Christian Doctrines I
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Christian Doctrines I
The Trinity
Let me ask of my reader, wherever, alike with myself, he is certain, there to go on with me; wherever, alike with myself, he hesitates, there to join with me in inquiring; wherever he recognizes himself to be in error, there to return to me; wherever he recognizes me to be so, there to call me back. . . . And I would make this pious and safe agreement, . . . above all, in the case of those who inquire into the unity of the Trinity, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; because in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.
Augustine, On the Trinity 1.3.5
1—Introduction
One of the most noteworthy developments in contemporary philosophy of religion has been the ingress of Christian philosophers into areas normally considered the province of systematic theologians. In particular, many Christian philosophers have taken up a share of the task of formulating and defending coherent statements of Christian doctrine. In the next three chapters we shall examine briefly a few of the most important peculiarly Christian doctrines that have attracted philosophical attention.
It is remarkable that despite the fact that its founder and earliest protagonists were monotheistic Jews, Christianity, while zealous to preserve Jewish monotheism, came to enunciate a nonunitarian concept of God. On the Christian view, God is not a single person, as traditionally conceived, but is tripersonal. There are three persons, denominated the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who deserve to be called God, and yet there is but one God, not three. This startling rethinking of Jewish monotheism doubtless grew out of reflection on the radical self-understanding of Jesus of Nazareth himself and on the charismatic experience of the early church. Although many New Testament critics have called into question the historical Jesus’ use of explicit christological titles, a very strong historical case can be made for Jesus’ self-understanding as the Son of man (a divine-human eschatological figure in Daniel 7) and the unique Son of God (Mt 11:27; Mk 13:32; Lk 20:9-19). Moreover, something of a consensus has emerged among New Testament critics that in his teachings and actions—such as his assertion of personal authority, his revising of the divinely given Mosaic law, his proclamation of the in-breaking of God’s reign or kingdom into history in his person, his performing miracles and exorcisms as signs of the advent of that kingdom, his messianic pretensions to restore Israel, and his claim to forgive sins—Jesus enunciated an implicit Christology, putting himself in God’s place. The German theologian Horst Georg Pöhlmann asserts,
This unheard of claim to authority, as it comes to expression in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, is implicit Christology, since it presupposes a unity of Jesus with God that is deeper than that of all men, namely a unity of essence. This . . . claim to authority is explicable only from the side of his deity. This authority only God himself can claim. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior; either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur.
Moreover, the post-Easter church continued to experience the presence and power of Christ among them, despite his physical absence. Jesus himself had been a charismatic, imbued with the Spirit of God; and the Jesus movement which followed him was likewise a charismatic fellowship that experienced individually and corporately the supernatural filling and gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit was thought to stand in the place of the risen and ascended Christ and to continue in his temporary absence his ministry to his people (Jn 7:39; 14:16-17; 15:26; 16:7-16; Rom 8:9-10; Gal 4:6).
In the pages of the New Testament, then, we find the raw data that the doctrine of the Trinity later sought to systematize. The New Testament church remained faithful to its heritage of Jewish monotheism in affirming that there is only one God (Mk 12:29; Rom 3:29-30; 1 Cor 8:4; 1 Tim 2:5; Jas 2:19). In accord with the portrayal of God in the Old Testament (Is 63:16) and the teaching of Jesus (Mt 6:9), Christians also conceived of God as Father, a distinct person from Jesus his Son (Mt 11:27; 26:39; Mk 1:9-11; Jn 17:5-26). Indeed, in New Testament usage, God (ho theos) typically refers to God the Father (e.g., Gal 4:4-6). Now this occasioned a problem for the New Testament church: If God designates the Father, how can one affirm the deity of Christ without identifying him as the Father? In response to this difficulty the New Testament writers refer to Jesus principally as “Lord” (kyrios), the same word the Septuagint translators used in place of God’s name Yahweh. The New Testament writers applied to Jesus Old Testament proof texts concerning Yahweh (e.g., Rom 10:9, 13). Indeed, the confession “Jesus is Lord” was the central confession of the early church (1 Cor 12:3), and they not only called Jesus “Lord” but also addressed him in prayer as Lord (1 Cor 16:22). This difference-in-sameness can lead to odd locutions like Paul’s confession “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6).
Furthermore, the New Testament church, not content with the use of divine nomenclature for Christ, also ascribed to him God’s role as the Creator and Sustainer of all reality apart from God (Col 1:15-20; Heb 1:1-4; Jn 1:1-3). In places restraint is thrown to the winds, and Jesus is explicitly affirmed to be (ho) theos (Jn 1:1, 18; 20:28; Rom 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb 1:8-12; 1 Jn 5:20). Noting that the oldest Christian sermon, the oldest account of a Christian martyr, the oldest pagan report of the church, and the oldest liturgical prayer (1 Cor 16:22) all refer to Christ as Lord and God, Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of Christian thought, concludes, “Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that ‘God’ was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.”
Finally, the Holy Spirit, who is also identified as God (Acts 5:3-4) and the Spirit of God (Mt 12:28; 1 Cor 6:11), is conceived as personally distinct from both the Father and the Son (Mt 28:19; Lk 11:13; Jn 14:26; 15:26; Rom 8:26-27; 2 Cor 13:13; 1 Pet 1:1-2). As these and other passages make clear, the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force, but a personal reality who teaches and intercedes for believers, who possesses a mind, who can be grieved and lied to, and who is ranked as an equal partner with the Father and the Son.
In short, the New Testament church was sure that only one God exists. But they also believed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while personally distinct, all deserve to be called God. The challenge facing the postapostolic church was how to make sense of these affirmations. How could the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each be God without there being either three Gods or only one person?
