An interesting discussion on the way back from vicar training last night around things Trinitarian, such as, should we begin with the one-ness or the three-ness and how do we best describe the unity and diversity in the Godhead. I’m not quite sure where all this got us and if we avoided heresy, but it was stimulating to talk about it and perhaps worth revisiting some rambling thoughts here to see if I’ve got any of it straight in my own head! It made me wish I’d been in Rev’d Dr Mike Ovey’s Trinity Lectures. It’s a shame we so quickly get into foreign words like hypostasis, substantia and ousia and that East and West didn’t seem to understand one another. Corrections welcome.
It seemed to me my interlocutor wasn’t the greatest fan of talking of one substance as the basis of unity. I can understand that there are dangers in thinking of some extra substance of goodness that stands behind the Persons and makes them God. My friend wanted to describe the unity of the persons of the Godhead and their divinity in terms of relationships.
However, it seems to me we need something more than relationships to ground the unity – and that we can usefully describe what it means to be divine or the One God of the Bible (such as uncreated) without necessarily having to talk of persons and relations. I guess mutual indwelling (perichorisis) – relationship language – does help us out in describing the unity. We could also say something about agreement of purpose and will, but it seems to me that we also need to talk of shared attributes.
As I had understood it, the relationships between the members of the Trinity ground their distinctiveness. The Son is all that the Father is except Father, and so on. You could say this strong statement of unity actually emphasises relationships since it is the relationships alone that are highlighted as distinguishing the persons. It is the relationship of eternal begetting / begottenness that makes the Son the Son and not the Father. Otherwise he shares all the attributes of the Father and is God (holy, wise, powerful, loving etc.) just as much as the Father is.
However, I guess we ought to say that the Son is God as the Son (in a Sonly way, in eternally begotten relationship with the Father) and so on. The persons are all that they are always in relationship to one another. They have their attributes as who they are in relationship, interdependently and in unity.
I think my friend also had some questions about some ways of talking about simplicity, but I cant quite remember / grasp what they were?
We don’t want to start parcelling out attributes amongst persons. We might call the Son the Wisdom of the Father but we don’t want to say the Father isn’t wise! The Father is never without the Son so I don’t know how much sense it makes to try to isolate the persons. For example, would the Father know an Other, or indeed know himself in an Other without the Son? Presumably not. But that’s just a way of saying we must be Trinitarian. All the persons are essential and eternal and any monadic account of “God” or “god” is inadequate.
My friend said he thought Calvin wasn’t very happy with Nicene-creed language of the Son as “God from God” etc. and stressed that it is poetic. We don’t have a reference for this? I guess the battle is to hang on to the fact that Jesus really is God, not God in some weaker sense. Sure, you might say the Son is True God in himself but all the persons are always only what they are in relationship.
It is also interesting to ask what we should make of John 5:26, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.” So that would seem to mean that there is a prior sense in which the Father has life in himself in which the Son does not? Clearly we must say the Son is eternal and uncreated but do we say he gets his life from the Father by virtue of / in his eternal begetting / begottenness? Is self-existence therefore an attribute of the Godhead or is it also an attribute of the Father but not of the Son? However, I guess the Father is only the Father in so far as he begets. So the Father is also dependant on the Son in terms of relationships: it is (eternally) having a Son that makes the Father a Father. The Father has no independent-apart-from-the-Son life as Father. Which is happy since in any case there wasn’t when he was not.
Mmmm.
Posts
11 comments:
On the last point, the difference between saying "so the Father has given the Son to have life" and "so the Father has given the Son to have life-in-himself" is surely important.
If John 5 said the former, that would imply that only the Father has life-in-himself; the Son has his life as a gift. In fact John 5 says the latter: both have "life-in-himself", but (paradoxically? - hate the word) that self-generated life is a gift from the Father.
Clearly that gift is eternal - not in the sense of "before time" (which would leave the door open to Arianism, "there was when he was not"), but in the sense of "eternally so". Which makes giving life-in-oneself akin to generation. I'd be interested to know people have said on the meaning of "life" in that phrase.
Now I'm musing slightly randomly - so I'll stop!
we have discussed the Calvin thing a bit in Doctrine of God this semester (exam yesterday), so here's my attempt at an answer of sorts.
Calvin though that if you said the Son was begotten with regard to his essence then you were denying his aseity (self-existence, life-in-himself). Hence he (and many others who followed him in the reformed tradition, including, recently, Robert letham, and I think Frame too) said that the Son is begotten of the Father with regard to his Sonship, not his essence.
Turretin was more careful. he realised that aseity/self-existence or the concept that the Son is God in himself (autotheos) is to do with relation to another essence. The Son is autotheos because he is homoousios, there is no 'other' essence' from which he has derived his own. However, he 'has' that essence from eternal generation.
Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine of Hippo, and (I think) the cappadocians were glad to talk of the Son having his essence because it was communicated by the Father in eternal generation. Hence the Father is the font/source/principium of divinity. In fact, much of what Hilary says in his 'on the Trinity' is based on the concept of eternal substantial generation.
Thank you, chaps.
I don't remember that bit from Doctrine of God. Is it new or was I asleep, I wonder?
