CHAPTER 4
THE MYSTERY OF THE
IMMANENT TRINITY
AND THE PROCESSION
OF THE SPIRIT
SAMEER YADAV
THERE IS IN RECENT THINKING about the Trinity an emerging trend that begins by observing the large and varied proliferation of Trinitarian theologies that have grown out of the twentieth-century revival of Trinitarian theorizing and then proceeds to offer strong cautionary notes about the kind of insights about the inner life of God as Trinity that we can legitimately expect to derive from our theorizing. The cautionary advice often recommends that we dramatically restrict our Trinitarian theorizing to recognize significant limits on what the available evidence licenses us to affirm about the inner life of God. This is what I will call a kind of metaphysical minimalism about our aims and interests in reflecting on the inner-Trinitarian life of God, a minimalism about how deep or detailed a model of the Trinitarian structure of God’s inner life in the so-called “immanent Trinity” we can derive from a traditional interpretation of Scripture. Three recent examples of Trinitarian minimalism have been expressed by Oliver Crisp, Karen Kilby, and Linn Tonstad.1 Each one offers different reasons to commend different kinds of minimalism as a cautionary note to would-be Trinitarian theologians who wish to maintain a traditional one-substance, three-persons doctrine. Despite their differences, all of them worry about unwarranted speculation in Trinitarian thinking. In what follows I want to object to these restrictive impulses and advocate for a more robust or maximalist freedom in Trinitarian theorizing. In this paper, I will focus particularly on the most recent expression of Trinitarian minimalism that we find in Oliver Crisp’s Analyzing Doctrine.
What does this question of minimalist versus maximalist theorizing about Trinitarian metaphysics have to do with the Holy Spirit in particular? Proposing an intervention on Trinitarian minimalism in the context of this book might seem five years too late, because the theme of Advancing Trinitarian Theology was the topic of the 2014 Los Angeles Theology Conference,2 whereas any treatment of the Nicene tradition for the papers collected in this volume from LATC 2020 are supposed to focus on the third article of the creed and its affirmations about the Spirit. In the history of Trinitarian debates, the primary problem of “third article theology” is the question of the Spirit’s procession—whether the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father only or jointly from the Father and the Son.3 But the filioque controversy has never been more than a stone’s throw from wider methodological debates about the proper approach to Trinitarian theorizing per se.4 So in what follows I will briefly summarize the connection between Crisp’s thinking about what Nicene Trinitarianism minimally involves and the filioque controversy. Then I’ll consider some worries about what Crisp calls the “moderate mysterianism” of his Trinitarian minimalism that would threaten to undercut traditional theorizing about the Spirit’s procession. I won’t claim that my rejection of Crisp’s Trinitarian minimalism gives us any particular reason to adopt this or that view of the Spirit’s procession ad intra. Rather, I only think we ought to lift his proposed restriction.
Oliver Crisp’s methodological reflections in his chapter on “Trinity and Mystery” in Analyzing Doctrine rely on Bill Wood’s explanation of a model as an attempt to schematize a complex set of data in order to gain partial understanding and to serve some particular interests of the inquirer.5 Like Wood, Crisp emphasizes that models intentionally and often necessarily leave a lot out, and in that respect whatever they seek to model will always remain relatively mysterious while the model will always be representationally inadequate. To cite his favored example, a model airplane is only aimed at resembling the real thing in certain targeted respects and therefore represents reality in a limited and partial way.6
Likewise, Crisp thinks that the Nicene orthodoxy about God’s triune nature is a limited way of representing how God reveals Godself to be in Scripture. Taking one plausible reading of the complex scriptural evidence as an evidence base, a Nicene model consists in organizing and schematizing that evidence base to arrive at the claim that there is exactly one God and that this God exists in three eternally distinct but coequally divine persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Crisp breaks this down into four component claims: there is exactly and numerically one God, God is coeternally three, the three are individually nonidentical to one another, and the three are equally divine or consubstantial.7 When considered together, these claims about God constitute a rather minimalistic and “conceptually thin” model of God’s triunity, a model that “says very little about the divine nature, and about what divine persons are or how they are related to one another in the divine life.”8 It expresses a plausibly biblically inferred belief that God is triune, although it does not model for us how God is triune. He does, however, take this minimal model to rule out many alternative possible ways of organizing the biblical material, such as the Arian view that makes the Son a less than divine substance who is not one being with the Father.9 I would want to add a few further points.