2—Historical Background
2.1 Logos Christology
The stage for both the later trinitarian controversy and the christological controversies, in which the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation were forged and given creedal form, was set by the early Greek Apologists of the second century, such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, and Athenagoras. Connecting the divine Word (Logos) of the prologue of John’s Gospel (Jn 1:1-5) with the divine Logos (Reason) as it played a role in the system of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC–ca. AD 50), the Apologists sought to explain Christian doctrine in Philonic categories. For good or ill, their appropriation of Hellenistic thought is one of the most striking examples of the profound and enduring influence of philosophy on Christian theology. For Philo, the Logos was God’s reason, which is the creative principle behind the creation of the world and which, in turn, informs the world with its rational structure. Similarly, for the Christian Apologists, God the Father, existing alone without the world, had within himself his Word or Reason or Wisdom (cf. Prov 8:22-31), which somehow proceeded forth from him, like a spoken word from a speaker’s mind, to become a distinct individual who created the world and ultimately became incarnate as Jesus Christ. The procession of the Logos from the Father was variously conceived as taking place either at the moment of creation or, alternatively, eternally. Although christological concerns occupied center stage, the Holy Spirit too might be understood to proceed from God the Father’s mind. Here is how Athenagoras describes it:
The Son of God is the Word of the Father in Ideal Form and energizing power; for in his likeness and through him all things came into existence, which presupposes that the Father and the Son are one. Now since the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son by a powerful unity of Spirit, the Son of God is the mind and reason of the Father. . . . He is the first begotten of the Father. The term is used not because he came into existence (for God, who is eternal mind, had in himself his word or reason from the beginning, since he was eternally rational) but because he came forth to serve as Ideal Form and Energizing Power for everything material. . . . The . . . Holy Spirit . . . we regard as an effluence of God which flows forth from him and returns like a ray of the sun. (A Plea for the Christians 10)
According to this doctrine, then, there is one God, but he is not an undifferentiated unity. Rather, certain aspects of his mind become expressed as distinct individuals. The Logos doctrine of the Apologists thus involves a fundamental reinterpretation of the fatherhood of God: God is not merely the Father of mankind or even, especially, of Jesus of Nazareth; rather, he is the Father from whom the Logos is begotten before all worlds. Christ is not merely the only-begotten Son of God in virtue of his incarnation; rather, he is begotten of the Father even in his preincarnate divinity.
2.2 Modalism
The Logos-doctrine of the Greek Apologists was taken up into Western theology by Irenaeus, who identifies God’s Word with the Son and his Wisdom with the Holy Spirit (Against Heresies 4.20.3; cf. 2.30.9). During the following century a quite different conception of the divine personages emerged in contrast to the Logos doctrine. Noetus, Praxeus, and Sabellius espoused a unitarian view of God, variously called modalism, monarchianism, or Sabellianism, according to which the Son and Spirit are not distinct individuals from the Father. Either it was the Father who became incarnate, suffered, and died—the Son being at most the human aspect of Christ—or else the one God sequentially assumed three roles as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relation to his creatures. In his refutation of modalism, Against Praxeas, the North African church father Tertullian brought greater precision to many of the ideas and much of the terminology later adopted in the creedal formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity. While anxious to preserve the divine monarchy (a term employed by the Greek Apologists to designate monotheism), Tertullian insisted that we dare not ignore the divine economy (a term borrowed from Irenaeus), by which Tertullian seems to mean the way in which the one God exists. The error of the monarchians or modalists is their “thinking that one cannot believe in one only God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the very selfsame person.” But while “all are of one, by unity (that is) of substance,” Tertullian insists that
the mystery of the economy . . . distributes the unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three persons—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: three, however, not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Against Praxeas 2)
In saying that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one in substance, Tertullian employs the word substance in both the senses explained by Aristotle. First, there is, as Tertullian affirms, just “one God,” one thing that is God. But Tertullian also means that the three distinct persons share the same essential nature. Thus, in his exegesis of the monarchian prooftext “I and my Father are one” (Jn 10:30), Tertullian points out (1) that the plural subject and verb intimate that there are two entities, namely, two persons, involved, but (2) that the predicate is an abstract (not a personal) noun—unum, not unus. He comments, “Unum, a neuter term, . . . does not imply singularity of number, but unity of essence, likeness, conjunction, affection on the Father’s part, . . . and submission on the Son’s. . . . When He says, ‘I and my Father are one’ in essence —unum—He shows that there are two, whom He puts on an equality and unites in one” (22).
So when Tertullian says that the one substance is distributed into three forms or aspects, he is not affirming modalism, but the diversity of three persons sharing the same nature. Indeed, he is so bold in affirming the distinctness of the persons, even calling them “three beings” (13; cf. 22), that he seems at times to court tritheism. Comparing the Father and the Son to the sun and a sunbeam, he declares, “For although I make not two suns, still I shall reckon both the sun and its ray to be as much two things and two forms of one undivided substance, as God and His Word, as the Father and the Son” (13). Thus he conceives the Son to be “really a substantive being, by having a substance of his own, in such a way that he may be regarded as an objective thing and a person, and so able . . . to make two, the Father and the Son, God and the Word” (7). Tertullian even seems to think of the Father and Son as distinct parcels of the same spiritual stuff out of which, in his idiosyncratic view, he believed God to be constituted (7).
Conventional wisdom has it that in affirming that God is three persons, church fathers like Tertullian meant at most three individuals, not three persons in the modern, psychological sense of three centers of self-consciousness. We shall return to this issue when we look at the creedal formulation of trinitarian doctrine, but for now we may note that an examination of Tertullian’s statements suggests that such a claim is greatly exaggerated. In a remarkable passage aimed at illustrating the doctrine of the Son as the immanent Logos in the Father’s mind, Tertullian invites his reader, who, he says, is created in the image and likeness of God, to consider the role of reason in the reader’s own self-reflective thinking. “Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your conception” (5). Tertullian envisions one’s own reason as a sort of dialogue partner when one is engaged in self-reflective thought. No doubt every one of us has carried on such an internal dialogue, which requires not merely consciousness but self-consciousness. Tertullian’s point is that “in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you” through which you generate thought. He realizes, of course, that no human being is literally two persons, but he holds that “all this is much more fully transacted in God,” who possesses his immanent Logos even when he is silent. Or again, in proving the personal distinctness of the Father and the Son, Tertullian appeals to scriptural passages employing first- and second-person indexical words distinguishing Father and Son. Alluding to Psalm 2:7, Tertullian says to the modalist, “If you want me to believe Him to be both the Father and the Son, show me some other passage where it is declared, ‘The Lord said unto himself, I am my own Son, today I have begotten myself’” (11). He quotes numerous passages that, through their use of personal indexicals, illustrate the I-Thou relationship in which the persons of the Trinity stand to one another. He challenges the modalist to explain how a Being who is absolutely one and singular can use first-person plural pronouns, as in “Let us make man in our image.” Tertullian clearly thinks of the Father, Son and Spirit as individuals capable of employing first-person indexicals and addressing one another with second-person indexicals, which entails that they are self-conscious persons. Hence, “in these few quotations the distinction of persons in the Trinity is clearly set forth” (11). Tertullian thus implicitly affirms that the persons of the Trinity are three distinct, self-conscious individuals.
