The Trinity: Six Classic and Contemporary Approaches
The Trinity: Six Classic and Contemporary Approaches
The doctrine of the Trinity, as will be clear from the material we have considered thus far, is a remarkably difficult area of Christian theology. In what follows, we shall survey six approaches, classic and modern, to this doctrine. Each of these approaches casts light on aspects of the doctrine and allows insights to be gained concerning its foundations and implications. Perhaps the most important of these classic expositions is that of Augustine, whereas in the modern period that of Karl Barth is of outstanding importance. However, the approach adopted by the Cappadocian fathers continues to be of importance, particularly within modern Greek and Russian Orthodox theology. It is therefore appropriate to begin our discussion by considering this classic approach to the Trinity, which continues to be highly influential in modern Christian thought.
Many older discussions of the Cappadocian and Augustinian approaches to the Trinity are influenced by a discussion dating from the 1880s by the French scholar Theodore de Régnon (1831–93). De Régnon drew a sharp distinction between approaches to the Trinity which emphasize the threeness of the Godhead and those which emphasize its unity. According to de Régnon, the trinitarian reflections of the Cappadocian fathers began from the threeness or plurality of divine persons, whereas Augustine began from the undifferentiated unity of the divine essence. These stereotypes are simply not helpful, and readers are recommended to avoid them if possible. The interplay of unity and plurality is more complex than this simple model allows. With this cautionary point in mind, we will turn to consider our six case studies.
The Cappadocian Fathers
As we noted earlier, the Cappadocian fathers – Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus – played a pivotal role in establishing the full divinity of the Holy Spirit (pp. 282–4). This was formally endorsed by the Council of Constantinople in 381. Once this decisive theological step had been taken, the way was open to a full statement of the doctrine of the Trinity. With the recognition of the identity of substance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the door was opened to exploring their mutual relationship within the Trinity. Once more, the Cappadocians played a decisive role in this major theological development.
The Cappadocians' approach to the Trinity is best understood as a defense of the divine unity coupled with a recognition that the one Godhead exists in three different “modes of being” or “manners of existence.” The formula which expresses this approach best is “one substance [ousia] in three persons [hypostaseis].” The one indivisible Godhead is common to all three persons of the Trinity. This one Godhead exists simultaneously in three different “modes of being” – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is not modalism (see pp. 308–10) but is rather a principled attempt to maintain the divine unity while recognizing the complexity of divine presence and action.
One of the most distinctive features of this approach to the Trinity is the priority assigned to the Father. Although the Cappadocian writers stress that they do not accept that either the Son or the Spirit is subordinate to the Father, they nevertheless explicitly state that the Father is to be regarded as the source or fountainhead of the Trinity. The being of the Father is imparted to both the Son and the Spirit, although in different ways: the Son is “begotten” of the Father and the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father. Gregory of Nyssa thus writes of “the one person of the Father, from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds.” Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa argues that the ultimate ground of unity within the Trinity is the Father: “the three have one nature (that is, God), the ground of their unity being the Father.”
So how can the one substance be present in three persons? The Cappadocians answered this question by appealing to the relationship between a universal and its particulars – for example, humanity and individual human beings. Thus, Basil of Caesarea argues that the one substance within the Trinity can be conceived as analogous to a universal, and the three persons to particulars. A common human nature, shared by all people, does not mean that all human beings are identical; it means that they retain their individuality, even though they share this common nature. Thus, each of the three persons within the Trinity has a distinctive characteristic.
According to Basil of Caesarea, the distinctive characteristics of each of the persons are as follows: the Father is distinguished by fatherhood, the Son by sonship, and the Spirit by the ability to sanctify. For Gregory of Nazianzus, the Father is distinguished by “being ingenerate” (agennesia, a difficult word which conveys the idea of “not being begotten” or “not deriving from any other source”), the Son by “being generate” (gennesis, which could also be translated as “being begotten” or “deriving one's origins from someone else”), and the Spirit by “being sent” or “proceeding.” The difficulty with this analogy, noted earlier (p. 310), is that it does seem to hint at tritheism, even though a more rigorous analysis shows that this is not actually the case.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
Augustine takes up many elements of the emerging consensus on the Trinity – for example, in his vigorous rejection of any form of subordinationism (that is, treating the Son and the Spirit as inferior to the Father within the Godhead). Augustine insists that the action of the entire Trinity is to be discerned behind the actions of each of its persons. Thus, humanity is not merely created in the image of God; it is created in the image of the Trinity. An important distinction is drawn between the eternal Godhead of the Son and the Spirit, and their place in the economy of salvation. Although the Son and the Spirit may appear to be posterior to the Father, this judgment only applies to their role within the process of salvation. Although the Son and the Spirit may appear to be subordinate to the Father in history, in eternity all are coequal. This is an important anticipation of the later distinction (see p. 308) between the essential Trinity, grounded in God's eternal nature, and the economic Trinity, grounded in God's self-revelation within history.