The first has to do with the scriptural evidence that served as the basis for inferring these parameters that make up a minimally Nicene Trinitarianism. Here it is important to emphasize that the parameters in question were formed primarily by reading the monotheism of Israel’s religion alongside the so-called “missions” of that God in the sending of the Son and the Spirit as revealing a pattern within God’s own life.10 Israel’s one God is revealed in redemptive relationship to us ad extra as a Father begetting a Son and breathing a Spirit, precisely because Israel’s one God in fact is a Father begetting a Son and breathing a Spirit ad intra, independently of God’s relation to creatures.11 It is this reading of God’s missions as revelatory of relations of origin within God that sets the parameters for the Nicene picture of God’s triunity: if Israel’s one God really is in some sense a divine Father begetting a divine Son and breathing a divine Spirit, then we must at a minimum affirm the claims about God’s numerical oneness and coeternal, nonidentical, and consubstantial threeness that Crisp identifies with Nicene minimalism.
The second point is that the parameters that make up the minimal claim about God’s triunity can be equally well identified negatively by three of the most important possibilities for reading the biblical evidence that it rules out: polytheism, modalism, and subordinationism. So the parameters of God’s numerical oneness and the consubstantiality of the three rules out polytheism,12 the eternality and nonidentity of the three rules out the modalist idea that God’s threeness is a merely optional way God chooses to appear rather than how God necessarily is,13 and the parameter of coequal divinity among the three rules out the subordinationist idea that any one person is anything less than a distinct way of manifesting the very same divinity that is also distinctly manifested by each of the other two persons.14
According to Crisp, this sort of minimal model of Trinitarianism is minimal because it involves only identifying a few necessary biblical parameters for defining what Christians mean when we say that God is triune. What it does not even so much as attempt to model is how God satisfies all of these parameters and hence how God is triune.15 Offering a model that shows how God satisfies the minimal model would count as a kind of “maximal” model of God’s triunity. It would show us more specifically what form God’s exemplification of triunity takes and how these parameters cohere, and this would require us to say much more than what we find in minimalism. A maximal account would have to specify the metaphysical structure that God’s one-and-three-ness consists in, and hence explain how the parameters constitutive of Nicene Trinitarianism hang together. Crisp identifies the two most historically dominant families of theological theory that have been offered as maximalist models of the Trinity: Latin models that theorize God as a single mind and will who exhibits the real and distinct subsistent relations of origin that mark off each person from the other,16 and social-Trinitarian models that theorize God as the perfect unity between three individual minds and wills distinguished by relationships of origin.17 To these he adds a third: the more recent advent of “constitutional” theories that regard the oneness of divine matter to exist eternally in three distinct forms.18 I will not dwell on these three types of maximal or conceptually thicker models. The point is just that Crisp claims that they go beyond the conceptual thinness of a minimal model in virtue of offering nontrivially different and mutually incompatible ways of specifying how the four parameters of God’s triunity are actually exemplified by God.
