For the past six months or so I’ve been following with great interest Ben Nasmith’s ruminations on the Holy Trinity over at his blog “Cognitive Resonance.” Ben is trying to figure if the trinitarian doctrine is both biblical and philosophically coherent. I gather that he belongs to the evangelical stream of Christianity. Hence he is doing what all thoughtful evangelicals like to do—assess theological claims in light of the plain reading of the Bible.
Ben appears to be on the cusp of jettisoning the doctrine of the Holy Trinity (“Trinitarian Trilemma“). He is finding Dale Tuggy’s arguments on behalf of unitarianism compelling. Dale abandoned his belief in the trinitarian doctrine several years ago, after a long period of research and reflection. As he explains in an interview with J. Dan Gill:
Not all versions of Trinity doctrines are contradictory. The more important question is, are they well founded in the Scriptures? When I went back to that I came to see, I mean, I read about the stories of the creeds coming to be, and that was pretty disturbing. But I came to see that these schemes have just been imposed upon the text. … I would accept the doctrine of the Trinity if it was the best explanation of the text. If it was really needed to properly understand the text then I would believe it even though it’s not there in the text. But it’s not the best explanation.
I find all of this fascinating, as I find Dale and Ben’s approach to the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity completely wrong-headed. If I were to approach question of God as they do, I would not only reject the Trinity but Christianity and church altogether. The gospel was not born in the classrooms of analytic philosophers.
Six months ago, in a series of articles on hermeneutics and Scripture, I observed the oddity of someone invoking the Bible to argue against one of the core beliefs of the very community that canonized the Bible. I won’t repeat here the arguments I advanced in that series, except to reiterate that there is only one reason to believe that the biblical writings are divinely inspired—because they are confessed to be Holy Scripture by the Church, by the same Church that proclaims and teaches that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one in essence and undivided; and only this Church can teach us how to read the Bible as Scripture. The fact that we often find the patristic exegesis “different” from our own interpretations of the biblical texts should alert us that reading the Bible as Scripture is different from how we read any other document. First-century believers did not restrict themselves to a plain reading of the Old Testament. They read it as if it were all about Jesus of Nazareth. Who today would guess that the rock Moses struck with his rod (Ex 17:6) typologically refers to the risen Christ, yet to the Apostle Paul the reference was obvious (1 Cor 10:4), or that Proverbs 8 reveals to us something about Jesus’ relationship to the Father, yet Athanasius and Arius both took the connection for granted. We inhabit today a very different worldview. Whether we read the Bible plainly or critically—as Stanley Hauerwas never tires of saying, fundamentalism is but the flip-side of the historical-critical method—we are not reading it as the apostolic and patristic Christians did. How then can we hope to penetrate to that theological and spiritual meaning that God intends for his Church? Hence when Dale Tuggy set for himself the project of reading the Bible through his evangelical and philosophical spectacles to determine whether he could find confirmation of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, the conclusion of his quest was virtually preordained.
In this post I wish to comment upon the incredible hermeneutical disadvantage in which all sola Scriptura Protestants find themselves when they consider catholic doctrines like the Holy Trinity or the two natures of Christ. Not only are they not reading the Scriptures according to the hermeneutical rules of the community that canonized the Scriptures (though this is probably true for most Western Christians); but even more decisively, they are not indwelling the sacramental, liturgical, and ascetical practices that formed the hearts and minds of patristic Christians and eventually led them to the Nicene confession of the Trinity. This is huge. At the end of the second century, St Irenaeus of Lyons declared: “Our teaching is in accord with the Eucharist and the Eucharist, in its turn, confirms our teaching.” But where is the Eucharist in evangelical Christianity? Where are the sacraments? Where are the rites and sacramentals? Where are the prayers for the departed and the invocation of the saints? Where are the prostrations and the sign of the cross? Where is the chant? the icons? the bishops? the ascetics? Where is the Theotokos? The list could be multiplied almost endlessly. Orthodoxy speaks of this matrix of ecclesial life under the locus Holy Tradition and insists that the Scriptures can only be rightly interpreted and understood by those who are immersed in and spiritually blessed by this Tradition. Hence while most Orthodox theologians, I think, would agree that the Bible is materially sufficient as an authority of faith, they would all affirm that it is formally insufficient. The Scriptures do not stand on their own but belong to the complex web of revelatory sources and spiritual practices that constitute Church in Tradition. Ultimately, as Vladimir Lossky states, Holy Tradition is nothing less than “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.”