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Augustine's approach to the Trinity concerns his understanding of the person and place of the Holy Spirit; we have already considered specific aspects of this during our discussion of the filioque controversy (see pp. 287–90). However, there is more that needs to be said about Augustine's conception of the Spirit as the love that unites the Father and the Son.
Augustine identifies the Son with “wisdom” (sapientia) and the Spirit with “love” (caritas). He concedes that he has no explicit biblical grounds for this identification; nevertheless, he regards it as a reasonable inference from the biblical material. The Spirit “makes us dwell in God, and God in us.” This explicit identification of the Spirit as the basis of union between God and believers is important, as it points to Augustine's idea of the Spirit as the giver of community. The Spirit is the divine gift which binds us to God.
There must therefore, Augustine argues, be a corresponding relationship within the Trinity itself. The gift must reflect the nature of the giver. God already exists in the kind of relationship to which God wishes to bring us. And, just as the Spirit is the bond of union between God and the believer, so the Spirit exercises a comparable role within the Trinity, binding the persons together. “The Holy Spirit [...] makes us dwell in God, and God in us. But that is the effect of love. So the Holy Spirit is God who is love.”
This argument is supplemented by a general analysis of the importance of love within the Christian life. Augustine, basing his ideas loosely on 1 Corinthians 13: 13 (“These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love”), argues along the following lines:
This style of analysis has been criticized for its obvious weaknesses, not least in leading to a curiously depersonalized notion of the Spirit. The Spirit appears as a sort of glue, binding Father and Son together and binding both to believers. The idea of “being bound to God” is a central feature of Augustine's spirituality, and it is perhaps inevitable that this concern appears prominently in his discussion of the Trinity.
One of the most distinctive features of Augustine's approach to the Trinity is his development of “psychological analogies.” The reasoning which lies behind the appeal to the human mind in this respect can be summarized as follows. It is not unreasonable to expect that, in creating the world, God has left a characteristic imprint upon that creation. Augustine uses the Latin term vestigium – which means “footprint” – to refer to this divine imprint on the created order. But where is that imprint (vestigium) to be found? It is reasonable to expect that God would plant this distinctive imprint upon the height of his creation. The Genesis creation accounts allow us to conclude that humanity is the height of God's creation. Therefore, Augustine argues, we should look to humanity in our search for the image of God.
So what is the height of humanity? On the basis of some Neoplatonic assumptions, Augustine argues that the human mind is to be regarded as the apex of humanity. It is therefore to the individual human mind that the theologian should turn, in looking for “traces of the Trinity” (vestigia Trinitatis) in creation. The radical individualism of this approach, coupled with its obvious intellectualism, means that he chooses to find the Trinity in the inner mental world of individuals, rather than – for example – in personal relationships (an approach favored by medieval writers, such as Richard of St. Victor). Furthermore, a first reading of On the Trinity suggests that Augustine seems to regard the inner workings of the human mind as telling us as much about God as about the economy of salvation. Although Augustine stresses the limited value of such analogies, he himself appears to make more use of them than this critical appraisal would warrant.
Augustine discerns a triadic structure to human thought and argues that this structure of thought is grounded in the being of God. He points to the triad of memory, understanding, and will as an analogy of God as Trinity. Just as there are three faculties in the human mind which are not ultimately totally separate and independent entities, so there can also be three “persons” in God.
There are some obvious difficulties here, possibly even some fatal weaknesses. As has often been pointed out, the human mind cannot be reduced to three entities in quite this neat and simplistic manner. In the end, however, it must be pointed out that Augustine's appeal to such “psychological analogies” is actually illustrative rather than constitutive. The three are intended to be visual aids (although visual aids that are grounded in the doctrine of creation) to insights that may be obtained from Scripture and from reflection on the economy of salvation. Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity is not ultimately grounded in his analysis of the human mind but in his reading of Scripture, especially of the fourth gospel.