The only qualification that might be made to this picture lies in a vestige of the Apologists’ Logos doctrine in Tertullian’s theology. He not only accepts their view that there are relations of derivation among the persons of the Trinity, but that these relations are not eternal. The Father he calls “the fountain of the Godhead” (29); “the Father is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole” (9). The Father exists eternally with his immanent Logos; and at creation, before the beginning of all things, the Son proceeds from the Father and so becomes his first begotten Son, through whom the world is created (19). Thus the Logos only becomes the Son of God when he proceeds from the Father as a substantive being (7). Tertullian is fond of using analogies such as the sunbeam emitted by the sun or the river by the spring (8, 22) to illustrate the oneness of substance of the Son as he proceeds from the Father. The Son, then, is “God of God” (15). Similarly, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son (4). It seems that Tertullian would consider the Son and Spirit to be distinct persons only after their procession from the Father (7), but it is clear that he insists on their personal distinctness from at least that point.
Through the efforts of church fathers like Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, and Novatian, the church came to reject modalism as a proper understanding of God and to affirm the distinctness of the three persons called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. During the ensuing century, the church was confronted with a challenge from the opposite end of the spectrum: Arianism, which affirmed the personal distinctness of the Father and the Son, but only at the sacrifice of the Son’s deity.
2.3 Arianism
In 319 an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius began to propagate his doctrine that the Son was not of the same substance with the Father, but was rather created by the Father before the beginning of the world. This marked the beginning of the great trinitarian controversy, which lasted through the end of the century and gave us the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds. Although Alexandrian theologians like Origen, in contrast to Tertullian, had argued that the begetting of the Logos from the Father did not have a beginning but is from eternity, the reason most theologians found Arius’s doctrine unacceptable was not, as Arius fancied, so much because he affirmed, “The Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning” (Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia 4-5). Rather, what was objectionable was that Arius denied even that the Logos preexisted immanently in God before being begotten or was in any sense from the substance of the Father, so that his beginning was not, in fact, a begetting but a creation ex nihilo and that therefore the Son is a creature. As Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, was later to protest, on Arius’s view, God without the Son lacked his Word and his Wisdom, which is blasphemous (Orations Against the Arians 1.6.17), and the Son is “a creature and a work, not proper to the Father’s essence” (1.3.9). In 325 a council at Antioch condemned anyone who says that the Son is a creature or originated or made or not truly an offspring or that once he did not exist; later that year the ecumenical Council of Nicaea issued its creedal formulation of trinitarian belief.
The creed states,
We believe in one God, the Father All Governing, creator of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not created, of the same essence as the Father, through whom all things came into being, both in heaven and in earth; Who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate, becoming human. He suffered and the third day he rose, and ascended into the heavens. And he will come to judge both the living and the dead.
And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit.
But, those who say, Once he was not, or he was not before his generation, or he came to be out of nothing, or who assert that he, the Son of God, is a different hypostasis or ousia, or that he is a creature, or changeable, or mutable, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them.
Several features of this statement deserve comment: (1) The Son (and by implication the Holy Spirit) is declared to be of the same essence (homoousios) as the Father. This is to say that the Son and Father both share the same divine nature. Therefore, the Son cannot be a creature, having, as Arius claimed, a nature different (heteroousios) from the divine nature. (2) The Son is declared to be begotten, not made. This anti-Arian affirmation is said with respect to Christ’s divine nature, not his human nature, and represents the legacy of the old Logos Christology. In the creed of Eusebius of Caesarea, used as a draft of the Nicene statement, the word Logos stood where Son stands in the Nicene Creed, and the Logos is declared to be “begotten of the Father before all ages.” The condemnations appended to the Nicene Creed similarly imply that this begetting is eternal. Athanasius explains through a subtle word play that while both the Father and the Son are agenetos (that is, did not come into being at some moment), nevertheless only the Father is agennetos (that is, unbegotten), whereas the Son is gennetos (begotten) eternally from the Father (Four Discourses Against the Arians 1.9.31). (3) The condemnation of those who say that Christ “is a different hypostasis or ousia” from the Father occasioned great confusion in the church. For Western, Latin-speaking theologians the Greek word hypostasis was etymologically parallel to, and hence synonymous with, the Latin substantia (substance). Therefore, they denied a plurality of hypostaseis in God. Although the Nicene Creed was drafted in Greek, the meaning of the terms is Western. For many Eastern, Greek-speaking theologians hypostasis and ousia were not synonymous. Ousia meant “substance,” and hypostasis designated a concrete individual, a property-bearer. As Gregory of Nyssa, one of three Cappadocian church fathers renowned for their explication of the Nicene Creed, explains, a hypostasis is “what subsists and is specially and peculiarly indicated by [a] name,” for example, Paul, in contrast to ousia, which refers to the universal nature common to things of a certain type—for example, man (Epistle 38.2-3). The Father and Son, while sharing the same substance, are clearly distinct hypostaseis, since they have different properties (only the Father for example, has the property of being unbegotten). Therefore, the Nicene Creed’s assertion that the Father and Son are the same hypostasis sounded like modalism to many Eastern thinkers. After decades of intense debate, this terminological confusion was cleared up at the Council of Alexandria in 362, which affirmed homoousios but allowed that there are three divine hypostaseis.
What were these hypostaseis, all sharing the divine nature? The unanimous answer of orthodox theologians was that they were three persons. It is customarily said, as previously mentioned, that we must not read this affirmation anachronistically, as employing the modern psychological concept of a person. This caution must, however, be qualified. While hypostasis does not mean “person,” nevertheless a rational hypostasis comes very close to what we mean by a “person.” For Aristotle the generic essence of man is captured by the phrase “rational animal.” Animals have souls but lack rationality, and it is the property of rationality that serves to distinguish human beings from other animals. Thus a rational hypostasis can only be what we call a person. It is noteworthy that Gregory of Nyssa’s illustration of three hypostaseis having one substance is Peter, James, and John, all exemplifying the same human nature (To Ablabius That There Are Not Three Gods). How else can this be taken than as an intended illustration of three persons with one nature? Moreover, the Cappadocians ascribe to the three divine hypostaseis the properties constitutive of personhood, such as mutual knowledge, love, and volition, even if, as Gregory of Nazianzus emphasizes, these are always in concord and so incapable of being severed from one another (Third Theological Oration: On the Son 2). Thus Gregory boasts that his flock, unlike the Sabellians, “worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One Godhead; God the Father, God the Son and (do not be angry) God the Holy Spirit, One Nature in Three Personalities, intellectual, perfect, self-existent, numerically separate, but not separate in Godhead” (Oration 33.16). The ascription of personal properties is especially evident in the robust defense of the full equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son as a divine hypostasis. Basil states that the Holy Spirit is not only “incorporeal, purely immaterial, and indivisible” but also that “we are compelled to direct our thoughts on high, and to think of an intelligent being, boundless in power” (On the Holy Spirit 9.22). Quoting 1 Corinthians 2:11, he compares God’s Spirit to the human spirit in each of us (16.40) and states that in his sanctifying work the Holy Spirit makes people spiritual “by fellowship with Himself” (9.23). The Cappadocians would have resisted fiercely any attempt to treat the Holy Spirit as an impersonal, divine force. Thus their intention was to affirm that there really are three persons in a rich psychological sense who are the one God.