I do not intend the above as a polemic against evangelical Christianity—Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism suffer their own terrible impoverishments—but the kind of sacramental and ecclesial life that characterized patristic Christianity and that engendered belief in God the Holy Trinity simply does not exist in modern evangelicalism. There is the Bible and sometimes some very good preaching, perhaps also a praise band and enthusiastic singing. If a sola scriptura believer assigns himself the task of reading the Bible to determine which, if any, of the catholic dogmas or practices accord with its plain teaching, he will never come up with anything that resembles historic Christianity.
Lex orandi, lex credendi. Long before the Church dogmatically confessed that Jesus Christ is homoousios with the Father, she was preaching a trinitarian gospel. Long before there was a St Athanasius, she was worshipping Jesus Christ and praying to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Long before the Council of Nicaea, she was living the Nicene faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a philosophical construct grounded in neutral exegesis of the Bible. It is confession of the apostolic faith celebrated every Sunday and every day in the Divine Liturgy and Divine Offices. As Christos Yannaras incisively observes, “We will not come to know the triunity of God by reading the Scripture or synodal decrees, but we will come to know it by participating (perhaps over a long time) in the mode of existence that constitutes the Church.”
Can we read our way into the Trinity? I do not think so. But perhaps we can read our way out of the Trinity.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Really well stated.
The ecclesial experience of Scripture always involves some implicit metaphysical understanding that is both historically contextualized and borne by traditional praxis. Apart from the Christian cultus, one is forced to attempt to discover a participatory truth extrinsically. It won’t work. John Milbank’s most recent book, Beyond Secular Order, does a nice job of delineating the various assumptions that were held by the patristic Church through the high Middle Ages and the very different perspectives that arose with late medieval scholasticism and early modernity. In many ways, Evangelical reading practices are the logical consequences of that shift. As David Bentley Hart pointed out in The Experience of God, this is the source of the irony that fundamentalist Christians and secular evolutionists are more allied than opposed in their metaphysical presuppositions.
Ultimately, sola scriptura is a misnomer. The plain reading of the Bible may be egalitarian, but it’s not Christian.
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Since when is the trinity the”best explanation” of the text? It’s just more “Greek philosophy imposed on scripture” nonsense. As if the trinity is supposed to have been derived from prooftexts, plain as day.
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I disagree it is read out of the Bible in the sense the way the creeds were written.
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My pragmatic and somewhat glib answer is, Lex Orandi Lex Credendi. If you actually use the language of the Trinity in your worship, if you are indeed baptized in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and if Trinitarian language isn’t simply re-arranging pieces of your mental furniture, then No, we’re not simply reading our way into the Trinity, we’re praying our way into it.
And that’s a huge and meaningful difference. You can understand why Eunomios wanted to edit the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:18-20 into something less … well… Trinitarian. Because baptism after all is our ground-floor entrance into the Christian faith.
Our theological praxis begins with those truly startling words of Risen and Soon-to-be-Ascended Jesus that conclude St Matthew’s Gospel, Every time I read them, I am amazed — I wasn’t expecting to read about the Trinity! Where did that come from?
But when you don’t have a rich praxis that gives meaning to your theological language, I’m amazed and impressed that many Protestants still adhere to the Nicene creedal tradition to this very day. It’d be so much easier simply to jettison it. But they don’t, because it’s not that big of a conceptual leap from the Gospels (of all places) to Nicea.
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I agree. That the Lutherans and Reformed still invoke Nicaea and classical trinitarianism reflects the abiding truth and heuristic power of the trinitarian dogma.
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My apologies, folks, if you have noticed the paragraph formatting rapidly changing. I was editing the piece and somehow I did something (don’t ask me what I did) and all the formatting disappeared and suddenly I had one big clump of text. I’ve been trying to reformat the article as originally published. I think I’ve restored it.