Some kind of essence / relationship distinction would seem to help, wouldn't it? But remembering that the essence is necessarily and eternally in relationship! And no essence other than that which exists in the persons - no prior stuff out of which the persons are made.
Can we do away with substance?
If substance is to do with 'whatness' then we can't can we? It renders John 1:1 a little meaningless. what are we saying when we say the Son is what the Father is (except father) if there's no 'whatness' to be talked about.
In (extreme) social trinities we have three persons with no whatness who come together to form a unity with no whatness!
What (ha ha) we mustn't do i guess is divorce substance from person, making it a fourth thing all three are made of.
Funnily enough, I have a feeling that's what Calvin's formulation of begotten with regard to sonship but not deity ends up doing. Gregory of Nyssa says that when we say Son/Father we're talking not about essence as much as how he has his essence (i.e. by virtue of being begotten/unbegotten). This allows 'Son' to mean both that the Son is of the same nature as the Father, and yet he is not the Father (he 'has' this essence by virtue of being eternally begotten). Hilary says similar stuff. However, if eternal generation and homoousios are not connected, then Sonship and the Son having the same essence as the Father are disconnected somehow too. Calvin wants to retain homoousios (obviously) but he won't ground it in eternal generation (which he leaves to be only about sonship).
Garry's notes cites I.Xiii. 20, 23-25.
Turretin he cites at III.XXviii.40 and III.xxix.4
I wonder if you asked him whether Garry would send you a copy of his notes.
What an excellent diocese you must be in if these are the conversations you have on the way home from potty training!
Just seen your comment Marc, sorry.
It might be new as this year the course is Garry and Fieldy but not Mike.
When did 'thought it was poetic' come to mean the same as 'thought it was untrue'? Oh yes, I remember, around the late 18th century, wasn't it? Long after Calvin, then.
Yeah. What exactly does 'poetic' mean according to your interlocutor? Analogical? Metaphorical? Well, everyone says that don't they? Isn't that standard patristic stuff: we don't really know what we mean by begetting, but we know it's different from creating? And as it's a Father-Son relationship, then of course we speaking (by analogy with human father-son relationships of generation) of begetting. But maybe I shd re-read Calvin before getting grumpy...
Mike recommended -and having now read both for essay and pleasure -I'll second -Robert Lethham's book The Holy Trinity as a good starting point.
It is I, the interlocutor! Sorry, been off blogging for a week. Not sure how to respond to all this. Let me list some bullet points as they occur to me...
* On starting points - I find this quotation by Athanasius (vs Arius) really helpful:
“Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.” (Contra Arianos, 1.34)
Athansius saw the danger clearly. If 'unoriginate' is (central to) the definition of deity then we have disqualified the Son before we've even begun. We must let the Three Persons in their roles and relations tells us what deity is. It cannot be assumed in advance of the gospel.
* "We need to talk about shared attributes." Well yes. But not in the sense of defining those attributes in advance of studying the mutual relations of the Persons and then mapping them on to the Three identically. The attributes ought to be conceived of as out-flows from the Persons. (Was I reading Leithart the other day who was saying something similar?)
* We ought to hold to 'Son is all Father is except Father' in terms of divine ontology - there is no ontological subordination. But clearly the statement can't be pressed too far. The Son is a lot of things that the Father is not: Mediator and Lamb and Priest and Begotten etc. My contention is that A) these self-differentiations can only exist *because* of the eternal perichoresis and therefore *because* of their ontological equality. But also B) they are are real self-distinctions which are constitutive of both their Personal existence *and* the divine ontology as a whole.
* I think when Augustine failed to follow the Cappodocian distinction of hypostasis and ousia and made his own this lead to a relegation of all statements of distinction, mutuality etc to the hypostatic level while leaving the essential (ousia) level free of such relationality. The Cappodocians on the other hand saw such mutual relations as constitutive of 1) Personal being, 2) Personal distinction *and* 3) the divine ontology. God's essential being is defined by distinction, reciprocity, could we even say multiplicity? (triplicity?)
* It is Calvin who stressed the poetic character of 'God from God' not me (I fear other commenters have got the wrong end of the stick). My source is Engelsma quoting Warfield quoting Calvin:
He called 'God from God etc' ‘a hard saying’ (p28) and elsewhere called this part ‘a song, more suitable for singing than to serve as a formula of confession. (p26 - David J. Engelsma, ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity’ in Protestant Reformed Theological Journal (vol. 23), 1989.
The threatening thing for Calvin (and I think for divine simplicity) is that Nicea proclaims Christ to be divine *in* His begotten-ness/sent-ness. 'out of the being of the Father' was also a troublesome phrase denoting eventful differentiation within the being of God. I think these affirmations of 381 sit ill with divine simplicity.
* Of course social trinitarians have a concept of whatness. They just don't think it's obvious what divine 'whatness' is in advance of encountering the 'whoness' of the Persons. (The danger of an a priori whatness was the danger Athanasius warned against above!)
The Cappodocians still have an ontology but it's an ontology of communion - God's being is in communion (Zizioulas). The danger as I see it lies in defining a whatness in advance of meeting the Persons. Simplicity is a good example of an assumed whatness that then sits ill with the mutual being of the God met in the economy.
