally noted as the important trinitarian witness that it is. Let me look, first, at something on the surface of the text, and then try to penetrate its depths a little more. Paul’s language here is, I take it, no accident — and even if we believe it to be so, we should hold that the Spirit’s presentation of it to us as canonical is not. And yet, that language is complex in the way that it speaks of three characters or actors in the story of our salvation. The theme of the chapter is announced at the beginning: through sending the Son for sin, and through enabling us to live in Christ, God has done what the law could not. Two themes are thus intertwined: God’s action in sending his Son and the character of life in Christ. Both of these themes are described in the same language, a language I think we can term “paradoxical.”
Romans 8:11 reads: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” How many characters are named here? There is one who raised Jesus, and there is also the Spirit of him who raised Jesus. If we look through the chapter as a whole we find this Spirit named sometimes as the “Spirit of,” and thus we might be tempted to understand it as a periphrastic expression, “the Spirit of Christ” being equivalent to “Christ’s spirit.” And yet, elsewhere in this chapter the Spirit is also presented as a distinct actor: the Spirit is that which leads some of us to be children of God; to live according to the Spirit is to set one’s mind on the things of the Spirit.
The picture is even more complex when we note that the Spirit is also named in the same chapter as “the Spirit of God” or “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead,” and as “the Spirit of Christ.” This ambiguity in the Spirit’s status is seen even more clearly when we bring into the conversation Gal 4:6: “Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ ” Here it is God or the Father who sends his Son’s Spirit into our hearts. The final ambiguity is that, going back to Romans 8, verse 10 speaks not of the Spirit of Christ being in us, but simply Christ. In the same way, at Gal 2:20, Paul famously asserts that “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
Thus, Romans 8 presents us with a paradox and an invitation. The paradox is that there seem to be three actors, each of whom plays a role in bringing the Christian to new life, often in overlapping ways. Some basic ordering of these agents is clear enough: God or Father appears to order the actions of Son and Spirit, but Son and Spirit act with a power that we think of as divine — the power to give life to the dead, for example. One of the most fundamental questions the text poses to us concerns how we speak of the Father’s self-gift to Son and Spirit and what it means for our understanding of the divine life that Son and Spirit possess the full reality of divine power.5 Throughout Romans 8, the text also plays with us. The relationship between Son and Spirit remains unclear, the same actions are accorded to both, and the relationship between the two is not codified but performed for us.
We might seek to dissolve these paradoxes by claiming simply that Paul himself did not clearly differentiate Son and Spirit, and that the linguistic complexity I have identified resulted from his confusion. In the first place, I am not convinced even as a historian that this explanation accounts for the evidence before us. But, in the second place, I think that we do not only read Scripture by attempting to uncover Paul’s intentions — we have this text given us through the Spirit, and its complexities are an invitation to us. In the third place, the invitations any one passage of Scripture puts before us become even more complex when we remember that we read a canon of texts together: the patterns that I have drawn out of this one text are then both complexified (because we see so many different vocabularies and nuances: the Son, for example, is also Word and Wisdom and Power and Light and Image and Glory and the Only-begotten), and they are rendered all the more central (because we see just how often they may be read from the text).
It is from reflecting on these invitations, reflecting on them in the light of our encounter with Christ and his Spirit, that doctrinal statements were borne. But these doctrinal terms and statements should be understood not only as summaries of biblical narratives, as rules for Christian speech (although these are two of the tasks they perform), but also as ways of stimulating our return to the matrices of terms and passages that they guard and organize. Working hard at what we mean when we say that Father, Son, and Spirit are of one “nature” is certainly good. Clarity in and care about our language should surely be valued by those to whom God has given minds. But, as I have indicated, I believe that such arguments should always be viewed as also parasitic and as gateways back to the terms and statements and passages that stimulated their appearance. Remembering that our formulae are signposts back to particular patchworks of texts, to particular configurations of scriptural invitations, may help to order all our speech and thinking appropriately toward God, toward a place where rational investigation must draw us only toward mystery. Doctrinal formulae enable articulation of what is revealed in rational terms, and they enable a certain clarity about and defense of what is revealed; but this does not mean that the divine mystery is a fog to be cleared, and the same formulae may also shape our ever deeper entry into that as it is revealed through the text of Scripture.