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This was exactly the issue that led to conversion for me. We were trying to start a house church and I had this ambitious idea of completely starting over – really living what I conceived to be the reformation ideal. I was going great guns, finding all sorts of stuff I had formerly believed that the text didn’t DEMAND. And suddenly one of them was the Trinity.
Thankfully, my background was fundamentalist rather than evangelical. I knew that there were certain doctrines I had to believe in order to remain a Christian, because that is the basic idea of fundamentalism. So I came to the conclusion that I could either be a biblicist or a Christian. Not both. It was pretty easy for me to say, “Christianity for me, please.”
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Interesting. I tend to think of Evangelicals and fundamentalists as quite similar, if not entirely the same. How would you distinguish between the two?
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Hi Brian! Well, they ARE very very similar. This is an interesting bit of American religious history here. The two words were interchangeable for something like 60 years, and then in the 1950’s there was this big split, with one group polarizing to one term, and another group polarizing to the other. Official doctrine tends to be very similar between the two groups, and at higher levels of scholarship they share all the same books and theologians, but that is the dirty secret kept from the people in the pew. This split is a memory that fundamentalists hold on to with a death grip, while evangelicals have more or less forgotten it. They don’t know why they refer to themselves as evangelicals other than “it means we care about the gospel.”
Fundemantalism, or as it was sometimes called, evangelicalism, was a movement that began in the late 1800’s as a response, or reaction, to Higher Criticism and to doctrinal innovation. It took its name from a series of scholarly papers published on essential Christian doctrines, called “The Fundamentals.” Initially, a number of denominations were involved. The impetus behind all this was, “In the face of denominational diffences and doctrinal innovation, can we discover, ennumerate, and define those doctrines which we all agree are necessary to believe in order to call oneself a Christian?” Of course they would not have included Roman Catholics in this, because Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone was a big favorite. However it included other doctrines like the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Deity of Christ, Trinity, Bodily Resurrection – as well as a few evangelical favorites like verbal plenary inspiration.
Ultimately, this project was doomed because they could never agree on the precise number and definition of the doctrines, and the more scholarly members of the movement questioned things that the others brought up, like pre-tribulation rapture fever and what was basically a revival of chiliasm. After the Scopes trial and the initial disaster of creationist science, fundamentalism as a movement became more and more marginalized culturally, while the “mainline” denominations grew more and more “liberal,” meaning, they rejected the supernatural.
Somewhere around the 1950’s a paper was published called “The New Evangelicalism,” or something very close to that. The idea in this paper pretty much split fundamentalism in two. The goal of the “new evangelicalism” was to be more relevant culturally, more compassionate, and more credible among scholars and scientists – while still retaining those “fundamental doctrines of the faith.”
For the hardliners, the problem with this had to do with the question of separation. As more and more denominations went “liberal,” persons and indeed whole churches had to decide whether to stay in the denominations and fellowship with those who did not believe in the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, etc. or whether to pull out and become independent, self-governing congregations, or to start new denominations (which might then split again.) And the strict people said, “you have to separate from apostates, and you have to separate from those who do NOT separate from apostates. Otherwise all the doctrinal distinctions between fundamentals and non-fundamentals will be obscured and we will be forced to compromise what we believe in our public lives.” And because most of the fundamentalists by now were baptists in doctrine if not in name, they had no concept of separation as excommunication. They just interpreted it as institutional separation. So you couldn’t teach in the same seminary with an apostate, be in the same denomination with an apostate, etc.
So “more relevant, credible, and compassionate” turned out to mean, tolerating the presence of any and all doctrinal variations on Christianity within the church and the para-church institutions. This is the origin of “the Bible is our only creed.” It just meant that as long as you assented to the Bible being the definition of your belief, you could interpret it however you wanted and there would be no institutional consequences. (Later on, institutions that tried this either went full-on liberal, or as in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention, were able to pull back and reclaim the denomination for a more traditional configuration.)
So this was the polarization that happened. The non-separatists went “new evangelical” and the separatists simply retained the “fundamentalist” lable and quickly dropped the “evangelical” label as being evil by association. They all ended up in strictly distinct institutions and congregations, where the fundies nursed the grudge of their abandonment, while the “new evangelicals” quickly forgot that they were the “new” version of something that had previously existed, mainly because the fundamentalists had very poor scholarship and were basically the embarassing country cousins.
