The Distinctions Among the Three Persons
itself not in a plural but in a singular sense, of the Trinity V 8. But whatever is properly said of each individual in the same Trinity is by no means said of themselves but of each other, or of the creature, and therefore it is evident that they are said relatively, not substantially, ib. ch. 11. And accordingly, later theology said that essence and person differed not re but ratione, however not by a reasoning reason, i.e., rationally, nominally, as Sabellius thought, but reasoned by reason. The distinction did not consist in any substance but only in relation, yet this distinction was nevertheless real, objective, grounded in God's revelation. Essence and Person do not differ re but still really; the difference consists in a mode of subsistence, yet it is a real difference. The person is a mode of existence of the Essence; and therefore, the Persons differ from each other, just as one mode of existence differs from another, or according to the common example, just as the open hand differs from the closed hand.
The Distinctions Among the Three Persons If this distinction between Essence and Person and among the Persons themselves is to be expressed in a single word, there is indeed not much more to be said. However, this distinction becomes clearer when we imagine the relations themselves by which it is brought about in the Divine Essence. Although the Holy Scripture is strictly monotheistic, it attributes divine nature and perfections to the Son and Spirit and places them on par with the Father. Father,
Son, and Spirit are distinct subjects in the same Divine Essence. And as such, they also bear different names, have particular personal
attributes, and always act in a certain fixed order, both ad intra and ad extra. Therefore, the distinction of Persons lies entirely in the socalled idioms, properties, personal characteristics, namely, paternity
(unbegottenness, innascibility), active generation, active spiration, filiation (passive generation and active spiration), procession
(passive spiration). These, by their very nature, do not add anything new, no new substance, to the Essence. A human who becomes a father does not change his essence but merely enters into a relationship that was previously foreign to him. The Divine Essence is distinguished in its Fatherhood, Sonship, and Spirituality not substantively, but only by reason, relation. The same Essence is and is called Father when it is conceived in its relation to that same
Essence in the relation of the Son. And thus, the Persons differ only in that one is Father, another Son, and the third Spirit. Among humans, there is only a weak resemblance to this, but one that can still serve to clarify. Among humans, fatherhood and sonship are also nothing but a relationship, but that relationship presupposes a personal, individual subject that is the bearer of that relationship but otherwise exists in various ways apart from that fatherhood and sonship. Fatherhood is but an incidental attribute of human existence; some people never become fathers; those who do become fathers have not been fathers for a long time and gradually cease to be fathers, and so on. Human existence does not equate to fatherhood or sonship. However, it is not so in the Divine Essence.
Being God entirely coincides with being a person. Just as this [being a person] is for them to be God, to be great, to be good, so also this
[being a person] is for them to be a person. The Divine Essence, so to speak, is completely absorbed in each of the three Persons in their
Father, Son, and Spirithood. Paternity, filiation, and procession are not additional attributes of the Essence but the eternal forms of, the eternal, immanent relations in the Essence. In humans, the unfolding of the one human nature diverges; it occurs partly in the
individual, as they become personalities; it also takes place in humanity, whose members all represent human nature in a particular way; it finally comes about in the relationships of gender and kinship, which in turn reveal aspects of human nature to us. In humans, this triple unfolding of nature is divided in space and time; it is essentially expansion. However, in God, there is no separation or division.
The unfolding of His Essence into personality simultaneously encompasses His Essence into persons and also His
Essence into the immanent relations expressed by the names Father, Son, and Spirit instantly, absolutely, completely within itself. Thus,
God is the archetype of humanity; what in humanity diverges, lies side by side, is dispersed in the forms of space and time, is eternally and simply present in God. The processions within His Essence simultaneously bring about in God His absolute personality, His trinity, and His immanent relations. They are the absolute archetypes of all those processions through which human nature achieves its complete unfolding in the individual, in the family, and in humanity. Therefore, the three Persons are indeed each other, alius, but not aliud; the Trinity is from and in and to the Unity; the unfolding of the Essence occurs within the Essence and thus does not detract from the unity and simplicity of the Essence. Furthermore, the three Persons, although not aliud, are still alii, distinct subjects, hypostases, subsistences, which precisely bring about the absolute unfolding of the Essence of God within the Essence itself. And finally, these three Persons are absolutely related to each other through generation and spiration; their distinction as subjects perfectly coincides with their immanent relationships of kinship. The Father is solely and eternally Father, the Son is solely and eternally
Son, the Spirit is solely and eternally Spirit. And because each is themselves in a simple, eternal, absolute manner, therefore, the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is so as Father, the Son as Son, the Holy Spirit as Holy Spirit.