IV. THE HOLY SPIRIT WHO HAS BEEN GIVEN TO US
And so back to my question: What do all these invitations allow us to say about the divine life? There are many paths that we might take to answer this question, but let us for a few minutes follow just one — a path of reflection on the Spirit that opens to us some of the fundamental mysteries of the divine relationships.6
As may be obvious, if you want to talk about the Son or the Father, not only do you have a lot of scriptural discussion of what Father and Son do, but you also have a great deal of material that discusses who they are. Thus, the Son is Word, Wisdom, Power; he is the image of God’s substance. Sometimes we find lists of terms that seem to tell us mostly about the Son’s role in our salvation. The Son is, for example, “the way and the truth and the life.” But, still, each of these titles requires our reflection and thought, and each may help us learn a little more about him.
When we try to find the same sort of material about the Spirit, we find ourselves in some difficulty. John 4:24 tells us simply that “God is spirit,” and it is possible to take a great many of the New Testament’s references to “Spirit” to be simply references to Father or Son as divine. At the same time we find a lot of descriptions of what the Spirit does in the world, but none of these seem immediately to tell us who the Spirit is. Thus, for example, we know through Luke and Acts that the Spirit is at work. Above all, the Spirit makes it possible for people to understand God’s will and for them to prophecy by “filling” them. Just a few examples: close to the beginning of the gospel Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesies, telling all who can hear that John will “go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him” (Luke 1:67 – 80). When Joseph and Mary bring the infant Jesus to the temple, they encounter Simeon, to whom it was revealed “by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah” (2:26). Simeon goes to the temple “moved by the Spirit” (2:27) and prophesies when he encounters the infant.
When we look on into the book of Acts we continue to find the Spirit leading, instructing, and filling. Thus, in Acts 1:2, 7 – 8, Jesus has taught “through the Holy Spirit,” telling the disciples that they will be baptized with the Spirit and will receive from the Spirit the power to witness to Christ “to the ends of the earth.” In Acts 2, it is by being filled with the Holy Spirit that the apostles speak and are heard in many languages. All of these texts enable us to speak ever more clearly about one of the Spirit’s key roles and to see that the Spirit is different from Father and Son; but what do they enable us to say about the Spirit’s nature and the Spirit’s relationship to Son and Father?
Well, turn again to Romans. There we saw the Holy Spirit as that which is both distinct and given, and that which is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Christ. How else is the Spirit of Father and Son named? Romans 5:5 says that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” At the very least this text points us toward the idea that the Spirit is the one who gives us God’s love, but there may be more here — hidden in a question the text poses. The sentence actually breaks into two parallel halves: “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts” and “the Holy Spirit has been given to us.” Is the Spirit the love that is given and is that then the fount of love for God in our hearts?