In sum, while modalism affirmed the equal deity of the three persons at the expense of their personal distinctness, orthodox Christians maintained both the equal deity and personal distinctness of the three persons. Moreover, they did so while claiming to maintain the commitment of all parties to monotheism. There exists only one God, who is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
2.4 Models of the Trinity
Does the doctrine of the Trinity make sense? Enlightenment thinkers denounced the doctrine as incoherent, but during the twentieth century many theologians came to a fresh appreciation of trinitarian theology, and in recent decades a number of Christian philosophers have sought to formulate philosophically defensible versions of the doctrine of the Trinity. Two broad models or approaches are typically identified: social trinitarianism, which lays greater emphasis on the diversity of the persons, and Latin trinitarianism, which places greater stress on the unity of God. This nomenclature, however, is misleading, since the great Latin church fathers Tertullian and Hilary were both social trinitarians, as was Athanasius, a fount of Latin theology. Therefore, we shall instead contrast social trinitarianism with what one wag has called anti social trinitarianism. The central commitment of social trinitarianism is that in God there are three distinct centers of self-consciousness, each with its proper intellect and will. The central commitment of anti social trinitarianism is that there is only one God, whose unicity of intellect and will is not compromised by the diversity of persons. Social trinitarianism threatens to veer into tritheism; anti social trinitarianism is in danger of lapsing into unitarianism.
Social trinitarians typically look to the Cappadocian fathers as their champions. As we have seen, they explain the difference between substance and hypostasis as the difference between a generic essence, say, man, and particular instances of it, in this case, several men like Peter, James, and John. This leads to an obvious question: If Peter, James, and John are three men each having the same nature, then why would not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit similarly be three Gods each having the divine nature?
In his letter To Ablabius That There Are Not Three Gods, Gregory of Nyssa struggled to answer this question. He emphasizes the primacy of the universal, which is one and unchangeable in each of the three men. This is merely to highlight a universal property, which Gregory holds to be one in its many instantiations, rather than the property instance of that universal in each man. Gregory, like Plato, thinks of the universal as the primary reality. He advises that rather than speaking of three Gods, we ought instead to speak of one man. But this answer solves nothing. Even if we think of the universal as the primary reality, still it is undeniable that there are three instances of that reality who, in the one case, are three distinct men, as is obvious from the fact that one man can cease to exist without the others ceasing to do so. Similarly, even if the one divine nature is the primary reality, still it is undeniably exemplified by three hypostaseis, who should each be an instance of deity.
In order to block the inference to three Gods, Gregory also appeals to the ineffability of the divine nature and to the fact that all the operations of the Trinity toward the world involve the participation of all three persons. But even granted his assumptions, one cannot justifiably conclude that there are not three cooperatively acting individuals who each share this ineffable nature, and any remaining indistinguishability seems purely epistemic, not ontological.
Gregory goes on to stress that every operation between God and creation finds its origin in the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is perfected by the Holy Spirit. Because of this, he claims, we cannot speak of those who conjointly and inseparably carry out these operations as three Gods. But Gregory’s inference seems unjustified. Simply because we creatures cannot distinguish the persons who carry out such operations, one cannot therefore conclude that there are not three instances of the divine nature at work; moreover, the very fact that these operations originate in the Father, proceed through the Son, and are perfected by the Spirit seems to prove that there are three distinct if inseparable operations in every work of the Trinity toward creation.
Finally, Gregory appears to deny that the divine nature can be multiply instantiated. He identifies the principle of individuation as “bodily appearance, and size, and place, and difference in figure and color”—“That which is not thus circumscribed is not enumerated, and that which is not enumerated cannot be contemplated in multitude.” Therefore, the divine nature “does not admit in its own case the signification of multitude.” But if this is Gregory’s argument, not only is it incompatible with there being three Gods, but it also precludes there being even one God. The divine nature would be uninstantiable, since there is no principle to individuate it. If it cannot be enumerated, there cannot even be one. On the other hand, if Gregory’s argument intends merely to show that there is just one generic divine nature, not many, then he has simply proved too little: for the universal nature may be one, but multiply instantiated. Given that there are three hypostaseis in the Godhead, distinguished according to Gregory by the intratrinitarian relations, then there should be three Gods. The most pressing task of contemporary social trinitarians is to find some more convincing answer to why, on their view, there are not three Gods.
Anti social trinitarians typically look to Latin-speaking theologians like Augustine and Aquinas as their champions. To a considerable extent the appeal to Augustine rests on a misinterpretation that results from taking in isolation his analogies of the Trinity in the human mind, such as the lover, the beloved, and love itself (On the Trinity 8.10.14; 9.2.2) or memory, understanding, and will (or love) (10.11.17-18). Augustine explicitly states that the persons of the Trinity are not identified with these features of God’s mind; rather, they are “an image of the Trinity in man” (14.8.11; 15.8.14). “Do we,” he asks, “in such manner also see the Trinity that is in God?” He answers, “Doubtless we either do not at all understand and behold the invisible things of God by those things that are made, or if we behold them at all, we do not behold the Trinity in them” (15.7.10). In particular, Augustine realizes that these features are not each identical to a person but rather are features that any single human person possesses (15.7.11). Identifying the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the divine memory, understanding, and love, Augustine recognizes, would lead to the absurd conclusion that the Father knows himself only by the Son or loves himself only by the Holy Spirit, as though the Son were the understanding of the Father and the Spirit, and the Father the memory of the Spirit and the Son! Rather, memory, understanding, and will (or love) must belong to each of the individual persons (15.7.12). Augustine concludes with the reflection that having found in one human person an image of the Trinity, he had desired to illuminate the relation among the three divine persons; but in the end three things which belong to one person cannot suit the three persons of the Trinity (15.24.45).