Against this background Crisp advocates for what he calls a moderate Trinitarian mysterianism. He suggests that the problems that afflict Latin, social, and constitutional Trinitarianism are not merely evidence of the difficulty of specifying how God’s threeness-in-oneness works, but it is instead evidence of the impossibility of specifying how it works. All maximal models of the Trinity fail for the same reason, he says, which is that in trying to move beyond the minimal parameters for saying that God is triune to specify how God is triune, maximal models say too much.19 More specifically, he thinks they attempt to say more than we are cognitively capable of knowing. His view is therefore mysterian in denying that we have sufficient grounds for theorizing the underlying metaphysics that ground or explain the parameters revealed in Scripture. Any apparent contradiction that arises from trying to understand how those parameters consistently hang together is merely apparent, arising from some kind of equivocation regarding God’s oneness or threeness (or both) that we cannot articulate because it is beyond our capacity to comprehend.20 It follows that maximal theorizing is a fool’s errand. To use the analogy he develops, it would be like 2-D creatures living in Flatland trying to comprehend a spherical being; such a being could only show up to Flatlanders as a series of points. The explanation of a 3-D being would not be merely difficult for 2-D beings to understand but impossible. So too God’s triunity that shows up for us as the parameters of the minimal model is a partial revelation grounded in something beyond our ken.21
Crisp takes this mysterianism to be “moderate” because in affirming a minimal model it claims that God’s triunity is partially intelligible and knowable. He therefore denies “apophaticism,” which he takes to imply a radical skepticism about what it means to call God “triune.” But he is nevertheless a mysterian in denying that a traditional reading of the biblical evidence licenses us to move beyond a minimal model to the kind of theorizing displayed by maximal models (we can only manage to say that not how).22 The relevant implication of this for the topic of this conference is that the filioque controversy can only be understood against the background of maximalist theorizing—it proposes single procession from the Father versus joint procession from Father and Son as two alternative metaphysical structures for explaining the individuation of the Spirit within the inner life of God.23 But arguably this is a matter of how, not that; it purports to identify what the nonidentity of Spirit from the other persons consists in and also traditionally involves the question of what the consubstantiality of God consists in, whether the monarchy of the Father that ontologically grounds both Son and Spirit on a single procession view or the bond of the Spirit that grounds the union of Father and Son on the joint procession view.24 But if all determinate metaphysical theorizing about the minimal claims regarding the intrinsic structure of the immanent Trinity necessarily say too much, then this, the most longstanding theological dispute in Christian history, turns out to be a kind of hubristic mistake. The minimal parameters give us no basis for getting a disagreement off the ground in the first place.
Given the divisive character of the filioque controversy across various quarters of the church, perhaps setting it aside as an illegitimate dispute counts as a benefit rather than a deficit of this view. But while Crisp’s moderate mysterianism would permit us to dissolve rather than attempt to solve the filioque controversy, I think there is a deep tension in his view that borders on incoherence. It seems to me that what he identifies as a moderate view is rather made up of two distinct components that are presented as compatible but in fact run contrary to one another. One component is what we can call “accommodationist”—it is the view that the minimal parameters for Trinitarianism derived from a traditional reading of Scripture are divine accommodations to our understanding that give us a genuine, albeit partial, picture of what the divine nature is like. A model airplane may not adequately resemble the avionic engineering of its archetype, but it can still adequately resemble other features, like its shape and relative proportions. Similarly, the volumetric figure of a sphere may be incomprehensible to a 2-D Flatlander, but the points manifest by that sphere on the 2-D plane are perfectly well comprehensible in just the terms used and understood by the Flatlander because they are accommodated to the Flatlander’s 2-D capacities.
But suppose this is how we understand the minimal parameters of Trinitarianism derived from a traditional reading of Scripture. Our talk of God’s inner life is like talk of the 2-D points that show up in virtue of the sphere that intersects our plane of existence. It is characterized by concepts perfectly well intelligible to us: relations of origin—begottenness, unbegottenness, procession, and so on—that mark off each of the three persons from one another, while each of those three is a real and fully divine manifestation of the same singular being of God. If the oneness and threeness implied by scriptural talk about God’s singular being exhibiting triadic interrelations is an accommodation, then we ought to be able to understand the truth conditions of the minimal parameters and the satisfaction conditions of their key terms in the same way that Flatlanders can know both the truth conditions for something’s showing up as the patterns of points accessible to them and the satisfaction conditions of the geometric terms describing those patterns.