* Ok, enough bullet points. I've written around these kinds of issues in these places:
http://christthetruth.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/avoiding-a-fourth/
http://christthetruth.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/nicene-trinitarianism/
http://christthetruth.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/oneness-and-threeness/
and elsewhere but that'll do for now.
By the way, who knows how Leo Davison is getting on?
Thanks, Glen. You obviously know more about this than I do and have done rather more thinking about it!
Great to have a footnote for the Calvin point.
Yes, good point about the limits of "the Son is all that the Father is except Father". So we accept it for "ontology"? What are the other categories? I guess some distinctions will map back to differences in relations. And I guess we also must distinguish Son-as-incarnate from the Father in certain additional ways (i.e. the incarnate Son has a human body but the Father doesn't). In fact, are all the differences really to do with relations if we include relations to humanity? (I guess we might also call these roles / functions?)
"Begotten" surely belongs to the relations (with the Father) category. It is another way of saying he is the Son, isn't it?
But as you say, relations constitute personal identity... Mmmm.
Certainly we could say that "uncreated" is central to divinity, though? And we could say something about the Triune God as necessarily and eternally self-sufficient and Living in himself?
I buy all the "don't forget about the Persons" stuff. Its the divine persons to who have the attributes in relation, yep.
So we need a Trinitarian account of simplicity? But this cant be news to the advocates of a classical doctrine of divine simplicity?
Afraid I don't know anything about Leo! Isn't he working with Tony Jones at Christ Church, Durham?
I wouldn't make a very good scholastic. What follows are some big picture thoughts that hopefully contain answers to some of your questions....
You said: "relations constitute personal identity." Yes indeed. And I guess my major point is that they constitute more than simply the identity of the persons (hypostases) but that these Three in these relations also constitute (without remainder) the essence (ousia) of God.
The basic affirmations of a trinitarian theology involve upholding difference, one-ness and deity.
Fundamentally I see the east saying that communion (perichoresis) is the essence of all three. The Persons (1) are *distinct* by virtue of their reciprocal relations, they (2) are eternally and unbreakably *united* by virtue of this eternal communion and (3) the *divine nature* essentially *is* the mutual life of these Three.
As I see it the West traditionally says that communion is the essence of (1), part of the essence of (2) and not really part of (3). i.e. perichoresis is the virtue by which the three are distinct. It plays a part in explaining the one-ness. But the west seeks also to ground one-ness in attributes/aseity/uncreated-ness which is often considered apart from and left unrelated to the mutual life of the Three. By the time the West explains the divine nature the communion/reciprocity/multiplicity of the perichoretic life is usually left behind in favour of non-relationally conceived attributes/aseity/uncreatedness.
Now if the attributes/aseity/uncreatedness of God was derived from and explicitly conceived out of the Personal inter-play then my suspicion of the traditional western methodology would be greatly reduced.
For attributes this would mean conceiving of (for instance) the omnipotence of God as the Father's rule through the Son and by the Spirit. This guards against having a pre-conceived notion of power that is then identically mapped onto Father, Son and Spirit. (In such a case the Son, who can do nothing without His Father, is not less God because of this but is in fact revealing the very heart of how God's omnipotence works - from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit).
For aseity it would mean acknowledging that *because* the Persons *receive* their life and being from one another in eternal communion so they have no need of anyone or anything else. This guards against having a preconceived notion of divinity that necessitates self-existence and then mapping this identically onto Father, Son and Spirit. In the case of Son and Spirit this will be quite awkward since they do *receive* their life from Another. (This is what Pete was pointing towards re Calvin's aseity of the Son).
For uncreatedness it would mean acknowledging that the Begettor, Begotten and Proceeding Ones are, between them, the source of everything else. All else is because of these Three. This, again, guards against what Athanasius saw to be Arius's problem: a predetermined definition of deity as 'unoriginate' that then disqualifies the Son from full deity. It also allows us to celebrate the begotten deity of the Son (our 'God from God') without this betokening an ontological subordination.
So if simplicity, aseity, uncreated-ness and the attributes are re-cast in thoroughly trinitarian ways (that is, as constituted *by* the interplay of Persons and not as considered apart from the Three) then I'm happy. On such an account God's one-ness would not be separately considered to the triune perichoresis but would indeed *be* the unity of the Three in their distinct roles and relations. The very being of God (and not simply the distinctions between Persons) would be thought of in dynamically mutual terms.
Now I see many good reformed theologians articulating things in just these sorts of ways (e.g. casting the attributes in triune terms). That is very welcome indeed and I see it as proof that in Calvin there is both Augustinian and Cappocian (sometimes brought together in harmony, sometimes battling it out!). And if the attributes etc are being articulated in these triune ways then what we have is a much needed integration of 'De Deo Uno' and 'De Deo Trino'. On this trajectory I see such theologians moving towards an affirmation that the One-ness of God *is* the communion of the Three. Brilliant! But then of course, such a theology is simply the eastern methodology: it is the Three in their communion who define for us the One!
Post a Comment