Anti social trinitarians frequently interpret Augustine to hold that the persons of the Trinity just are various relations subsisting in God. But this is not what Augustine says (5.3.4–5.5.6). Arians had objected that if the Father is essentially unbegotten and the Son essentially begotten, then the Father and Son cannot share the same essence or substance (homoousios). In response to this ingenious objection Augustine claims that the distinction between Father and Son is a matter neither of different essential properties nor of different accidental properties. Rather, the persons are distinguished in virtue of the relations in which they stand. Because “Father” and “Son” are relational terms implying the existence of something else, Augustine thinks that properties like begotten by God cannot belong to anything’s essence. He evidently assumes that only intrinsic properties go to constitute something’s essence. But if being begotten is not part of the Son’s essence, is it not accidental to him? No, says Augustine, for it is eternally and immutably the case for the Son to be begotten. Augustine’s answer is not adequate, however, since eternality and immutability are not sufficient for necessity; there could still be possible worlds in which the person who in the actual world is the Father does not beget a Son and so is not a Father. Augustine should instead claim that Father and Son imply internal relations between the persons of the Godhead, so that there is no possible world in which they do not stand in that relation. The Father and Son would share the same intrinsic essential properties, but they would differ in virtue of their differing relational properties or the different internal relations in which they stand. Note what Augustine does not say, namely, that the Father and Son just are relations. It is true that Augustine felt uneasy about the terminology of “three persons” because this seems to imply three instances of a generic type and hence three Gods (5.9.10; 7.4.7-8). He accepted the terminology somewhat grudgingly for want of a better word. But he did not try to reduce the persons to mere relations.
For a bona fide example of anti social trinitarianism, we may turn to Thomas Aquinas, who pushes the Augustinian analogy to its apparent limit. Aquinas holds that there is a likeness of the Trinity in the human mind insofar as it understands itself and loves itself (Summa contra gentiles 4.26.6). We find in the mind the mind itself, the mind conceived in the intellect, and the mind beloved in the will. The difference between this human likeness and the Trinity is, first, that the human mind’s acts of understanding and will are not identical with its being and, second, that the mind as understood and the mind as beloved do not subsist and so are not persons. By contrast, Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity implies that God’s acts of understanding and willing are identical with his being, and he further holds (paradoxically) that God as understood and God as beloved do subsist and therefore count as distinct persons from God the Father. According to Aquinas, since God knows himself, there is in God the one who knows and the object of that knowledge, which is the one known. The one known exists in the one knowing as his Word. They share the same essence and are indeed identical to it, but they are relationally distinct (4.11.13). Indeed, Aquinas holds that the different divine persons just are the different relations in God, like paternity (being father of) and filiation (being son of ) (Summa theologiae 1a.40.2). Despite his commitment to divine simplicity, Aquinas regards these relations as subsisting entities in God (Summa contra gentiles 4.14.6, 11). Because the one knowing generates the one known and they share the same essence, they are related as Father to Son. Moreover, God loves himself, so that God as beloved is relationally distinct from God as loving (4.19.7-12) and is called the Holy Spirit. Since God’s knowing and willing are not really distinct, the Son and Holy Spirit would be one person if the only difference between them were that one proceeds by way of God’s knowing himself and the other by way of God’s loving himself. But they are distinct because only the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son.
3—Assessment of the Models
3.1 Anti Social Trinitarianism
Is Thomistic anti social trinitarianism viable? Thomas’s doctrine of the Trinity is doubtless inconsistent with his doctrine of divine simplicity. Intuitively, it seems obvious that a being that is absolutely without composition and transcends all distinctions cannot have real relations subsisting within it, much less be three distinct persons. More specifically, Aquinas’s contention that each of the three persons has the same divine essence entails, given divine simplicity, that each person just is that essence. But if two things are identical with some third thing, they are identical with each other. Therefore, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cannot be distinct persons or relations. Since this unwelcome conclusion arises not so much from Aquinas’s trinitarian doctrine as from the doctrine of divine simplicity, and since we have already found reason to call that doctrine seriously into question, let us ask whether Thomas’s account of anti social trinitarianism is viable once freed of the constraints of the simplicity doctrine.
It seems not. Without begging the question in favor of social trinitarianism, it can safely be said that on no reasonable understanding of person can a person be equated with a relation. Relations do not cause things, know truths, or love people in the way the Bible says God does. Moreover, to think that the intentional objects of God’s knowing himself and loving himself constitute in any sense really distinct persons is wholly implausible. Even if God the Father were a person and not a mere relation, there is no reason, even in Aquinas’s own metaphysical system, why the Father as understood and loved by himself would be different persons. The distinction involved here is merely that between oneself as subject (“I”) and as object (“me”). There is no more reason to think that the individual designated by “I,” “me,” and “myself” constitutes a plurality of persons in God’s case than in any human being’s case. Anti social trinitarianism seems to reduce to classical modalism.
Suppose the anti social trinitarian insists that in God’s case the subsistent relations within God really do constitute distinct persons in a sufficiently robust sense. Then two problems present themselves. First, there arises an infinite regress of persons in the Godhead. If God as understood really is a distinct person called the Son, then the Son, like the Father, must also understand himself and love himself. There are thereby generated two further persons of the Godhead, who in turn can also consider themselves as intentional objects of their knowledge and will, thereby generating further persons ad infinitum. We wind up with a fractal-like infinite series of Trinities within Trinities in the Godhead. Aquinas actually considers this objection, and his answer is that “just as the Word is not another god, so neither is He another intellect; consequently, not another act of understanding; hence, not another word” (Summa contra gentiles 4.13.2). This answer only reinforces the previous impression of modalism, for the Son’s intellect and act of understanding just are the Father’s intellect and act of understanding; the Son’s understanding himself is identical with the Father’s understanding himself. The Son seems but a name given to the Father’s me. Second, one person does not exist in another person. On Aquinas’s view the Son or Word remains in the Father (4.11.180). While we can make sense of a relation’s existing in a person, it seems unintelligible to say that one person exists in another person. (Two persons’ inhabiting the same body is obviously not a counterexample.) Classic trinitarian doctrine affirms that more than one person may exist in one being, but persons are not the sort of entities that exist in another person. It is true that the classic doctrine involves a perichoresis (circumincessio) or mutual indwelling of the three persons in one another, which is often enunciated as each person’s existing in the others. But this may be understood in terms of complete harmony of will and action, of mutual love, and full knowledge of one another with respect to the persons of the Godhead; beyond that it remains obscure what literally could be meant by one person’s being in another person. Again, we seem forced to conclude that the subsisting relations posited by the anti social trinitarian do not rise to the standard of personhood.
3.2 Social Trinitarianism
Are there brighter prospects for a viable social trinitarianism? Brian Leftow has distinguished three forms of social trinitarianism on offer: Trinity monotheism, group mind monotheism, and functional monotheism.
3.2.1 Functional Monotheism
To consider these in reverse order, functional monotheism appeals to the harmonious, interrelated functioning of the divine persons as the basis for viewing them as one God. For example, Richard Swinburne considers God to be a logically indivisible, collective substance composed of three persons who are also substances. He sees the Father as the everlasting active cause of the Son and Spirit, and the latter as permissive causes, in turn, of the Father. Because all of them are omnipotent and perfectly good, they cooperate in all their volitions and actions. It is logically impossible that any one person should exist or act independently of the other two. Swinburne considers this understanding sufficient to capture the intention of the church councils, whose monotheistic affirmations, he thinks, meant to deny that there were three independent divine beings who could exist and act without one another.