The task of specifying the truth conditions of a minimal Trinitarianism by way of identifying the satisfaction conditions of its key terms is exactly what the maximal models are trying to do. Latin, social, and constitutional Trinitarian theorists are not like Flatlanders trying to describe the sphere and explaining how and why it must essentially appear in the 2-D ways it does to them. Instead, they are like Flatlanders trying to find a coherent scheme that describes what a sphere means for them by incorporating all the appearances of its 2-D manifestations available to them as manifestations that purport to describe a single being.25 Likewise Trinitarian theorists are trying to offer a minimally coherent interpretation of what “triunity” means in light of what has been revealed.26 This is why the main reasons that Latin and social Trinitarian have offered to accept their theory and reject its alternatives are no different than the kinds of reasons that motivate Trinitarianism in the first place. Crisp observes that the formation of a minimal understanding of God’s triunity implied the rejection of Arian subordinationism, and to this I have also observed that it was also understood to imply the rejection of tritheism and modalism as well. But as Crisp himself observes, the primary arguments of Latin Trinitarians against social Trinitarians has become precisely that they violate a minimal parameter of avoiding tritheism, while the objection to the Latins is that they violate the antimodalist parameter.27 There is no way of articulating a minimalistic Trinitarianism that is not already somehow metaphysically loaded to specify what kind of oneness and threeness is minimally required to keep us from these heresies. So what I am suggesting is that if we can truly understand the minimal parameters of a traditional Trinitarianism as accommodations to our cognitive limits, then we are automatically propelled exactly toward the kind of maximalist theorizing that Crisp seems to want to rule out as overdetermined.
The question of single versus joint procession arises from a key interpretive assumption in the formation of a minimal Trinitarianism. It is the assumption that the divine missions reflect the divine nature. Since in biblical passages describing the divine mission of sending us the Spirit we can find talk of receiving the Spirit from the Father, jointly from the Father and the Son, and also as from the Father through the Son, the question is how to translate these forms of divine agency into a characterization of the relation of origin that individuates and defines the personhood of the Spirit.28 In the historical theorizing over this question, the primary stakes have been to understand what it is about the divine life we mean when talk about “the Spirit” as a divine person nonidentical while also consubstantial and coequal with Father and Son. Accordingly, the metaphysical arguments for one model and against another appeal to the same kinds of reasons that motivate the minimal model: each argues that the other entails some form of subordinationism or fails to preserve a form of nonidentity between the Spirit and the other persons that also preserves the Spirit’s consubstantiality and so on. Of course some have suggested that both models do equally well.29 If so, then the filioque controversy may indeed be underdetermined by a minimal Trinitarianism not because the minimal view is semantically incomplete but because its determinate meaning is compatible with both single and joint procession. But it remains the case that a conclusion like that would need to be shown by appealing to the metaphysical implications of single versus joint procession interpretations of the minimal model, not by ruling out the legitimacy of interpreting the metaphysics required to understand that model in the first place. On Crisp’s accommodationist line, therefore, minimalism does not rule out maximalist theorizing but motivates it.
On the other hand, Crisp seems to recognize that a maximal modeling might be a way of interpreting the meaning of a minimally defined Trinitarianism rather than trying to explain it or go beyond it, and he therefore goes on to articulate a second component to his mysterianism. It is the claim that we ought to regard the minimal model itself as semantically underdetermined. In other words, he suggests that the kind of threeness and oneness claimed by the minimal model—the meaning of terms like numerical oneness, consubstantial, and nonidentical threeness are merely “placeholders” and that “we do not have a clear conceptual grip on their semantic content.”30 But if that is so, then it is not the question of how God is triune but the very claim that God is triune that is necessarily underdetermined on Crisp’s mysterianism, like variables with inscrutable values. In the absence of any kind of truth-conditional interpretation of the minimal model, we would have to regard it as literally unintelligible. If it is semantically incomplete then we literally do not and cannot know what we mean when we say that God is three and God is one.31 If we cannot have a grip on the semantic content of the oneness and threeness talk internal to the minimal model, then—just as Crisp claims—many different more robust Trinitarian models would be radically underdetermined, including both those metaphysical models that posit a single procession of the Spirit from the Father and those that posit a dual procession from the Father and the Son. But a semantically incomplete Trinitarianism would also equally well underdetermine an orthodox rejection of tritheism, subordinationism, and modalism, since denying those views would likewise require us to know enough about what our oneness and threeness talk means to rule them out. If God is just somehow one, then we could not say that God is precisely one in such a way as to not multiply beings or entities; if God is just somehow three, then we could not say that God is precisely three in such a way as to admit of intrinsically distinct principles of individuation.