The fundamentalists rightly predicted that after a few generations, the children of the “new evangelicals” would not know the difference between a fundamental doctrine and a “preference.” Enter Ben Nasmith and all the people he’s reading.
The separatism of the fundamentalists is still strong, and they as a group have a very strong sense of self-identity and of their own history. I attended two fundamentalist schools, three fundie churches, and a fundie camp. In these places, you are not one of the brethren unless you attend, specifically, a “fundamentalist, Bible-believing, Baptist Church.” (Or baptistic church, according to some.)
By contrast, those who call themselves evangelicals have hardly any historical consciousness at all (it seems to me) and probably wouldn’t even recognize the epithet “new evangelical” if a fundie ever happened to hurl it at them. However that is not likely to happen, as fundies are more busy hurling that epithet at each others’ daughters for wearing pants or sandals or or plaform shoes or whatever. After they separated out all the liberals, separation had come to be the sine qe non of the whole movement, so they had to develop a whole doctrine of “holiness as separation” and now they rush about on endless quests for more things to separate from. This is a big difference from evangelicals, who rush about looking for more ways to be “relevant” as a general rule – which puts the two groups in direct opposition over matters like modesty, courtship, theater, etc.
Meanwhile, a small group called the “Young Fundamentalists” is trying to find a middle ground – without much success, since their elders in the fundie movement just snort and call them new evangelicals, while the other evangelicals hear what they have to say and just give them a blank stare and say, “So what?”
Fascinatin’, right?
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Great history lesson! Thanks.
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Indeed, thanks. That was illuminating. I cannot really do justice to such a thorough exposition. A brief question: Would the older fundamentalists see a figure like BB Warfield at Princeton as representative? I think he may have been part of that group that espoused “the Fundamentals” you referred to.
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I recommend this first chapter (free kindle sample) of “The Theology of Dallas Willard”, by Gary Black for a concise but excellent history of evangelicalism(s) – http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Dallas-Willard-Discovering-Protoevangelical-ebook/dp/B00F2RKFG0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
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I remember reading Warfield and finding him very challenging. I can’t really answer your question out of my own knowledge – I’ve pretty much given you everything I’ve got, and what I’ve got is admittedly colored by my fundamentalist past. However, here’s a short little article that may help with that.
http://www.theopedia.com/Fundamentalism
I think most fundamentalists I know would have considered Warfield as a worthwhile and challenging read – my dad has him in his library. As far as I can tell, the “High Reformed” as we used to call them eventually fell outside this whole antagonistic relationship between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, and kind of went their own way. But we let them talk to us… if they were “from the past” then we could absolve them of certain disagreements with ourselves.
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Ben, that is basically the same history I gave, only with more details, and a more approving approach to the new-evangelical side of the question.
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Ben, I hesitate to recommend it because of the rather ferocious Calvinism involved, but there is also some interesting historical material in “Evangelicalism Divided” by Iian Murray.
His work on the American Second Great Awakening, “Revival and Revivalism,” is also interesting in giving background to American religion in general. He’s a very precise primary researcher, so you find things there that are not available elsewhere, but of course it is all used as a platform for his theological bias.
Part of my understanding of fundamentalist history cannot be found in books. One of the colleges I attended was run by a man whose father was involved in the split. We had fundamentalist history lectures where he invited his father’s friends to come in and talk about their recollections and their reasoning for what they did, and the pressure they were under in those days. I recall one of them talking about a phrase that went around for a while, which was “keeping the furniture.” Apparently, those who wanted to stay in the denominations were reduced to this argument – they knew they should separate from liberals according to their own beliefs, but they didn’t want to leave all the “furniture” of the denominational organizations to the liberals, so they were going to stay in and keep using diplomacy and dialogue to try to take back the denominations. Of course, liberals have deep prejudices against anything supernatural, so dialigue and diplomacy was never going to change anything. These men, in the view of the bent old fundamentalists I heard in the lectures, had forgone their fellowship in the purity of the gospel, and allowed good friendships to lapse, in order to keep their positions and respectability and salaries – the “furniture.” That was the day-to-day reality, in their view, behind the neo-evangelical rhetoric. “Dialogue with liberals” was spoken from a position of inferiority – from the consciousness that one is in the weaker position and therefore one must make nice with the enemy. This was an enormous scandal for the people who wouldn’t redefine God, Christ, and salvation – even though they lost everything in the process. 50 years later, the wounds were still deep.