We know that this Spirit gives life — we see that here and in other Pauline texts that speak of the Spirit as simply “life-giving” — and we know that through the giving of this Spirit we become lovers of God and of each other. We see it also in the community of those who received the Spirit in Acts: filled with the Spirit they are “one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32). Moreover, not only does the New Testament call God Spirit (John 4:24), but we know from 1 John 4:8 that “God is love.” The Spirit is God’s own Spirit, Christ’s Spirit, and the Spirit who is love drawing us into a communion of love. From the character of the Spirit’s mission do we learn of his eternal character? Theologians have for centuries believed so. Thus, when we seek to speak about the unity of Father and Son, a unity that can also be narrated as their sharing the same Spirit, we can say that the divine being is a communion brought about from eternity through the Father’s sharing of his being, his Spirit, his love with the Son, and the Son’s possessing as his own life the Spirit, who also shares the fullness of divinity, who himself gives life and blows where he chooses. The divine life and unity thus may be understood as an act brought about from eternity by the Father’s generation of the Son and spiration of the Spirit. We must of necessity give this act an order, a sequence, and yet we must also recognize that doing so should evoke of us a qualification or another story in which we insist that there is no time here; this is simply how God determines to be from eternity.7
Follow two steps. First, I have suggested elsewhere that Augustine comes to view the divine persons as identical with the intra-divine acts that Scripture predicates of them. The Son is a seeing of the Father — this is how we should read John 5:19. But the Son does not come to be a seeing of the Father subsequent to his generation; he is generated as a seeing of the Father. The Son is the Father’s Word, the Father speaking (as it were), but this is not a subsequent action — as if the Father thought and then decided to express what he had thought in a distinct Word. No, the Father from eternity speaks his Word and Wisdom. Speaking this Word and Wisdom is how the Father determines from eternity to be.8
Second, Augustine speaks of the Spirit being as a love who makes many into one. Here Augustine sees Acts 4:32’s account of the Spirit’s drawing the apostles together so that they are “one heart and mind” as enabling us to speak a little further about how the Spirit is love. Dramatically and yet hesitantly Augustine suggests that the Spirit from eternity is breathed as the one who makes Father, Son, and Spirit one. The Father generates the Son from eternity as one who loves the Father; he loves with the Father’s Spirit who is also his own Spirit, who is also the Spirit who possesses the fullness of divine knowledge and will. The act of breathing the Spirit is thus one with the generation of the Son; it is through the breathing of the Spirit that there is from eternity the divine communion. The act that is God is the act of generation and spiration. This account is certainly inchoate in Augustine — but it is there.
But once we begin to speak like this, we are inexorably drawn to confess that while we can and should base our speaking about the divine life in a personalist language of individual agents acting, this language is gradually rendered more and more opaque to our minds as we see the ways in which we must also talk of the persons “in” each other. The language that we thought we could grasp is seen to point toward a reality beyond the temporal and the spatial. It does so, to make the point again, because of the character of the divine love and unity. There is certainly a task here for the speculative reason, and yet there is also a need for that reason to recognize when the target of its gaze has receded beyond sight.9
Allow me here to venture a comment in this light on the sort of enterprise represented by Tom McCall’s paper in this volume. Tom offers a sophisticated and historically sensitive analytical account of the range of accounts of divine simplicity that one can find in patristic and medieval theology. He does so in order to isolate one that does not fall foul of those fairly common modern critiques of divine simplicity, which argue that the irreducibility of the persons (for example) shows the illogicality of arguing simpliciter that all things in God are identical. I salute his historical sensitivity, but I wonder if he — like a significant number of those who attempt to use analytical philosophical tools in this way — has paid sufficient attention to the way in which the language of divine simplicity is actually used in patristic theology (I make no claim here about medieval debates). For all late fourth- and early fifth-century pro-Nicene theologians I know who attempt some account of the divine unity as simple, it is important to end and surround our attempts to speak of the character and pattern of divine existence with confession of our failure to grasp the uniqueness of that existence.
Augustine, for example, seems to articulate a rather direct version of simplicity as identity, and he uses that notion as the context within which we should understand the divine act or acts I described above. And yet, as I have noted elsewhere, Augustine links his notion of simplicity as identity to an account — Neo-Pythagorean in origin — of divine unity as uniquely preceding and being the source of number. From this language and for theological reasons, he draws the assumption that while God calls us to reach out with our speculative reason, God also may be known as exceeding our attempts to use concepts univocally of him. The rules of identity and non-identity that we know are, in a way unknown to us, exceeded by the divine life. Thus one of the most fundamental functions of Augustine’s account of divine unity and simplicity is to serve in the trenches of our re-formation as an intellectual guerilla fighter against the pride that so easily affects that reason as it reaches toward the source of all rationality.10
V. THE STILL POINT
Exploring how the Scriptures speak to us about the Trinity is to follow a path that leads us from statements making use of temporal and material imagery, statements that we initially seem to grasp fairly easily, toward a recognition that such language points us toward a reality of mutual indwelling that escapes our mental grasp. The road leads, in another terminology, toward a “still point” whose beauty we can sense and whose necessity we can imagine, but which always alludes our intellectual grasp in this life. The language I use here comes from the first of T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Eliot uses this language to describe the true experience of beauty and time possible in the memory that has been schooled in the garden of earthly beauty and which has come to see — as far as we can — the nature of time’s movement. As we see the true beauty that is possible in the temporal world we inhabit, we recognize that the turning of the world draws us toward and stems from a point where all our categories are transcended. Thus, by analogy, as we come to grasp something of the divine indwelling and unity that is the divine life, we are seeing what shines within all the many different scriptural discussions of the various divine relations, within and between the various different terminologies used for Father, Son, and Spirit. Within here is an important word; we do not move beyond that language, we discover that to which it points. Eliot writes:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless . . .
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.11
The movement of the intellect toward awareness of this still point for the intellect contemplating Scripture’s speech about the divine life and unity is not, however, a movement toward a point at which we realize the futility of all our thought. It is not a movement that convinces us trinitarian theology is merely a fiction. It is, in fact, a movement that may shape the heart and the imagination toward an ever-deeper recognition of ways in which the trinitarian life lies within each of the actions Scripture attributes to Father, Son, and Spirit. Each of those titles and actions that Scripture attributes to Father, Son, and Spirit eventually draws us by a particular path toward this same still point. This is a movement in knowing and loving that the Spirit intends for us to follow as far as we may; this is a movement into knowing and into mystery that is intended when God addresses us in his Word.
As a further example of how important it is that we embrace this conceptual movement toward the still point of the divine nature, consider for a moment the Nicene insistence that Father, Son, and Spirit are of one will. For many advocates of recent “social” accounts of the Trinity, the one divine will is obviously opposed to there being three wills. To assume such an opposition is, I suggest, to miss the journey toward the still point taken by those Nicenes who most deeply reflect on this language.
Take, for example, an argument found in Basil of Caesarea.12 The Son truly exists as a distinct divine individual and hence he must will, and he must have the power to accomplish what he wills. Father and Son each must will, and they must each will from eternity and accomplish what they will. But any question concerning the Son’s life, the Son’s mode of existence is inseparable from his relationship to the Father. Basil draws a parallel: just as Scripture tells us that the Son draws his being from the Father, so we are told that the Son comes to do the Father’s will, that he speaks the words that have been spoken to him (John 12:50; 14:24). But, says Basil, it would not be fitting to think that the Son’s acting at the command of the Father involved any lack of power or self-determination on his part. We know, however, that the Father shows all things to the Son. Thus, Basil suggests, the Father shares his will with the Son eternally in the same way — the Son is a spotless mirror of the divine being, goodness, and will. Thus, from eternity, the Son’s will is fully his own, and yet also the Father’s; there is one divine will shared by the Father, fully possessed by the Son in communion with the Father. There is no opposition between one or three wills here. Basil’s argument is, in part, an attempt to bend our speech slowly toward a still point where, because of the divine unity that has arisen through the Father’s gift, our conceptual resources are exhausted and must end in adoration.
In his recent apostolic exhortation Lumen fidei, Pope Francis wrote succinctly: “faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.”13 This statement offers us helpful resources for thinking about the character of Scripture’s speech about God and for thinking about the dignity, reach, and darkness of the gift that is theological speculation. The language of faith — the language of Scripture — illuminates, enabling the human mind to understand and move toward its true object, God, and to understand the character of our world, its brokenness, redemption, origin, and destiny.
But this light also illuminates a darkness that lies ahead of us and surrounds us, for it shows to us the limits of our knowledge — or better, it begins to initiate us into those limits, and if we rest on the language of faith, we can be drawn ever more deeply into this darkness. Learning to love not only the illumination but also the darkness is, I suggest, essential if we are to see both what faith is and the importance of decentering our search for knowledge into a search for greater awareness of our own failure and our need for grace. The language of faith, then, is a lamp that draws us through and into a darkness — but we can trust that the illumination it provides is sufficient for the journey! Christian apophaticism is a divine gift, a work of the Spirit reforming the mind, purifying the mind; but it is a gift that is founded on the fact that God has given us to share in his own knowledge, in his own Wisdom; it is a gift found on the gift of true speech about the divine.