It therefore looks like Crisp’s moderate mysterianism is either not mysterian in any way that ought to restrict our Trinitarian metaphysical theorizing, or else it is indeed mysterian but of a rather radical sort that entails the unintelligibility of even the most minimal model of God’s triunity by imposing semantic indeterminacy on its key terms. We might try to alleviate this tension by noting, as Crisp does, that his mysterianism is compatible with a Thomistic style doctrine of analogy in our theological semantics.32 But I don’t think that helps. If the point is simply that our attempts to find an intelligible oneness-threeness claim minimally projected by Scripture needs to be qualified as merely analogical of whatever it is about, then we have moved out of the mysterian territory that restricts our theorizing and back into accommodationist territory that allows it: an analogical semantics can’t provide any reasons to limit the traditional wrangling over better and worse metaphysical interpretations of a minimally Trinitarian model (as evidenced in part by the fact that a great many “maximalists” endorsed it).33 A doctrine of analogy just implies that whatever metaphysically specified theory we have reason to prefer as the best interpretation of our minimal parameters, we must claim that it is at best analogically true of God’s triunity rather than univocally true of it. But clearly that is no constraint on Trinitarian theorizing, only a constraint on the status of our theories.34
So to summarize the argument I’ve been developing: Crisp’s allegedly moderate Trinitarian mysterianism presents us with two incompatible ways of theorizing about the Trinity. The first way is quite permissive: the full gamut of traditional theorizing in the Nicene tradition is just an attempt to articulate a minimally coherent understanding of God’s revealed accommodations to us as a single being who eternally exists as a Father begetting a Son and breathing the Spirit without mutual subordination or collapse of individual identity between the three. Analyzing what the key terms in this understanding ought or ought not ontologically commit us to is inevitably controversial. As such, it predicts genuine metaphysical dispute. The resultant theorizing cannot therefore rightly be regarded as unnecessary, overly speculative, or overweening. Alternatively, we can opt for the radically skeptical way of regarding the oneness and threeness of God projected by a traditional reading of Scripture as involving a fundamental semantic indeterminacy that prevents any analysis of those constituent concepts. As such, every particular theoretical interpretation of God’s triunity would be underdetermined. But this comes at the cost of the very idea of God’s triunity being literally unintelligible to us, an unaccommodated rather than revealed mystery, one that fails to tell us about God in terms we can possibly understand. From an indeterminate oneness and threeness, neither the affirmations nor the denials of the Nicene orthodoxy could follow. Given these options when reflecting on the procession of the Spirit within the divine life, therefore, it seems best to take the more permissive route of allowing the wind to blow where it wishes in our theorizing rather than quenching the spirit of inquiry for fear of saying too much.
This argument leaves an important question unanswered: namely, whether the rejection of the mysterian skepticism implied by Crisp’s view entails a rejection of a Trinitarian apophaticism per se. It seems to me that it does not. One way to construe the apophatic gesture is to regard it not as a matter of denying us any (significant) knowledge of God’s nature per se—but rather as a matter of denying us knowledge of God’s nature in se. This would be to regard God’s triunity as a revealed accommodation that manages to truly track the way things stand with God, while doing so in a necessarily relational way according to our cognitive limits rather than according to the way God is in and for Godself. Whether an apophaticism of that sort is defensible, however, is a matter best left for another time.35
NOTES
1. Oliver D. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019); Karen Kilby, “Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 1 (January 2010): 65–77; Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2017).
2. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders, eds., Advancing Trinitarian Theology: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).
3. While Myk Habets describes “third article theology” as a movement in constructive theology that utilizes “a distinctly pneumatological approach to dogmatics,” I use it only to signal theology focusing particularly on the theological reflection arising from the third article of the Nicene creed. See the essays gathered in Habets, Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016).
4. As Edward Siecienski notes, in The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), at issue was not only “the monarchy of the Father, the eternal relationship between Son and Spirit, [and] the transferrable (or nontransferable) nature of the hypostatic qualities” but also “the exact relationship between the economy . . . and theology” (6). Furthermore, “this last issue,” Siecienski observes, was “particularly vexing, since the Greeks were more hesitant about blurring the lines between the two, while the Latins insisted that the economy revealed truths about the immanent Trinity, including the sending of the Spirit by/through/from the Son,” and it was precisely these “diverse approaches to trinitarian mystery” that raised the question of whether “the two halves of Christendom” had “come to “differing, and ultimately incompatible, teachings about the nature of God” (6).