Leftow blasts Swinburne’s view as “a refined paganism,” a thinly veiled form of polytheism. Since, on Swinburne’s view, each person is a discrete substance, it is a distinct being, even if that being is causally dependent on some other being for its existence. Indeed, the causal dependence of the Son on the Father is problematic for the Son’s being divine. For on Swinburne’s account, the Son exists in the same way that creatures exist—only due to a divine person’s conserving him in being and not annihilating him. Indeed, given that the Son is a distinct substance from the Father, the Father’s begetting the Son amounts to creatio ex nihilo, which as Arius saw, makes the Son a creature. If we eliminate from Swinburne’s account the causal dependence relation among the divine persons, then we are stuck with the surprising and inexplicable fact that there just happen to exist three divine beings all sharing the same nature, which seems incredible. As for the unity of will among the three divine persons, there is no reason at all to see this as constitutive of a collective substance, for three separate Gods who were each omnipotent and morally perfect would similarly act cooperatively, if Swinburne’s argument against the possibility of dissension is correct. Thus there is no salient difference between functional monotheism and polytheism.
3.2.2 Group Mind Monotheism
Group mind monotheism holds that the Trinity is a mind that is composed of the minds of the three persons in the Godhead. If such a model is to be theologically acceptable, the mind of the Trinity cannot be a self-conscious self in addition to the three self-conscious selves who are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for otherwise we have not a Trinity but a Quaternity, so to speak. Therefore, the Trinity itself cannot be construed as an agent, endowed with intellect and will, in addition to the three persons of the Trinity. The three persons would have to be thought of as subminds of the mind of God. In order to render such a view intelligible, Leftow appeals to thought experiments involving surgical operations in which the cerebral commissures, the network of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, are severed. Such operations have been performed as a treatment for severe epilepsy, and the results are provocative. Patients sometimes behave as though the two halves of their brain were operating independently of each other. The interpretation of such results is controversial, but one interpretation, suggested by various thought experiments, is that the patients come to have two minds. Now the question arises whether in a normally functioning human being we do not already have two separable subminds linked to their respective hemispheres that cooperate together in producing a single human consciousness. In such a case the human mind would itself be a group mind.
Applying this notion of a group mind to the Trinity, we must, if we are to remain biblically orthodox, maintain that the minds of the persons of the Trinity are more than mere subminds that either never come to self-consciousness or else share a common mental state as a single self-consciousness. For such a view is incompatible with the persons’ existing in I-Thou relationships with one another; on such a view God really is only one person.
In order to be theologically acceptable, group mind monotheism will have to be construed dynamically, as a process in which the subminds emerge into self-consciousness to replace the single trinitarian self-consciousness. In other words, what group mind monotheism offers is a strikingly modern version of the old Logos doctrine of the Greek Apologists. The divine monarchy (the single self-consciousness of the Trinity) contains within itself an immanent Logos (a submind) that at the beginning of the creation of the world is deployed into the divine economy (the subminds emerge into self-consciousness in replacement of the former single self-consciousness).
This provocative model gives some sense to the otherwise very difficult idea of the Father’s begetting the Son in his divine nature. On the other hand, if we think of the primal self-consciousness of the Godhead as the Father, then the model requires that the person of the Father expires in the emergence of the three subminds into self-consciousness (cf. Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians 4.3). In order to avoid this unwelcome implication, one would need to think of some way in which the Father’s personal identity is preserved through the deployment of the divine economy, just as a patient survives a commissurotomy.
The whole model, of course, depends on the very controversial notion of subminds and their emergence into distinct persons. If we do not equate minds with persons, then the result of the deployment of the divine economy will be merely one person with three minds, which falls short of the doctrine of the Trinity. But if, as seems plausible, we understand minds and persons to exist in a one-to-one correspondence, then the emergence of three distinct persons raises once again the specter of tritheism. The driving force behind group mind monotheism is to preserve the unity of God’s being in a way functional monotheism cannot. But once the divine economy has been deployed, the group mind has lapsed away, and it is unclear why we do not now have three Gods in the place of one.
3.2.3 Trinity Monotheism
We turn finally to Trinity monotheism, which holds that while the persons of the Trinity are divine, it is the Trinity as a whole that is properly God. If this view is to be orthodox, it must hold that the Trinity alone is God and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while divine, are not Gods. Leftow presents the following challenge to this view:
Either the Trinity is a fourth case of the divine nature, in addition to the Persons, or it is not. If it is, we have too many cases of deity for orthodoxy. If it is not, and yet is divine, there are two ways to be divine—by being a case of deity, and by being a Trinity of such cases. If there is more than one way to be divine, Trinity monotheism becomes Plantingian Arianism. But if there is in fact only one way to be divine, then there are two alternatives. One is that only the Trinity is God, and God is composed of non-divine persons. The other is that the sum of all divine persons is somehow not divine. To accept this last claim would be to give up Trinity monotheism altogether.
Leftow’s dilemma is graphically exhibited in figure 31.1.
How should the Trinity monotheist respond to this dilemma? Starting with the first disjunction, he will clearly want to say that the Trinity is not a fourth instance of the divine nature, lest there be four divine persons. Moving then to the next set of options, he must say that the Trinity is divine, since that is entailed by Trinity monotheism. Now if the Trinity is divine but is not a fourth instance of the divine nature, this suggests that there is more than one way to be divine. This alternative is said to lead to Plantingian Arianism. What is that? Leftow defines it merely as “the positing of more than one way to be divine.” This is uninformative, however; what we want to know is why the view is objectionable. Leftow responds, “If we take the Trinity’s claim to be God seriously, . . . we wind up downgrading the Persons’ deity and/or [being] unorthodox.” The alleged problem is that if only the Trinity exemplifies the complete divine nature, then the way in which the persons are divine is less than fully divine.
Figure 31.1. Leftow’s dilemma for Trinity monotheism
This inference would follow, however, only if there were but one way to be divine (namely, by instantiating the divine nature); but the position asserts that there is more than one way to be divine. The persons of the Trinity are not divine in virtue of instantiating the divine nature. For presumably being triune is a property of the divine nature (God does not just happen to be triune); yet the persons of the Trinity do not have that property. It now becomes clear that the reason that the Trinity is not a fourth instance of the divine nature is that there are no other instances of the divine nature. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not instances of the divine nature, and that is why there are not three Gods. The Trinity is the sole instance of the divine nature, and therefore there is but one God. So while the statement “The Trinity is God” is an identity statement, statements about the persons like “The Father is God” are not identity statements. Rather, they perform other functions, such as ascribing a title or office to a person (like “Belshazzar is king,” which is not incompatible with there being coregents) or ascribing a property to a person (a way of saying, “The Father is divine,” as one might say, “Belshazzar is regal”).