VI. THE FATHER AND THE DIVINE LIFE
Now that we have spoken a little of the divine life, I want us to think about the role of the Father — illuminating the divine unity from a different angle. I do this so that we can begin to think not only toward the divine unity, toward the still point at which our theological reason fails, but also from that unity toward our own lives. We can turn first to the relationship between the Father and the Son. The Son has come not to do his own will. The incarnate Christ is a model for us of humility before his heavenly Father, and even the eternal Word and Son depends on the Father. One of the most interesting texts in this regard is John 5:19 – 29. Jesus’ discourse here culminates a chapter in which he has healed on the Sabbath and been accused of making himself equal to God by naming God as his Father. In response to this critique — which is given by the narrator, not put into the actual dialogue — Jesus relates his mission to the will of the Father.
I would like to point to two themes woven through his enigmatic words. First, Jesus tells us that “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees the Father doing” (John 5:19). The verse parallels famous words found later in this chapter and virtually repeated in the next: “I have come down from heaven not to do my [own] will but to do the will of him who sent me” (6:38), and I certainly think that we must take from them the principle that the incarnate Son’s humility before the Father reveals something about what it means for the Son to be eternally who he is. The Son in eternity looks toward the Father, knows the Father, and in the words of 5:19, does “whatever the Father does.”14
But note, second, the emphasis throughout this passage on what the Son does and what he is able to do. The Father shows the Son all that he does, and the Son is able to do those things. The Father raises the dead, the Son raises the dead. Indeed, it is not even that the Son raises because he acts with the Father’s power; he gives life “to whom he is pleased to give it” (John 5:21). Verse 26 tells us that as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. The gift the Father gives to the Son is one not of loaned authority or power, but of being in himself one who can give life. Both Son and Spirit are “life-giving.”
Complement these texts with the perspective found in the first verses of John’s gospel. God’s Word is with God, but with God in a manner that enables the equivalent statement “and . . . was God.” This gnomic phrasing has, of course, invited a library of speculation, but let me note only that it conveys a mystery to us. The Word is with God — and thus a distinct reality — in such a way that we can also say “and the Word was God” (John 1:1). There is no hint here that we should read this as “and was a lesser not fully divine being,” or as meaning “but not, of course, having the full power of the Father.” The Word simply “was God.” And yet, verse 3 tells us that it was “through” this Word that “all things were made.” How? Well, part of an answer should surely point to the next sentence: “In him was life.” The Son and Word is the one through whom all things are created, the one who follows the will of the Father — the one who embodies obedience. Yet the Word or Son does so because the Father has given all to him, given him in himself the power to give life and to restore life.
This mystery points us, I think, toward the language of loving gift if we are to understand the relationship of the two: the Father holds back nothing from the Son — and I mean this in a deep ontological sense; all that the Father is he gives to the Son. The Son’s love for the Father is one of endless conformity in will, endless exercise of the nature and power he has received — but what we may also describe as the endless exercise of his own will. At this point our notions of “ownness” and “authority” are stretched almost to breaking; they are stretched toward the still point of which I have spoken.
We can then certainly speak of an order among the trinitarian persons. It is the Father who generates the Son and breathes forth the Spirit. Yet, Scripture invites us to reflect until our minds fail on the reality of the gift or gifts that constitute the divine life. We are invited, I suggest, to ask what it means for the Father to be the Father by meditating on the Father’s giving of his own Spirit so that the Son is fully divine, fully his own divine agent. The Father acts from eternity to give rise to a communion of Father with a Son and a Spirit in which these latter two owe all to the Father but also possess all. We are also invited to reflect on the divine fatherhood by noting how “Father” and “Son” are also God and Word, the Son being the Father’s own eternal speaking of what he is and what is to be. God from eternity determines that he will be God with his Word and Spirit, defined as the Father who shares all with his Son in the Spirit as an eternally generative, loving communion.