And because all three are God, they share in one divine nature, and thus, there is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to be praised forever.
After the doctrine of the Trinity has been outlined in general, it is now necessary to discuss the Three Persons separately. The first person is the Father, and His personal property is paternity or also agennēsia. In the Arian controversy, this word played a significant role. It was adopted from ordinary Greek usage. Plato called the ideas agennētous; Aristotle used it to refer to matter; the Gnostics spoke of God as the unborn or ingenerable. From them, Paul of Samosata and the Arians, such as Aëtius and Eunomius, adopted this terminology to combat the homoousion of the Son and the Spirit with the Father. The agennēsia expressed, in contrast to all creatures, the actual Essence of God. However, the Son is not agennētos; He is called monogenēs in Scripture, and orthodoxy also calls Him begotten; therefore, He cannot be God but must be a creature; we cannot accept two uncreated beings, that is, two gods. Now, in Greek, there are two words: gennētos, from gennan, gignere, generare, and genētos, from gignesthai, fieri; the latter is much broader than the former and refers to everything that is produced and has a beginning of existence, whether by creation, generation, or propagation. These two words were not always clearly distinguished at first; it was only pointed out that the word agennētos or agenētos could be used in different senses and could be applied to the Son in one sense but not in another. But gradually, the practice of distinguishing between these two words became established. All three persons could then be called agenētos, in contrast to all creatures; none of them were produced in the manner of creatures; none of them had a beginning of existence. The agenesie was a property of the Divine Essence and common to all Three Persons. But from this, the agennēsia had to be distinguished. This was a property of the Father alone. The Son could
be called gennētos, not because He was produced in time like a creature but because He was begotten from eternity from the Essence of the Father. But the church fathers also noted that this property, namely agennēsia, specifically belonged to the Person and not to the Essence. The Essence is one and the same in the three
Persons, but the agenesie is a relation in the Essence. Just as Adam, Eve, and Abel share the same nature, though received in different ways, so also in God, the Essence is one, although it exists in the three Persons in different ways. Furthermore, the name agennēsia is negative and only states that the Father is above generation, but it says nothing positive about God's nature; actually, it is not even an indication of the Person of the Father, because being agennētos and being a Father are absolutely not the same. Therefore, the name
Father is preferable to that of agennētos. The Scriptural name of Father much better indicates the personal property of the first person. In paternity, a positive relationship to the second Person is implied. The name Father is even more inherent to God than the name of God, because the latter is a general name, a nomen dignitatis, but the Father's name in the New Testament, like that of Yahweh in the Old Testament, is a proper name, indicating a personal property of God. Whoever denies God the name of Father does Him even greater dishonor than one who denies His creation.
This Father name is not a figurative expression transferred from humans to God. Rather, the relationship is reversed. Fatherhood on earth is a distant, weak resemblance of God's Fatherhood, Eph. 3:15.
God is Father in a true and complete sense. Among humans, a father is also a son of another, and a son in turn is also a father; among humans, a father alone is unable to produce a son; among humans, fatherhood is temporary and in a sense accidental, not essentially connected with being human; it only begins late and ceases soon, in any case at death. But in God, it is entirely different. He is solely and purely and completely Father; He is only Father; He is Father by
nature; He is eternal Father, without beginning and end, and therefore, generation must also be eternal, and the Son equally eternal as the Father, because if the Son were not eternal, the Father could not be eternal either. The eternity of Fatherhood entails the eternity of Sonship; whoever mentions the Father also automatically mentions the Son. To express this relationship of the Father to the Son and also to the Holy Spirit, the Father was often called autogenous, autogenetos, autotheos, apoietos, anarchos, principii expers, self-origin, self-cause of substance, self-principle; and also arch, aitia, riza, phgh, principium, causa, radix, fons, origo, caput, etc. of the Son and the Spirit or of the entire Godhead.