While I am not a fundamentalist anymore, and I am aware of many of the problems in that movement, it seems to me that evangelicals are promoting a myth of the reasonable and compassionate neo-evangelical history, if it’s true that they scrambled back into relevance over the faces of their friends and their theological loyalties. True, fundamentalists are often pugnacious – usually because they lack the subtlety or leverage to be otherwise. Fundamentalists, with their insistence on some really outlier theology in certain areas, are also hard to take seriously sometimes. And yes, there’s an invisible compromise with modernism in the “textualism” with which they approach Holy Writ. (This is something that my dad, for instance, talks about a lot, following Dr. Tozer.) Also, there’s an inconsistency behind their very insistence on the fundamentals, in that they have to pretend to have gotten them directly from the Bible through the Spirit, even though they are actually holding on with might and main to the last piece of Holy Tradition which commands their loyalty. Maybe it’s because of this all, and not in spite of this all, but I just can’t take neo-evangelicalism seriously. To me it seems to be the religion of rootlessness, of perjured loyalties, of scandalous frivolity.
From my perspective, fundamentalists are blind crippled heroes hanging onto the shrub at the edge of the cliff, refusing to go over; evangelicals are rockin’ out on their way to the bottom. (Firm ground would be theological authority.) I realise I’m not using the term ‘evangelical’ with the precision that the book you referenced does. But I also realise what that book doesn’t – that today’s evangelical landscape, at the theological level, is largely the result of intellectual cross-breeding between liberals one the one hand, and fundamentalists with inferiority complexes on the other. And that’s disturbing.
I say all this with best wishes. And yes, I can tell you are not on the brink of giving up on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. There are too many issues involved other than just the exegesis of a few passages, aren’t there? Like for instance, is Dale Tuggy really equipped to reinvent what is literally the central, touchstone doctrine of Christian belief? And, where did the idea of “self” come from – is it even a proper theological category or is it just an idea invented to make the Christian God seem less plausible? I, for instance, never think of myself as “a self.” To me, the word is just part of our inflected pronoun system in English – it has no conceptual richness. I am a human being in the female form, and a person. If I were to imagine myself differently, perhaps I would begin to behave differently.
When dealing with concepts, Reason is only half the equipment. Imagination is just as important, if not more so.
This was long, I know. Sorry. Please consider it a personal statement, and not an argument.
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Thanks for sharing. I personally haven’t read much about evangelical history but I did read the chapter that I linked to and found it helpful. I hesitate to commit to a specific theological camp, but I presently find individuals like Dallas Willard and Christian philosopher Paul K. Moser very interesting. Willard is described in this book as a “proto-evangelical.” There are plenty of directions to choose from post evangelicalism. Proto-evangelicalism, as I (barely) understand it, aims to return to a Christianity that rests on access to the power and person of Christ as fundamental rather than mere correct belief. Taking a lesson from them (Willard and Moser), I recently shifted the purpose of my blog from “what I believe and why” to “towards a Christ-shaped analytic theology”. http://bennasmith.wordpress.com/about/
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I understand that impulse, and I think it’s a good one. But you see this as a “return?”
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I think it is likely a return to the question “who do you say that I am?” Doctrinal orthodoxy can be a false comfort for those of us with a proclivity towards becoming “experts in the law”. There are many ways to resist Christ’s authority. Becoming an doctrinal expert, or defender of the truth, perhaps involves dangers that evangelicals/fundamentalists have long neglected.
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So are you more in line with the emergent movement?
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Not really. They don’t tend to be very analytic!
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Too true.
Read much Chesterton yet?
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I have read a little bit of him. He seems to write very well.
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Apparently C. S. Lewis said that George MacDonald baptized his imagination (or was it affeections? both?) but G. K. Chesterton baptized his intellect. He wrote prolifically and his range is enormous – from poetry to detective stories to journalism to political essays to literary criticism to mythopoeic novels to theology and philosophy.