VII. “NOT A LIGHT . . . BUT A LAMP”
Meditating on the communion that constitutes the divine life is in itself a good. When God is all in all, the just will be eternally entranced by the inexhaustible vision of God, and so beginning to think about that vision now is part and parcel of training us toward heaven. Thus when we ask the question, “What is the doctrine of the Trinity for?” while we should certainly answer that this doctrine orders all others, we should also say that this doctrine is drawn from Scripture through the Spirit’s work as an initial glimpse of that which will be our sight in eternity. In other words, this doctrine describes and reshapes our vision of all toward that which truly is. But how should we draw parallels and analogies between the divine life and our own Christian lives?
One common move in recent trinitarian theology has to been to argue for fairly direct links between accounts of the inner life of God and aspects of human relationships: just as the life of God is X, so should we be. This move is found in distinct forms. Thus we have, for example, the liberal Protestant argument that “the Trinity is our Social Program”; we have the more conservative Protestant linking of the relations between Father and Son with the relationships of men and women; we have the Catholic movements of communio ecclesiology and some recent versions of what has become known as “the theology of the body.”15 Now, each one of these receives some warrant in the Scriptures, and so my goal in this last section is not to favor or criticize any one of them, but to make a suggestion about all in the light of my argument so far.
There are obviously enough many dangers when we draw parallels between the divine life and ours. Most obviously we may simply claim too much. The divine life is unique, occurs under conditions that are not ours, and always recedes from our grasp even as it draws our minds and hearts. But such a dismissal is not sufficient: Christ himself calls us to the task at John 17:20 – 21 and, as I have tried to argue, the darkness attendant on Christian faith does not prevent our speech but rather gives a particular cast to an enterprise that is commanded of us. Thus, we must ask ourselves what mode of analogical reasoning is appropriate for us when we consider texts that invite us to parallel the divine life and our own. I do not have a simple and clear answer to my own question. But I do want to offer three sets of related observations toward an answer.
First, I do not think there is much use in our imagining for ourselves a comprehensible model of the divine life in abstract or formal terms, and then arguing that our lives should also be ordered to mirror such a model. Thus, we might imagine for ourselves a highly personalist model of three persons in loving relationship and say that our community should also exhibit loving relationships. Such a mode of thinking may involve our projecting onto the divine life models of relationship that we favor and then, in a (perhaps unconscious) sleight of hand, calling for those models to be promoted among us. In this sleight of hand there are many difficulties. One of the most important is that our conceptions of the divine life have become too far removed from the mass of scriptural references and images and complexities that we should call to mind when Christ says “as we are one.” What we know of the divine life is constituted by a dense field of statements and allusions, and the whole task of producing a model is deeply problematic.
Another difficulty is that thinking about the relationship between the divine life and ours as if we were dealing with two distinct and separated realities is a mistake. The divine unity that we seek to emulate or the love that the persons show to each other is already here among us and in us. If we are baptized we are in Christ, we have received Christ’s Spirit and the Father also. Somehow the life of the church must already show us what we so easily take to be conceived only in an act of the imagination reaching up into the heavens. We are already in and being shaped by the life toward which we reach; and we are in it a particular point in the drama of salvation, and we are in it through being drawn into Christ’s body. Rather than focusing on the life of God and constructing a model that may be eschatological, we must attend to the conditions of life and relationship that befit the fallen who are now being redeemed in Christ.