So if the persons of the Trinity are not divine in virtue of being instances of the divine nature, in virtue of what are they divine? Consider an analogy. One way of being feline is to instantiate the nature of a cat. But there are other ways to be feline as well. A cat’s DNA or skeleton is feline, even if neither is a cat. Nor is this a sort of downgraded or attenuated felinity: a cat’s skeleton is fully and unambiguously feline. Indeed, a cat just is a feline animal, as a cat’s skeleton is a feline skeleton. Now if a cat is feline in virtue of being an instance of the cat nature, in virtue of what is a cat’s DNA or skeleton feline? One plausible answer is that they are natural parts of a cat which are unique to cats. Hence, being feline is truly predicable of any entity x if x either is a cat or is a distinctive part of a cat. This suggests that we could think of the persons of the Trinity as divine because they are parts of the Trinity, that is, parts of God. So being divine is truly predicable of any entity x if x either is a God or is a distinctive part of a God. Now obviously, the persons are not parts of God in the sense in which a skeleton is part of a cat; but given that the Father, for example, is not the whole Godhead, it seems undeniable that there is some sort of part-whole relation obtaining between the persons of the Trinity and the entire Godhead. Mereologically speaking, we can think of the Trinity as an individual composed of individuals, just as a wall is composed of stones.
Far from downgrading the divinity of the persons, such an account can be very illuminating of their contribution to the divine nature. For parts can possess properties that the whole does not, and the whole can have a property because some part has it. Thus, when we ascribe omniscience and omnipotence to God, we are not making the Trinity a fourth person or agent; rather, God has these properties because the persons do. Divine attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness are grounded in the persons’ possessing these properties, while divine attributes like necessity, aseity, and eternity are not so grounded. With respect to the latter, the persons have these properties because God as a whole has them. For parts can have some properties in virtue of the wholes of which they are parts. The point is that if we think of the divinity of the persons in terms of a part-whole relation to the Trinity that God is, then their deity seems in no way diminished because they are not instances of the divine nature.
Is such a solution unorthodox? It is true that the church fathers frequently insisted that the expression “from the substance of the Father” should not be understood to imply that the Son is formed by division or separation of the Father’s substance. But the concern here was clearly to avoid imagining the divine substance as a sort of “stuff” that could be parceled out into smaller pieces. Such a stricture is wholly compatible with our suggestion that no one person is identical to the whole Trinity, for the part-whole relation at issue here does not involve separable parts. It is simply to say that the Father, for example, is not the whole Godhead. The Latin church father Hilary seems to capture the idea nicely when he asserts, “Each divine person is in the Unity, yet no person is the one God” (On the Trinity 7.2; cf. 7.13, 32).
On the other hand, it must be admitted that a number of post-Nicene creeds, probably under the influence of the doctrine of divine simplicity, do include statements that can be construed to identify each person of the Trinity with God as a whole. For example, the Eleventh Council of Toledo (675) affirms, “Each single person is wholly God in Himself,” the so-called Athanasian Creed (fifth century) enjoins Christians “to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord,” and the Fourth Lateran Council, in condemning the idea of a divine Quaternity, declares, “Each of the Persons is that reality, viz., that divine substance, essence, or nature . . . what the Father is, this very same reality is also the Son, this the Holy Spirit.” If these declarations are intended to imply that statements like “The Father is God” are identity statements, then they threaten the doctrine of the Trinity with logical incoherence. For the logic of identity requires that if the Father is identical with God and the Son is identical with God, then the Father is identical with the Son, which the same councils also deny.
Peter van Inwagen has sought to defend the coherence of such creedal affirmations by appeal to relative identity. According to this notion, the identity relation is not absolute but is relative to a sort of thing. For example, we say, “The couch is the same color as the chair” (not “The couch is the chair”) or “The Lord Mayor John is the same person as the schoolboy Johnny” (not “The Lord Mayor is the schoolboy Johnny”). Given certain assumptions, van Inwagen shows that we can coherently affirm not only statements like “The Father is the same being as the Son,” or “The Father is not the same person as the Son,” but even paradoxical statements like “God is a person,” “God is the same person as the Father,” “God is the same person as the Son,” and “The Son is not the same person as the Father.” The fundamental problem with the appeal to relative identity, however, is that the very notion of relative identity is widely recognized to be spurious. Van Inwagen himself admits that apart from trinitarian theology, there are no known cases of allegedly relative identities that cannot be analyzed in terms of classical identity. Our example of the couch and the chair is not any kind of identity statement at all, for neither piece of furniture literally is a color; rather, they have the same color as a property. The example of the Lord Mayor is solved by taking seriously the tense of the sentence; we should say, “The Lord Mayor was the schoolboy Johnny.” Not only are the alleged cases of relative identity spurious, but there is a powerful theoretical argument against making identity relative. Suppose that two things x and y could be the same N but could not be the same P. In such a case x could not fail to be the same P as x itself, but y could. Therefore, x and y are discernible and so cannot be the same thing. But then it follows that they cannot be the same N, since they cannot be the same anything. Identity must therefore be absolute.
Finally, even granted relative identity, its application to trinitarian doctrine involves highly dubious assumptions. For example, it must be presupposed that x and y can be the identical being without being the identical person. Notice how different this is from saying that x and y are parts of the same being but are different persons. The latter statement is like the affirmation that x and y are parts of the same body but are different hands; the former is like the affirmation that x and y are the identical body but are different hands. Van Inwagen confesses that he has no answer to the questions of how x and y can be the same being without being the same person or, more generally, how x and y can be the same N without being the same P. It seems, then, that the ability to state coherently the trinitarian claims under discussion using the device of relative identity is a hollow victory.
Protestants bring all doctrinal statements, even conciliar creeds, especially creeds of nonecumenical councils, before the bar of Scripture. Nothing in Scripture warrants us in thinking that God is simple and that each person of the Trinity is identical to the whole Trinity. Nothing in Scripture prohibits us from maintaining that the three persons of the Godhead stand in some sort of part-whole relation to the Trinity. Therefore, Trinity monotheism cannot be condemned as unorthodox in a biblical sense. Trinity monotheism seems therefore to be thus far vindicated.
All of this still leaves us wondering, however, how three persons could be parts of the same being, rather than be three separate beings. What is the salient difference between three divine persons who are each a being and three divine persons who are together one being?