The most significant restatements of the doctrine of the Trinity within the western tradition date from the twentieth century, which saw a revival of Trinitarian theology. We shall consider four quite distinct approaches, beginning with that of Karl Barth.
Karl Barth (1886–1968)
Barth sets the doctrine of the Trinity at the opening of his Church Dogmatics (1936–69). This simple observation is important, for he totally inverts the position in which it was fixed by F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834). For Schleiermacher, the Trinity is perhaps the last word which can be said about God; for Barth, it is the word which must be spoken before revelation is even a possibility. It is thus placed at the opening of the Church Dogmatics because its subject matter is what makes dogmatics possible in the first place. The doctrine of the Trinity undergirds and guarantees the actuality of divine revelation to sinful humanity. It is an “explanatory confirmation,” as Barth puts it, of revelation. It is an exegesis of the fact of revelation.
“God reveals himself. He reveals himself through himself. He reveals himself.” With these words (which I have found to be impossible to translate into inclusive language), Barth sets up the revelational framework which leads to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Deus dixit! (“God has spoken!”) – in the event of revelation, and it is the task of theology to inquire concerning what this revelation presupposes and implies. For Barth, the doctrine of the Trinity has an explanatory and regulatory function which encompasses theology in its entirety. The Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved but an explanatory framework which sets theology in its proper perspective and thus offers solutions to its problems and riddles. For Barth, theology is a process of “thinking afterward” about what is contained in God's self-revelation. We have to “inquire carefully into the relation between our knowing of God, and God himself in his being and nature.”
With such statements, Barth sets up the context of the doctrine of the Trinity: given that God's self-revelation has taken place, what must be true of God for this to have happened? What does the actuality of revelation have to tell us about the being of God? Barth's starting point for his discussion of the Trinity is not a doctrine or an idea but the actuality of God's speaking and God's being heard. For how can God be heard when sinful humanity is incapable of hearing the Word of God?
The above paragraph is simply a paraphrase of sections of the first half-volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics, entitled “The Doctrine of the Word of God.” There is an enormous amount said in this, and it requires unpacking. Two core themes in Barth's analysis need to be carefully noted:
The very fact that revelation takes place thus requires explanation. For Barth, this implies that humanity is passive in the process of reception; the process of revelation is, from its beginning to its end, subject to the sovereignty of God as Lord. For revelation to be revelation, God must be capable of effecting self-revelation to sinful humanity, despite humanity's sinfulness.
Once this paradox has been appreciated, the general structure of Barth's doctrine of the Trinity can be followed. In revelation, Barth argues, God must be as shown in the divine self-revelation. There must be a direct correspondence between the revealer and the revelation. If “God reveals himself as Lord” (a characteristically Barthian assertion), God must be Lord “antecedently in himself.” Revelation is the reiteration in time of what God actually is in eternity. There is thus a direct correspondence between:
To put this in the language of trinitarian theology, the Father is revealed in the Son.
So what about the Spirit? Here we come to what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Barth's doctrine of the Trinity: the idea of “revealedness” (German: Offenbarsein). To explore this concept, we will have to use an illustration not used by Barth himself. Imagine two individuals, walking outside Jerusalem on a spring day around the year AD 30. They see three men being crucified and pause to watch. The first points to the central figure and says, “There is a common criminal being executed.” The second, pointing to the same man, replies, “There is the Son of God dying for me.” To say that Jesus of Nazareth is the self-revelation of God will not do in itself; there must be some means by which Jesus of Nazareth is recognized as the self-revelation of God. It is this recognition of revelation as revelation that lies at the heart of Barth's idea of “revealedness.”
So how is this critical insight achieved? Barth is quite clear: sinful humanity is not capable of reaching this insight unaided. Barth is not prepared to allow humanity any positive role in the interpretation of revelation, believing that this is to make divine revelation subordinate to human theories of knowledge. (As we saw on p. 146, he has been heavily criticized for this, even by those, such as Emil Brunner, who might otherwise be sympathetic to his aims.) The interpretation of revelation as revelation must itself be the work of God – more accurately, the work of the Spirit. Humanity does not become capable of hearing the word of the Lord (capax verbi Domini) and then hear this word; both this hearing and this capacity to hear are given in the one act by the Spirit.