To explore a little further what I am trying to say here, let me offer a second set of observations. It is, I suggest, also a mistake to think about the relationship between the divine life and ours without recognizing that we, now, are always only growing toward the unity that Christ tells us will be ours. The analogies we offer should always be offered in faith and to form hope and love. They are always analogies to aid the journey. Thus, I suspect we must draw such analogies with the intention that they always illuminate our failure and our need. We both fail to undertake that to which Christ commands us if we are to manifest him to the world, and we fail to recognize that the unity we seek to exhibit is already at work within us. Our need is to accept the slow reformation of mind and heart through grace that is constantly offered us. Or, as I said above, our need is to recognize that the life of the church that is ours is a life in which the divine life is already at work. Resting in this body and attending to the ways in which God acts among us through Son and Spirit is the context in which our most important learning occurs. It is here that the intellect is humbled, and in being humbled it soars.16
My third set of observations concerns the content of the analogies we can draw between aspects of the divine life and our own. If I am right about the importance of turning to the different range of scriptural passages that draw us toward such analogies and then of meditating on them, what may we say about the overall character of such analogies? Is there a primary focus to the analogies Scripture draws us toward? Yes, I think there is. In each case that I can think of, Scripture invites us to meditate on the priority of love as the constitutive feature of what it is to be a divine person in relationship. Whether we attend to the unity of Father and Son, to the manner in which the Father shows all to the Son, or to the complex parallels between the Spirit as the love of God and the gift that draws us into unity, in every case the reality that we are drawn to contemplate is that of an eternally self-giving love.
But note that this love is something we can only move toward contemplating because each of the divine three is this love from eternity and from the Father’s gift. This love will always escape our grasp. We should be, I suggest, wary of describing the content of particular divine relationships in order to make our analogies too clear, too fixed; doing so might hide from our minds and hearts the manner in which our expectations are always transcended by the depth of the mutual gift that constitutes the divine unity. Nevertheless, when we attend to these relationships well, we see that we are drawn into them, that they ground our lives as created beings and as Christians. Thus we may perhaps find ourselves not simply imagining the life of God “out there” and wondering how we should emulate that which seems impossibly different. We must also be drawn to reflect on how the Christian life reveals (and hides) the process of our being drawn into one as Father and Son (and Spirit) are one.
When we think about the relationship between the one that Father, Son, and Spirit are, and the one we seek to be, I suggest that the main focus of our attention should not be the overall likeness (and lack of likeness) between God as three and one, and us as multiple and unitary — whether we consider ourselves as families, as churches, or as human communities of whatever scope. Rather, our main focus should be the character of the individual and multiple interrelationships between the divine three. The manner in which the divine love is performed by Father as eternally giving all that he is, by the Son eternally receiving and eternally being the giver of life, by the Spirit as drawing us into unity as the body of Christ, the different ways in which the divine love is performed here provide us with a matrix of points of departure for our meditation and prayer. Attention to any of the ways in which the life of divine love is performed draws us — I hope — first, constantly toward a confession of our own failure to act in love and hence in unity, and, second, constantly toward recognition of our need to rest on the work of grace within us. In this last recognition we come to what I think is at the very heart of that to which Christ calls us in John 17 — the unity that we are called to exhibit is a unity into which we are already being drawn and reformed.
In this paper I have followed a path toward a notion of divine unity and then back out toward our process of reflection on ourselves as imaging the divine life. My account has revolved around insistence that the divine unity is an incomprehensible act of communion established from eternity by the Father. Indeed, I hope that it was reasonably clear that I see a close link between recognizing how and why the divine unity exceeds our grasp and the particular style of analogical reflection that I argue is most appropriate. At every stage, though, my account has been accompanied by a vision of theological speech as a process of speculative reflection on God’s written Word that is drawn from us by God’s work. In focusing attention on this speculative process, I have sought, first, to challenge us to think about what mode of argument is the necessary or most appropriate context for good theological thinking. But, in second place, I hope I am also heard as calling us to reflect on the “failure” of our speculative gaze. Reaching a point in our reflections at which the divine life seems to have receded before our grasp is not to reach a point of failure. In part, it is not because along the way toward that still point, paths and parameters for further thought will have been sketched and stimulated. But in the largest part, this is not failure, because this is to follow the path into the divine mystery that God’s Word himself opened up for us as he spoke through his person and through the writers of Scripture.