I bring him up because, if you are going to re-examine cardinal doctrines, a historical consciousness is essential. In other words, who first started to challenge those doctrines from within Christianity, and why? And who answered those people, and how? In that context it would almost be a sin to ignore Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy.’ (He was not Eastern Orthodox. 🙂
Although one wonders if, to really appreciate its insights, one must plunge beneath the waters under MacDonald’s hand first…
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I’ve had that book saved on my kindle for a while. As for re-examining cardinal doctrines, there is already precedent for a non-heretical conservative party within the church who reject Arianism yet are suspicious of extra-biblical terminology: the homoiousian party. People like Samuel Clarke (who got me thinking) are basically just early-modern reincarnations of that position. And even Athanasius regarded such people as brothers “who mean what we mean” but disagree about the wording.
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They only used words found in the Bible?
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Maybe not quite so strict, but they were reluctant to accept the extra-biblical Nicene term “homoousios”. You can read Athanasius’ appeal to this orthodox party in On the Synods 41-55: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204/Page_472.html (only about 20 pages)
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http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html
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The homoiousion party is not your best example for what your are proposing, Ben. In the mid-350s a trinitarian dogma did not exist in the Church. Nicaea was not recognized as an ecumenical council (especially in the Eastern Church) and even its supporters interpreted the homoousion in diverse ways.
But the Church did in fact dogmatically settle on the Nicene homoousion, and this dogma became the basis for all subsequent dogmatic definitions of the first millennium. Hence what you are proposing is nothing less than unravelling the closely-knit fabric of Christian doctrine. There is simply no going back on what happened at the 325 and 381 ecumenical councils—there can only be going forward.
For an example of what you are proposing, see this new “personal” creed: http://goo.gl/uGJs8H. It might just as easily have been composed by the Homoian party in the mid-4th century.
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That “personal creed” was not written by me, so I take no responsibility for it. I’m not suggesting that we go back to the homoiousian position, but I am suggesting that the irenic dialogue between Athanasius and the homoiousians is interesting and helpful. The lesson: what we mean matters more than the words we may disagree about.
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As a poet I can never agree to that. The conventions of language are far more important to mankind than the private conceptions of an individual. Now, how God will judge that individual may have more to do with his intentions, but this is not Judgement Day, it’s public discourse.
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But the fact of the matter is that people mean different things by the same words, especially in theology. Charity requires asking what one’s conversation partner means before branding them a heretic or thinking ill of them.
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Ben, that’s true. Even scriptural writers mean different things by the same words. That’s why the scriptures cannot funciton as a creed or doctrinal statement. They are literature. Only a creed can function as a creed.
But in order to arrive at a creed – or any agreed-upon belief – specific words must be agreed upon, along with their meanings. I think what Fr. Kimel and I are trying to insist on is a historical consciousness – an awareness that what you are reading is the story of how the church came to agree on some specific words.
Yes, I agree that the story is instructive in the ethics of polemical discussion. (Sometimes negatively, sometimes positively.) But I guess what I’m wanting to see from you is a recognition that people discussing “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” long after the discussion has been closed are in a different position – ethically, spiritually, morally, linguistically – than those who were discussing these questions before the words and their meanings had been exhaustively discussed and agreed upon.
In other words, even though neither Fr. Kimel nor I have called Tuggy or anyone else a heretic, isn’t it a fair assesment for us to say that there’s an ethical burden on him when discussing this particular doctrine that he would not bear when, for instance, discussing eschatology?
And not just because of the centrality of the doctrine, though that’s part of it. But also, because for centuries the Christian Church has been able to tell the world about God with one mouth. The value of that – and the disaster should it be undone – cannot be properly assessed by one man.
Did I fairly represent your position, Fr. Kimel?
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Interesting point. Yes, we should certainly tread carefully here. But as I see it, there are a wide variety of different (mutually incompatible) understandings of the Trinity. So I don’t think that there is much risk of destroying theological unity by exploring further. The main risk to unity, as I see it, is failing to do justice to the authority and character of the one Lord Jesus Christ. Fortunately, one can submit to that authority without a correct understanding of the Trinity (it happens all and perhaps most of the time). Accordingly, I consider myself united with all who call upon the name of the Lord, regardless of our several theological disagreements. This lowers the stakes of doing theology and should lead to more irenic discussion between brothers and sisters in Christ.