The particular property of the second Person in the Trinity is filiation. In Scripture, He bears various names indicating His relationship to the Father, such as Word, Wisdom, Logos, Son,
Firstborn, Only Begotten, Only Son, Image of God, eikon, hypostasis, character. On these Names and on some texts, quoted above, was built the doctrine of eternal generation, aiōnios gennēsis, first named by Origen. Naturally, we speak of this in a human and therefore imperfect and defective way; and the thought of it urges humility.
But still, we may speak so. For just as by analogy, mouth, ear, and eye are attributed to God, human generation is an analogy and image of that Divine act by which the Father gives life in Himself to the Son.
But then all imperfection and sensuality thereof must be excluded.
Human generation is imperfect and defective; a man needs a woman to produce a son; a man can never impart his full image, his entire being, even in many children; a father becomes a father only gradually and ceases to be one, and the child soon becomes entirely independent of and autonomous from the father. But this is not so with God. There is generation also in the Divine Essence. It is a beautiful thought, recurring in the church fathers, that God is fruitful. He is not an abstract, rigid Unity, not monadic, solitary. He
is a fullness of Life; His nature is generative, fruitful; it is capable of expansion, unfolding, communication. Whoever denies this and denies all production in the Divine Essence does not take seriously that God is infinitely, blissfully alive. He is left with nothing but an abstract, deistic conception of God or, as compensation, in a pantheistic way, he incorporates the life of the world into the Divine essence. Without the Trinity, creation cannot be understood; if God cannot communicate Himself, then He is a dark light, a dry fountain, and how could He communicate Himself ad extra, to creatures? But still, that generation is to be understood in a Divine way. Therefore, it is primarily spiritual. The Arians particularly objected to it, arguing that all generation necessarily entails separation, division, parturition, and now also, suffering, exhaustion. That would be so if it were bodily, sensual, creaturely. But it is spiritual and Divine, and therefore simple, without division or separation; it occurs indivisibly and immutably. It brings distinction and distribution, but no diversity and division in the Divine Essence. "For God, being without parts, is also without suffering or exhaustion of the Son; nor is there any wounding of His body, nor any breaking up into parts, as occurs with men." Therefore, the generation in God has its most striking analogy in thinking and speaking; and Scripture itself points to this when it calls the Son the Logos. Just as the human spirit objectifies itself in the word, so God in the Logos communicates His entire
Essence. But even here, there is distinction. Man needs many words to express his thought; those words are sounds and therefore sensual and material; they are unsubstantial and have no permanence in themselves. But when God speaks, He speaks in the one Logos, expressing His entire Essence and giving Him life in Himself.
Secondly, therefore, generation implies that the Father begets the Son ek thēs ousias tou patros, God from God, Light from Light, true
God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, as established at Nicaea. The Arians taught that the Son was
brought forth from nothing by the will of the Father. But this was not generation but creation. Creating is making something exist and exist in the way that the creator and maker make it, dissimilar to them in every way and in essence; but generation is the one who is begotten being brought forth by the essence of the one who begets, like in essence. The Son is not a creature but is to be praised as God forever, Rom. 9:5. And therefore, He was not brought forth by the will of the Father, from nothing and in time. But He is begotten from the essence of the Father, in eternity. Generation, therefore, is not an actual work, an energy of the Father, but to the Father belongs a generative nature. This naturally does not mean that generation is an unconscious, involuntary emanation, that it occurs outside the will and power of the Father. It is not an act of a preceding, deciding will, of a preconceived plan, like creation; but it is so naturally to the Father that His will, as a concomitant will, is entirely pleased with it.