1. This paper draws on two of my Pentecost Lectures offered to the Benedictine community of Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland during 2012. A later version was then delivered to the September 2013 conference “Beholding the Wonder of Trinitarian Relations” at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. I would like to thank my hosts on both occasions — Dom Anselm Atkinson and Dr. Bruce Ware — and those in these two communities who provided such good conversation. I would also like to thank Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders for the wonderfully organized conference at Fuller Seminary at which the final version was read and the participants for their excellent questions and conversation.
2. The best introduction to this process is provided by Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
3. For an excellent introduction to classical Catholic trinitarian theology, see Gilles Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God (trans. Matthew Levering; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011).
4. There are many complex questions here about the character of appropriate biblical interpretation. On the one hand, I have no intention of indicating via the form of my argument that I think there is no place for a close historical interrogation of the texts I explore; on the other hand, I do think that exegesis — in its different legitimate modes — is essential to the task of expounding Christian doctrines. I attempt to give a fuller view of how I negotiate some of these problems in my “The Word Answering the Word: Opening the Space of Catholic Biblical Interpretation” in Theological Theology: Essays in Honor of John B. Webster (ed. R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky, and Justin Stratis; London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
5. There is a long and complex debate in the fourth century about how we should understand Father, Son, and Spirit as each possessing the fullness of divine power and as being one power through their inseparable action. See for introduction Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 280 – 84 (and index for references to discussion of the theme in particular theologians); Michel R. Barnes, “ ‘One Nature, One Power’: Consensus Doctrine in Pro-Nicene Polemic,” in Historica, Theologica et Philosophica, Critica et Philologica (ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone; StPatr 29; Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 205 – 23.
6. My emphasis on offering an account of the Spirit inspired by Augustine’s as a fundamental point of departure is intended also to be a recommendation of his account (though it is only fair to note also some influence from Didymus the Blind’s On The Holy Spirit). For discussion of Augustine himself, see Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 10.
7. Here I have begun to tread gently onto the turf that Steve Holmes explores in his paper. I largely agree with his account, except that I think one can already find in Augustine the seeds of the account he seeks.
8. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, chap. 9.
9. Not surprisingly, I have a number of problems with the family of perspectives grouped under the phrase “social trinitarianism.” Many versions of it fail for me most importantly because they are simply inattentive to the principles classical trinitarian theology. But one substantive point may be made on the basis of my exploration here. If I am right about the necessary combination of personalist and non-personalist language at the heart of classical trinitarianism, then some who are tempted to give in to the seductions of a “social trinitarian” perspective as opposed to a classical perspective must rethink the character of the opposition they think exists.
10. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, chap. 8.
11. Excerpt from “Burnt Norton,” from T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1936; renewed 1964). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Also permission granded © T. S. Eliot Estate by Faber and Faber Ltd.
12. My argument here paraphrases On the Holy Spirit 18.20.51ff. For an excellent new translation see St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit (trans. Stephen Hildebrand; Yonkers NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 87ff.
13. Paragraph 57. The text may be accessed at www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20130629_enciclica-lumen-fidei_en.html.
14. I have already mentioned this text and noted my own discussion of Augustine’s interpretation. In the same discussion, I offer a survey of prior patristic exegesis (Augustine and the Trinity, 233 – 40).
15. And, for Catholic theologians, the suggestive words of Gaudium et Spes paragraph 24 provide a further authoritative push: “. . .the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, ‘that all may be one. . . as we are one’ (John 17:21 – 22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (the text is available at: www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html). In another context I hope to reflect on the styles of trinitarian thought that stretch from this text, through the teaching of John Paul II and on to the recent accounts of Cardinals Scola and Ouellet.
16. Although I construe what we should and what we cannot say about the Trinity differently from Karen Kilby, readers will note a number of common themes between my brief comments here and her own helpful final reflections on ways in which we should reflect in the light of our trinitarian theology. The final pages of Karen’s chapter are by no means exhaustive, but they do indicate the importance of our seeking a complex range of ways on which to reflect on the relationship between our communion and the divine, and specifically in the light of our particular place in the divine economy.