All this might seem to suggest that Barth is really some kind of modalist, treating the different moments of revelation as different “modes of being” of the same God. It must be conceded immediately that there are those who charge him with precisely this deficiency. Nevertheless, more considered reflection perhaps moves us away from this judgment, although other criticisms can certainly be made. For example, the Spirit fares rather badly in Barth's exposition, which in this respect can be argued to mirror weaknesses in the western tradition as a whole. However, whatever its weaknesses may be, Barth's discussion of the Trinity is generally regarded as having reinstated the importance of the doctrine after a period of sustained neglect within dogmatic theology. That process of reinstatement has been further consolidated through the work of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, to which we now turn.
Karl Rahner (1904–84)
Like Barth, Karl Rahner is widely seen as having played a decisive role in the renewal of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century. Rahner's particular contribution to the development of modern trinitarian theology is generally agreed to be his analysis of the relationship between the “economic” and the “immanent” Trinity (see p. 308). The basic distinction here is between the manner in which God is known through revelation in history and the manner in which God exists internally. The “economic Trinity” can be thought of as the way in which we experience the diversity and unity of God's self-disclosure in history, and the “immanent Trinity” as God's diversity and unity as it is in God. Rahner's axiom concerning their relationship, which is widely quoted in modern theology, takes the following form: “The ‘economic' Trinity is the ‘immanent' Trinity, and the ‘immanent' Trinity is the ‘economic' Trinity.” In other words, the way God is revealed and experienced in history corresponds to the way God actually is.
Figure 13.2 Karl Rahner (1904–84).
Source: © Bettmann / Corbis.
Rahner's approach to the Trinity is a powerful corrective to certain tendencies in older Catholic trinitarian theology, especially the tendency to focus on the “immanent Trinity” in such a way as to marginalize both human experience of God and the biblical witness to salvation. For Rahner, the “economic” Trinity relates to the “biblical statements concerning the economy of salvation and its threefold structure.” Rahner's axiom allows him to affirm that the entire work of salvation is the work of one divine person. Despite the complexity of the mystery of salvation, a single divine person can be discerned as its source, origin, and goal. Behind the diversity of the process of salvation there is to be discerned only one God.
This fundamental principle of the unity of the economy of salvation can be traced back to Irenaeus (especially in his polemic against the Gnostics; see pp. 122–4), who argued that two divine beings could be distinguished within the economy of salvation. Rahner therefore insists that the proper starting point of trinitarian discussion is our experience of salvation history, and its biblical expression. The “mystery of salvation” happens first; then we move on to formulate doctrines concerning it. This “previous knowledge of the economic Trinity, derived from salvation history and the Bible” is the starting point for the process of systematic reflection. The “immanent Trinity” can therefore be thought of as a “systematic conception of the economic Trinity.”
Rahner therefore argues that the process of theological reflection which leads to the doctrine of the immanent Trinity has its starting point in our experience and knowledge of salvation in history. The complexity of that salvation history is ultimately grounded in the divine nature itself. In other words, although we experience diversity and unity within the economy of salvation, that diversity and unity correspond to the way God actually is. Rahner expresses this point as follows:
The differentiation of the self-communication of God in history (of truth) and spirit (of love) must belong to God “in himself,” or otherwise this difference, which undoubtedly exists, would do away with God's self-communication. For these modalities and their differentiation either are in God himself (although we first experience them from our point of view) or they exist only in us.
In other words, “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are not simply human ways of making sense of the diversity of our experience of the mystery of salvation. Nor are they roles which God somehow temporarily assumes for the purpose of entering into our history. Rather, they correspond to the way God actually is. The same God who appears as a Trinity is a Trinity. The way in which God is known in self-revelation corresponds to the way God is internally.
John Macquarrie (1919–2007)
John Macquarrie, a Scottish theologian with roots in the Presbyterian tradition, approached the doctrine of the Trinity from an existentialist perspective. In his Principles of Christian Theology (1966), Macquarrie argued that what he calls “Holy Being” has “let itself be known in the Christian community of faith under the Trinitarian symbolism of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God.” For Macquarrie, the doctrine of the Trinity “safeguards a dynamic as opposed to a static understanding of God.” But how can a dynamic God simultaneously be stable? Macquarrie's reflections on this tension lead him to conclude that “if God had not revealed himself as triune, we should have been compelled to think of him in some such way.” He explores the dynamic conception of God within the Christian tradition in the following manner:
It will be clear that Macquarrie's approach is genuinely helpful in linking the doctrine of the Trinity with the existential situation of humanity. Yet its weakness is also evident, in that there appears to be a certain artificiality involved in the assignment of existential functions to the persons of the Trinity. One wonders what would have happened if the Trinity had happened to have four members; perhaps Macquarrie would have devised a fourth category of being to deal with this situation? But this is a weakness of existential approaches in general rather than of this approach in particular.