It is a revelation of His essential nature and therefore also of His knowledge, will, and power and of all His virtues. Thirdly, therefore, generation is also confessed by the Christian church as eternal. The Arians said that the Son was once not, hn pote ote ouk ēn, they appealed mainly to the creation, ektisis, of Proverbs 8:22, and pointed to the antinomy that exists between the concepts of eternal, aiōnios, and generation, gennēsis. But if Father and Son bear these names in a metaphysical sense, as the Scripture undeniably teaches, then thereby generation is also proven to be eternal. If the Son is not eternal, then God is not eternal either; He was then God before He was Father and only later became Father in time. Denying eternal generation not only diminishes the deity of the Son but also that of the Father; it makes Him changeable, deprives Him of His divine nature, robs Him of the eternity of Fatherhood, and leaves unexplained how God can truly and rightly be called Father in time if the basis for this is not eternal in His nature. But that generation is therefore to be understood truly as eternal. It did not end and was
completed in eternity, but it is an eternal, unchanging, and therefore simultaneously eternally completed and eternally ongoing act of God. Just as the sun radiates light, and the fountain flows water, so generation is inherent in the nature of the Father. The Father was never and is never without generation. He always begets. "The Father did not beget the Son and then disown Him, nor did the Father, after begetting Him, reject Him from His own substance, but He always begets Him." God's begetting is speaking, and His speaking is eternal, "God's begetting is eternal."
The third Person in the Trinity bears the name of the Holy Spirit, and His personal property is the ekporeusiv, pneuma, procession, spiration. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has always been treated in Christian theology as a consequence of the doctrine of the Son. With the second Person, the struggle was almost exclusively over His divinity; His personality was generally accepted. But with the Holy
Spirit, the struggle was mainly over His personality; if this was acknowledged, His divinity naturally followed; just as with the divinity of the Son, so must that of the Holy Spirit be accepted.
However, the Pneumatomachians of earlier and later times brought various objections against the personality and divinity of the Holy
Spirit. They argued that the Name God is never attributed to the Holy Spirit in Scripture, that there is no mention of His worship anywhere, and that He is repeatedly presented as a power and a gift from God; the few passages that speak of Him as a Person had to be understood as personifications. Now Gregory of Nazianzus explained the great difference of opinion that existed in his time about the Holy
Spirit by saying that the Old Testament had clearly revealed the Father but less clearly the Son, and that the New Testament had indeed set forth the divine nature of the Son in clear light but had only obscurely indicated the divinity of the Holy Spirit. But now the Holy Spirit dwells among us and makes Himself known to us.
Therein lies an undeniable truth. The personality and divinity of the Holy Spirit are not as objectively distant from us as those of the Father and the Son. The Name He bears does not express that Personality, as does that of Father and Son. The economy of the Holy
Spirit, namely sanctification, is not as clearly delineated for us as that of creation, incarnation, and atonement. We live in that economy ourselves; the Holy Spirit dwells in us and among us, and therefore prayer is directed less to Him than to the Father and the Mediator.
He is much more the Author than the object of prayer. Therefore, the personality or at least the divinity of the Holy Spirit was disputed in the church for a long time. The religious importance of this doctrine was not felt in the early days. The Spirit was usually acknowledged in His personality but only considered as the Spirit who had done His work in the past, who had enlightened the prophets and apostles, and who had equipped and empowered Christ for His ministry. The necessity of internal grace was not yet understood; there was still no conscious, lively need for an almighty, divine operation of grace in the heart; the mystical union, the communion between God and man, was not yet sounded in its depth; the objective revelation of God in Christ seemed sufficient, and a subjective illumination was not yet considered necessary. However, as soon as the church contemplated more deeply its own life and tried to understand not only the objective but also the subjective principles of salvation, it joyfully confessed the Personality and divinity of the Holy Spirit. And so it has continued through all ages. The denial of the Personal existence and divine nature of the Holy Spirit always arises consciously or unconsciously from a rationalistic, Pelagian, deistic principle; it belongs in the circle of the Arians, Socinians,
Remonstrants, etc.
