I do not claim to be any
sort of expert on the doctrine of the Trinity, nor to have all the answers, but,
as much for my own benefit as anything else, this is an attempt to calmly lay
out some of common ground and the issues that might be disputed between
conservative evangelicals who want to respect the traditional doctrine. What
follows has something of the nature of a series of points which we need to keep
in mind.
(For some further reading
of blogs, articles and books, see here).
Of course the divine life
is incomprehensible and mysterious to us. We must remember the Creator/creature
distinction. Our talk about God is especially analogical. Although we are made
in the image of God, it is unsurprising if God’s life is not entirely like our
own. It is no simple thing to argue from the nature of human person to the
nature of divine persons or from the immanent life of the Trinity to the
relations between men and women, for example. Even if we grant that wives
should submit to their husbands in a manner analogous to the way in which the
Son submits to the Father, of course there will be great differences since, for
example, the Triune persons are eternal and perfect and could not disagree.
Arguments for
complimentary (equal but different) relationships between men and women need
not depend on our doctrine of the Trinity.
Having said that our
knowledge of God’s inner life is limited, we still insist that God has revealed
himself clearly (if not exhaustively). God’s revelation is directed towards our
salvation, but knowing him is involved, indeed, central. Our focus of concern
should be the economy of God’s revelation and its practical implications for
our love of God and neighbour, not speculation about the hidden life of God, but
it is reasonable to think that God’s saving and revealing activity in his
economy relates to and flows from his immanent life. It is good and right to
want to know God. God’s revelation really reveals something of who he is in
himself. When God acts he is not pretending and it is hard to think that his
acts are arbitrary. (In fact, even if this is something of a minority report in
the tradition, I am inclined to think that all of God’s actions are both
volitional and necessary, flowing from who he is and governed by his wise and
good will).
If we wish to be orthodox
Christians we must affirm the full deity of all three divine persons. The Son
is no less God than the Father. His being / substance / essence / deity are no
less than the Father’s and he is equal with the Father in this sense, and
entirely worthy of the same divine worship. To deny these things is a kind of
Arian or semi-Arian / homoian subordinationism.
Yet there is order to the
divine life. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father and the Spirit
proceeds from the Father and the Son. These relationships are not interchangeable.
The Father therefore has a kind of (atemporal) priority amongst the persons of
the Trinity.
Having said this, the
Father is never without his Son. If the Son is from the Father, the Father is
only Father because he has a Son. We might say that the persons have a kind of
mutual dependence – it is not just that the Son depends on the Father for his
identity as Son. Without his Son the Father would not be Father.
(Calvin gives a
distinctive account of the Son as having his divinity from himself since
asceity is an attribute of deity. This has some plausibility to it).
There is a perichoretic
indwelling between the persons. The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the
Father. The persons cannot be separated are not to be confused or confounded.
The tradition also teaches
the inseperable operation of the members of the Trinity, but again, the persons
act in an ordered manner: the Son dies on the cross (as a man); the Father does
not, yet the work of the atonement is the work of the Triune God and of all
three persons. Some of the Fathers write that all the works of God follow this
pattern of from the Father, through the Son, completed in the Spirit.
It is the eternal relations
of origin which define the persons. The Son is all that the Father is except
Father.
It seems reasonable to say
that it was suitable to the Son’s “nature” as Son (or more precisely, his relation
of origin to the Father) that it was he who should become incarnate.
The Father sends the Son.
The Son does not send the Father. It is tricky to say whether or not there is
some kind of sending prior to the incarnation. Is this sending merely a
temporal matter of the economy or is there something eternal here? Is there
some sort of eternal “decision” that the Son will be sent? Again, the eternal
God’s “decisions” would be rather different from our own since our deciding
usually involves a process of deliberation.
Augustine speaks of the
Son’s involvement in his own sending. The Father sends his Son by the Word such
that the Father and the Son can be said to send the Son (De trin. ii.9, 103).
When we speak of the
persons of the Trinity we are far from speaking of three people. To speak in
this latter manner risks suggesting three gods. Simply to say that all three
persons share the same nature is not necessarily sufficient to safeguard the
unity of the Trinity since three men might be said to each share a human nature
but there are still three men. Neither is it sufficient to safeguard the unity
of the persons to say that they always agree. Again, we could imagine three men
who did that.
Traditionally it has been
argued that wills are a property of natures and not of persons. So the
incarnate Christ has two natures, human and divine, each of which has a will.
But there is only one divine will, which all three persons share, not three separate
(but agreeing) wills. The persons are also traditionally understood to have one
divine intellect. What exactly is meant by “persons” with reference to the
Trinity, therefore, is hard to say.
Whilst the persons are
identical apart from their relation of origins, perhaps it might be said that
each of the persons possesses all of the divine attributes in a way that is
conditioned by their relation of origins. The Son might be said to possess the
divine will in a Sonly manner (though of course there can be no sense of the Son
yielding to a different or superior will of the Father, since all three persons
are equally wise and good and so on)? This might allow us to think of certain
dispositions analogous to submission as existing between the divine persons.
If we accept the
traditional view of the divine will outlined above, it is also hard to see that
a Covenant of Redemption by which the divine persons agree that the Son would
become incarnate would make sense. Or else it becomes a trivial point: of
course the divine persons “agree” because they timelessly share one divine
will.
When Christ speaks in the
gospels, he may be speaking according to his human nature or according to his
divine nature. Some statements may apply only to the incarnate state. “God”
might refer to one of the persons or to the Triune God.
No doubt there is much
more to say which others have / can say much better than I can!
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