It is also interesting to consider whether Macquarrie's approach can be considered to be a form of modalism – specifically, the functional modalism which we noted earlier (p. 309). Macquarrie appears to argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be viewed as the revelation of three modes of being within God. Yet these three persons “are not just three stages in the community's experience, or three temporal phases in God's self-manifestation, but belong together in the ‘substance' of the Godhead, that is to say, in Being.”
Macquarrie's approach illuminates both the strengths and weaknesses of the existentialist approach to theology. Broadly speaking, these may be stated as follows:
Robert Jenson (Born 1930)
Writing from a Lutheran perspective, but deeply versed in the Reformed tradition, the contemporary American theologian Robert Jenson has provided a fresh and creative restatement of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. In many ways, it is appropriate to regard Jenson as providing a development of Barth's position, with its characteristic emphasis upon the need to remain faithful to God's self-revelation. Jenson's The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (1982) provides a fundamental reference point for discussion of the doctrine in a period which has seen fresh interest develop in this hitherto neglected matter.
Jenson argues that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the proper name for the God whom Christians know in and through Jesus Christ. It is imperative, he argues, that God should have a proper name. “Trinitarian discourse is Christianity's effort to identify the God who has claimed us. The doctrine of the Trinity comprises both a proper name, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit' [...] and an elaborate development and analysis of corresponding identifying descriptions.” Jenson points out that ancient Israel was set in a polytheistic context, in which the term “god” conveyed relatively little information. It was necessary to name the god in question. A similar situation was confronted by the writers of the New Testament, who were obliged to identify the god at the heart of their faith, and distinguish this god from the many other gods worshiped and acknowledged in the region, especially in Asia Minor.
The doctrine of the Trinity thus identifies and names the Christian God – but identifies and names this God in a manner consistent with the biblical witness. It is not a name which we have chosen; it is a name which has been chosen for us, and which we are authorized to use. In this way, Jensen defends the priority of God's self-revelation against human constructions of concepts of divinity. “The gospel identifies its God thus: God is the one who raised Israel's Jesus from the dead. The whole task of theology can be described as the unpacking of this sentence in various ways. One of these produces the church's trinitarian language and thought.” We noted in an earlier section (pp. 182–4) the manner in which the early church tended accidentally to confuse distinctively Christian ideas about God with those deriving from the Hellenistic context into which it expanded. The doctrine of the Trinity, Jenson affirms, is and was a necessary defense mechanism against such developments. It allows the church to discover the distinctiveness of its creed and avoid becoming absorbed by rival conceptions of God.
However, the church could not ignore its intellectual context. If, on the one hand, its task was to defend the Christian notion of God against rival conceptions of divinity, another of its tasks was to provide “a metaphysical analysis of the gospel's triune identification of God.” In other words, it was obliged to use the philosophical categories of its day to explain precisely what Christians believed about their God, and how this distinguished them from alternatives. Paradoxically, the attempt to distinguish Christianity from Hellenism led to the introduction of Hellenistic categories into trinitarian discourse.
The doctrine of the Trinity thus centers on the recognition that God is named by Scripture, and within the witness of the church. Within the Hebraic tradition, God is identified by historical events. Jenson notes how many Old Testament texts identify God with reference to divine acts in history – such as the liberation of Israel from its captivity in Egypt. The same pattern is evident in the New Testament: God is recognized to be identified with reference to historical events, supremely the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God comes to be identified in relation to Jesus Christ. But who is God? Which god are we talking about? The God who raised Christ from the dead. As Jenson puts it, “the emergence of a semantic pattern in which the uses of ‘God' and ‘Jesus Christ' are mutually determining” is of fundamental importance within the New Testament.
Jenson thus recovers a personal conception of God from metaphysical speculation. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is a proper name, which we are asked to use in naming and addressing God. “Linguistic means of identification – proper names, identifying descriptions, or both – are a necessity of religion. Prayers, like other requests and praises, must be addressed.” The Trinity is thus an instrument of theological precision which forces us to be accurate in our language about the God under discussion.