Perhaps we can get a start at this question by means of an analogy. (There is no reason to think that there must be any analogy to the Trinity among created things, but analogies may prove helpful as a springboard for philosophical reflection and formulation.) In Greco-Roman mythology there is said to stand guarding the gates of Hades a three-headed dog named Cerberus. We may suppose that Cerberus has three brains and therefore three distinct states of consciousness of whatever it is like to be a dog. Therefore, Cerberus, while a sentient being, does not have a unified consciousness. He has three consciousnesses. We could even assign proper names to each of them: Rover, Bowser, and Spike. These centers of consciousness are entirely discrete and might well come into conflict with one another. Still, in order for Cerberus to be biologically viable, not to mention in order to function effectively as a guard dog, there must be a considerable degree of cooperation among Rover, Bowser, and Spike. Despite the diversity of his mental states, Cerberus is clearly one dog. He is a single biological organism having a canine nature. Rover, Bowser, and Spike may be said to be canine too, though they are not three dogs, but parts of the one dog Cerberus. If Hercules were attempting to enter Hades and Spike snarled at him or bit his leg, he might well report, “Cerberus snarled at me” or “Cerberus attacked me.” Although the church fathers rejected analogies like Cerberus, once we give up divine simplicity, Cerberus does seem to represent what Augustine called an image of the Trinity among creatures.
We can enhance the Cerberus story by investing him with rationality and self-consciousness. In that case Rover, Bowser, and Spike are plausibly personal agents and Cerberus a tripersonal being. Now if we were asked what makes Cerberus a single being despite his multiple minds, we should doubtless reply that it is because he has a single physical body. But suppose Cerberus were to be killed and his minds survive the death of his body. In what sense would they still be one being? How would they differ intrinsically from three exactly similar minds that have always been unembodied? Since the divine persons are, prior to the incarnation, three unembodied minds, in virtue of what are they one being rather than three individual beings?
The question of what makes several parts constitute a single object rather than distinct objects is a difficult one. But in this case perhaps we can get some insight by reflecting on the nature of the soul. We have argued that souls are immaterial substances and have seen that it is plausible that animals have souls (see chap. 13). Souls come in a spectrum of varying capacities and faculties. Higher animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins possess souls more richly endowed with powers than those of iguanas and turtles. What makes the human soul a person is that the human soul is equipped with rational faculties of intellect and volition that enable it to be a self-reflective agent capable of self-determination. Now God is very much like an unembodied soul; indeed, as a mental substance God just seems to be a soul. We naturally equate a rational soul with a person, since the human souls with which we are acquainted are persons. But the reason human souls are individual persons is because each soul is equipped with one set of rational faculties sufficient for being a person. Suppose, then, that God is a soul that is endowed with three complete sets of rational cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood. Then God, though one soul, would not be one person but three, for God would have three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality, and volition, as social trinitarians maintain. God would clearly not be three discrete souls because the cognitive faculties in question are all faculties belonging to just one soul, one immaterial substance. God would therefore be one being that supports three persons, just as our own individual beings each support one person. Such a model of Trinity monotheism seems to give a clear sense to the classical formula “three persons in one substance.”
Finally, such a model does not feature (though it does not preclude) the derivation of one person from another, enshrined in the confession that the Son is “begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made” (Constantinopolitan Creed). God could simply exist eternally with his multiple cognitive faculties and capacities. This is, in our view, all for the better. For although creedally affirmed, the doctrine of the generation of the Son (and the procession of the Spirit) is a relic of Logos Christology that finds virtually no warrant in the biblical text and introduces a subordinationism into the Godhead, which anyone who affirms the full deity of Christ ought to find very troubling.
Finally, although the doctrine of the Trinity belongs to revealed theology rather than to natural theology, we may ask if there are any positive arguments that might be offered on behalf of the plausibility of that doctrine. We close with an argument that a number of Christian philosophers have defended for God’s being a plurality of persons. God is by definition the greatest conceivable being. As the greatest conceivable being, God must be perfect. Now a perfect being must be a loving being. For love is a moral perfection; it is better for a person to be loving rather than unloving. God therefore must be a perfectly loving being. Now it is of the very nature of love to give oneself away. Love reaches out to another person rather than centering wholly in oneself. So if God is perfectly loving by his very nature, he must be giving himself in love to another. But who is that other? It cannot be any created person, since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to his essence to create. So we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and yet no created persons exist. So created persons cannot sufficiently explain whom God loves. Moreover, contemporary cosmology makes it plausible that created persons have not always existed. But God is eternally loving. So again created persons alone are insufficient to account for God’s being perfectly loving. It therefore follows that the other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God himself.
In other words, God is not a single, isolated person, as unitarian forms of theism like Islam hold; rather, God is a plurality of persons, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms. On the unitarian view God is a person who does not give himself away essentially in love for another; he is focused essentially only on himself. Hence, he cannot be the most perfect being. But on the Christian view, God is a triad of persons in eternal, self-giving love relationships. Thus, since God is essentially loving, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian doctrine of God.
Chapter Summary
The doctrine of the Trinity arises from reflection on the scriptural data affirming the personal distinctness and deity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Early Logos Christology sought to explain the person of the Son in terms of the external projection of God’s immanent reason. Rejecting modalism’s denial of the distinctness of the persons and Arianism’s denial of the full deity of the persons, the church articulated the position that there exist three persons and one substance in God. Contemporary thought on the Trinity tends to divide between two camps: social trinitarianism and anti social trinitarianism. According to the former there are three centers of self-consciousness in God, whereas the latter tends to think of God in terms of a unitary consciousness. Anti social trinitarianism finds it difficult to avoid modalism, while the danger facing social trinitarianism is tritheism. Of the various forms of social trinitarianism, such as functional monotheism, group mind monotheism, and Trinity monotheism, the latter has the best prospects for facilitating an orthodox account of how the one God can be three persons. Since God is essentially self-giving love, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian doctrine of God.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
anti social trinitarianism
center of self-consciousness
christological controversies
Constantinopolitan Creed
Council of Nicaea
economy
Father
functional monotheism
Greek Apologists
group mind monotheism
heteroousios
historical Jesus
Holy Spirit
homoousios
hypostasis
identity statements
implicit Christology
individual
Jesus’ self-understanding
Latin trinitarianism
Logos
mind
modalism
monarchianism
monarchy
monotheism
nature
Nicene Creed
ousia
part-whole relation
person
personal indexicals
property instance
relation
relative identity
Sabellianism
social trinitarianism
Son
subminds
subordinationism
substance
tripersonal
tritheism
trinitarian controversy
Trinity monotheism
unitarian
universal property