5. William Wood, “Modeling Mystery,” Scientia et Fides 4, no. 1 (2016): 39–59.
6. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 87.
7. Crisp delineates these as separate propositions T1–T4: “(T1) there is exactly one God; (T2) there are exactly three coeternal divine persons “in” God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; (T3) the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not identical; (T4) the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial.” Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 86.
8. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 78.
9. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 85.
10. As Fred Sanders puts it in The Triune God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016): “The Bible tells a unified story of God’s way with his people . . . in the visible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Interpreting these missions correctly as divine self-revelation is central to the exegetical establishing of Trinitarian theology. What the missions reveal about the life of God is that his life takes place in eternal relations of origin” (93).
11. See Sanders, “Entangled in the Trinity: Economic and Immanent Trinity in Recent Theology,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 40, no. 3 (2001): 175–82. For a helpful synopsis of the various ways that the inference from economy of the Spirit to the immanence of the Spirit in the divine life, see Brian Daley, “Revisiting the ‘Filioque’: Roots and Branches of an Old Debate. Part One,” Pro Ecclesia 10, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 31–62.
12. See Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium Quod non sint tres dei, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, vol. 3, part 1, ed. Friedrich Muller (Leiden: Brill, 1958), 35–58, and translated as On “Not Three Gods”: To Ablabium, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 5, trans. and ed. H. A. Wilson (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893), 331–36. See also the discussion of early Christian thinking about the kind of unity a triune God must possess in Giulio Maspero, Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 344–63.
13. Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), defines the modalism of Sabellius and Paul of Samosata as the view that God is a “radically singular being” with “Son and Spirit as merely modes of divine operation” (16). This may not be an entirely accurate way of glossing the view insofar as we can also find it expressed by pro-Nicenes. In Ad Ablabium, Gregory of Nyssa describes Father, Son, and Spirit as “modes” of a singular existence and then goes on to say, “It does not seem to me absolutely necessary, with a view to the present proof of our argument, to contend against those who oppose us with the assertion that we are not to conceive ‘Godhead’ as an operation. For we, believing the Divine nature to be unlimited, conceive no comprehension of it.” Rather, modalism consists in holding that the three modes of the divine being are operations of the divine being contingent on the divine will that fail to track anything of the divine nature. It is consistent with rejecting that view, Gregory thinks, to hold that one knows by way of revelation that it belongs necessarily to God’s nature to be manifest in three distinct modes of divine operation, expressed in a unity of action, while not knowing how the divine nature manifests those modes of operation in itself, apart from their manifestation in God’s external acts.
14. For an assessment of the Arian controversy and its formative role in shaping the Nicene consensus, Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), remains unsurpassed.
15. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 93–94.
16. Richard Cross argues persuasively that while the differences between so-called “Latin” vs. “Greek” Trinitarianism are not as stark as often imagined, Latin Trinitarianism remains distinctive for holding that the only distinguishing mark individuality one divine person from another is one of mutual relations. See his “Latin Trinitarianism: Some Conceptual and Historical Considerations,” in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, ed. Thomas McCall and Michael Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201–16. For a contemporary expression of Latin Trinitarianism in just this sense, see Brian Leftow, “A Latin Trinity,” Faith and Philosophy 21, no. 3 (2004): 304–33.
17. Carl Moser characterizes social Trinitarianism as committed to the idea that the divine unity consists in the “mutual indwelling” or periochoresis of Father, Son, and Spirit, each construed as a fully fledged “person” in the modern sense involving distinct agencies or centers of consciousness. See Moser, “Fully Social Trinitarianism,” in McCall and Rea, Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, 131–50. Perhaps the most influential modern expression of social Trinitarianism is to be found in Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981). For a recent defense of social Trinitarianism, see William Hasker, “Objections to Social Trinitarianism,” Religious Studies 46 (2010): 421–39.
18. See Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, “Material Constitution and the Trinity,” Faith and Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2005): 57–76. In addition to Latin, Social, and Material Constitution accounts, we might add the recent defense of a “Latin Social Trinity” by Scott Williams in “Unity of Action in a Latin Social Model of the Trinity,” Faith and Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2017): 321–46.
19. “I think all these existing ways of conceiving the Trinity fail for a similar reason—namely, they attempt to say too much about the triunity of God” (Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 82).