This immediately shows that the confession of the Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit did not arise from philosophy but from the
heart of Christian religion itself, from the faith of the church. There is, as with the Deity of the Son, a deep religious significance to it, it is connected with the Christian religion itself. This is undoubtedly established on the basis of Scripture, that the Holy Spirit is the subjective principle of all salvation, of regeneration, faith, conversion, sanctification, etc., in other words, there is no communion with the Father and the Son except in and through the Holy Spirit. And now one of two things: either the Holy Spirit is a creature, whether a power, a gift, a person, or truly God. If He is a creature, then He cannot make us partakers of the truth of God
Himself, the Father and the Son with all their benefits; then He cannot be the principle of new life in the Christian and in the whole church; then there is no true communion of God and humanity, then
God remains above and outside us, and He does not dwell in humanity as in His temple. But the Holy Spirit is not and cannot be a creature. For He stands in the same relationship to the Son as the Son does to the Father, and He makes us partakers of the Son and the Father. He is as closely connected to the Son as the Son is to the Father. He is in the Son, and the Son is in Him. He is the same essence with the Son. He is the Spirit of wisdom and truth, the power and the glory, the Spirit through whom Christ sanctifies the church and in whom He makes her partake of Himself and all His benefits, the true nature, the adoption, the mystical union with God. He who gives us God Himself must Himself truly be God.
To this soteriological significance is added the theological meaning of the Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit. Without this, there is no true Unity of Father and Son; whoever denies the Deity of the Holy
Spirit cannot maintain that of the Son; only in the Divine Person of the Holy Spirit does the Trinity come to a close, does the Unity of Essence in the Trinity of Persons and the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of Essence come into being. With the Deity of the Holy Spirit,
the entire dogma of the Trinity stands or falls, the mystery of Christianity, the heart of religion, the true, essential communion of our souls with God. This was understood by the church fathers, and therefore, along with defending the Deity of the Son, they defended that of the Spirit. The Nicene Creed expressed the faith in "the Holy
Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets." And since then, the whole Christian world confesses its faith in the consubstantial Trinity.
The relationship in which the Holy Spirit stands to the Father and the Son is somewhat revealed by His name, the Holy Spirit, as well as by many verbs such as given, sent, poured out, breathed, proceeding, descending, etc. Christian theology has described it as probolh, ekporeusiv, ekfoithsiv, proienai, prokuptein, proceisyai, processio, spiratio, and so forth. It was preferably thought of as a breath, spiratio. Scripture provided grounds for this, as when it called the Holy Spirit wind, pneuma, and often compared Him to breath and wind, Ps. 33:6, Job 33:4, John 3:8, 20:22, Acts 2:2, etc. However, theology exercised modesty in the description of inspiration. Like generation, it had to be thought of as the eternal communication of the same essence; it also had to be distinguished from generation, because generation gave life in itself to the Son and spiration to the Holy Spirit, but people felt the difficulty of further specifications.
Augustine said: "But who can explain the difference between being born and proceeding, speaking of that most excellent nature? Not everything that proceeds is born; although everything that is born proceeds. Just as not everything that is bipedal is human, even though everything that is human is bipedal. This much I know. But to distinguish between that generation and this procession, I neither know nor am able to do so." Yet, some distinction was sought. And it was found either in the fact that the Son went forth only from the
Father, but the Holy Spirit from both, or in the fact that He proceeded from the Father and the Son as given, not as born.
Especially, it was pointed out that the Holy Spirit could not be the Son of the Son, because then the triad would become an infinite plurality, and there would be no end to the vital movement in the Being of God. The Holy Spirit completes the blessed triad. The trinity is not susceptible to increase or decrease; it is perfect. Augustine once responded to the objection of the Arians, that if only the Father could generate a Son by whom all things were created, then the Father must be more powerful than the Son: "But God forbid that the Father is more powerful than the Son because the Father begot the creator, and the Son did not beget the creator. For it was not that He could not, but that He did not have to." But how this is to be understood is clarified in the following: "For the divine generation would be immoderate if the begotten Son were to beget a grandson to the Father...and the series of generation would not be fulfilled if one always were to be born from another, nor would anyone complete it if one were not sufficient." However, in that essence of the Trinity, in no way can any other person exist from the same essence. Finally, especially by Thomas Aquinas and his followers, the distinction between generation and spiration was thus indicated: generation occurred by way of intellect, and spiration by way of will.
This distinction had long been prepared by comparing generation to thinking and speaking, and presenting the Holy Spirit as the love that binds the Father and the Son together. In medieval and Roman theology, this distinction was almost universal.
Protestant theologians all accepted a certain distinction between generation and spiration, as well as between Son and Spirit; they partly recognized the correctness of the above-mentioned distinctions; but many were not so confident in speaking here and did not consider these distinctions scriptural and modest enough.