20. According to Crisp, Christian Trinitarianism is mysterious insofar as it involves what James Anderson has called a “MACRUE,” an acronym for a “merely apparent contraction resulting from unarticulated equivocations” (Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 93).
21. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 96–97. For a similar appeal to Abbott’s nineteenth-century story of Flatland to illustrate divine incomprehensibility, see David Holley, Meaning and Mystery: What it Means to Believe in God (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 110; and Steven Boyer and Christopher Hall, The Mystery of God: Theology for Knowing the Unknowable (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 3–18.
22. “Although I am sympathetic to the intuition that motivates some apophatically minded systematic theologians to be leery of any but the thinnest conceptual content to the doctrine of the Trinity, I am also skeptical of the claim that we can know nothing, or next to nothing, about the divine nature. . . . But nor am I as optimistic as some analytics and social Trinitarians seem to be about what we can say regarding the divine nature. What I am after is something between these two sorts of views” (Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 84).
23. As Stephen Holmes puts it: “Within the bounds of classical Trinitarianism, the filioque debate was, in retrospect, inevitable: two relations of origin are proposed, the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit. There are thus four relational terms: generating; being generated; spirating; and being spirated. These four terms then need to be divided between three hypostases. Two options appear natural and obvious: to identify the One who generates with the One who spirates, thus teaching the Father as the sole cause and denying the filioque; or, following Thomas Aquinas, to affirm the filioque by making spiration a joint action of Father and Son, and so a non-hypostatic causal principle. (Other solutions are logically possible . . . but all seem sufficiently obviously foreign to the economic order revealed in Scripture to be immediately excluded).” Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 164.
24. For a detailed analysis of the purported theological consequences of a single versus dual procession account of the Spirit, see A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
25. In the case of scriptural revelation, however, the “appearances” that we are trying to coordinate into a single scheme are not only phenomenological, but also propositional, and perhaps testimonial.
26. For the distinction between various types of revelation, see Mats Wahlberg, Revelation as Testimony: A Philosophical-Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014); and Yadav, “Biblical Inspiration and Biblical Revelation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation, ed. Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
27. See Joost van Rossum, “The Experience of the Holy Spirit in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology,” Communio viatorum 53, no. (2011): 25–39: “Patriarch Photius, 9th century, who wrote the first systematic treatise against this doctrine, considered the Filioque to be another form of Sabellianism, since in this theology the Father and the Son are merged together into one Person” (35). See also Sciecienski, The Filioque, 133–34.
28. See, for instance, the helpful summary of the subtle inferential reasoning from economy to immanence that we find in Staniloae in Viorel Coman, “Dimitru Staniloae on the Filioque: Trinitarian Relationship between the Son and the Spirit and Its Relevance for the Ecclesiological Synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 553–75.
29. Holmes, for example, claims, “It is clear that neither position on the filioque does violence to the received orthodox and catholic tradition. Historically, there was full communion between [those holding single and dual procession]. . . . This does not of course mean that the issue is trivial, or in principle insoluble.” Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity, 164.
30. Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine, 100.
31. Perhaps it is false that knowing the meaning of a proposition just is knowing the truth conditions of that proposition. Still, it seems that knowing what a proposition means necessarily involves grasping at least some of its truth-conditions.
32. The rhetorical structure of Crisp’s talk about the Trinity is similar to that of the Thomistic line of rejecting univocity without embracing a kind of equivocity that undermines literal meaning—hence settling on analogy to escape between the horns.
33. See Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity, 154–59. For an antimetaphysical reading of Thomas, see Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (2005): 414–27. Gilles Emery, however, seems to offer a reading more historically and contextually faithful to Thomas in regarding his skepticism as aimed at necessary reasons for Trinitarian properties and relations, rather than being aimed at positive knowledge of those properties and relations per se. See Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18–35.
34. See William P. Alston, “Aquinas on Theological Predication: A Look Backward and a Look Forward,” in Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 145–78.
35. For some hints of how an apophaticism of this sort might go, see Sameer Yadav, The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); and Yadav, “Mystical Experience and the Apophatic Attitude,” Journal of Analytic Theology 4 (2016): 17–43.