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Ben, a few points here.
First, it’s nonsensical to say that there are a wide variety of different understandings of the Trinity. By saying this, you show that you don’t understand what the Trinity is. The Trinity is, itself, an “understanding” of something. It is not a thing found in nature, which we can all observe and make theories about. It is an idea, an official one agreed upon at a certain time, after a certain process, by the Church.
That would be like saying that there are many different mutually incompatible definitions of mass-energy equivalance. On closer inspection, it turns out that mass-energy equivalance is, itself, a defintion. It represents a specific, carefully defined understanding of the relationship between mass and energy.
You could say there are different undersandings of mass and energy, but you could not say there are different understandings of mass-energy equivalence – unless you are willing to grant that one of those understandings is correct and all the others misunderstandings, in fact.
Now let’s suppose that many many people – those who are not experts in physics – do not really understand mass-energy equivalence. In this sense it is true that there are “many different understandings of mass-energy equivalance.” But surely their condition is different than the condition of a physicist who proposes an entirely different theory of the relationship between mass and energy and tries to convince everyone to be loyal to that one?
The fact is, I believe in mass-energy equivalence as defined by Albert Einstein – even if I don’t understand it very well. I am loyal to that view of reality. So are most other people in our time.
In the same way, most people in the pew are loyal to the Trinity, even if they don’t understand it at a philosophical level. They know that “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” are both one and three, and their lack of philosophical understanding actually makes the doctrine more interesting to them. If you were to propose some other, incompatible, definition of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” they would become uncomfortable and perhaps angry – because you are interfering with their ability to worship.
Now if you mean that there are many understandings of the scriptural formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” then you shouldn’t use the word ‘Trinity,’ but we can consider your argument from there. You are really saying that many theologians have proposed new definitions of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” which are inimical to the Trinity.
You are arguing in effect that the very existence of these alternate definitions, apart from the validity of their arguments or the richness of their concepts, renders the Trinity “just another definition,” and denies it its special position in the Church’s understanding – despite history, despite linguistic convention.
It strikes me that this is making things pretty easy for all opponents in all debates. If all you have to do to discredit a theory is to throw up multiple opposing theories – any theories – then it doesn’t really matter what those theories are, how likely or reasonable, how helpful, how argued, does it?
By this line of reasoning, all debates, all theories, all definitions, all reasonings, have been rendered useless and pointless and you have conceded that we cannot know anything at all – all we can do is obey.
In other words you are standing, as you make that argument, in the ranks of those who are dismantling civilization. I would reconsider, if I were you.
***
As a side note – I predict that soteriology will become very important in this discussion. The main impulse, the emotional drive, which prompts people from a more-or-less evangelical background to feel trapped and constrained within orthodoxy is the fact that there is a force constraining them to believe that everyone outside orthodoxy has no part in Christ and that, in fact, Christ will torture them endlessly for getting their doctrine wrong and therefore it hardly matters how we treat them. No wonder we want to make the tent as big as possible. Every good man wants, in his heart, to rebel against this monstrous idea.
I suggest that it is better to rebel against the idea openly, to get a new soteriology, rather than to retain the soteriology while rendering it toothless at the expense of the grandest doctrines of the Church.
I don’t think it’s necessary to believe that the existence of an official orthodoxy – a single voice with which the Church speaks – is there for the purpose of damning everybody who doesn’t “get it.” It’s there for the purposes of public discourse and the very great good that comes from everyone in society worshipping the same God. What mercy, what fellowship, what love may be extended to the dissenting is a completely different question.
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If you think it is non-nonsensical to point out that there are multiple understandings of the Trinity, what do you make of, for example, Trinities in which the Spirit proceeds also from the Son vs. Trinities in which he doesn’t? Or what about Trinities in which the Son and Spirit defer to the Father in authority vs. Trinities in which they do not? Every theologian, in my experience, understands the Trinity slightly differently. I don’t see how you can deny a plurality of understandings that are at face value compatible with Scripture and the early creeds.
As for soteriology, I don’t think a correct understanding of the Trinity is necessary for salvation, if only because most of God’s people seem to not understand the Trinity.
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Ben, AR didn’t say a correct understanding of the Trinity is necessary for salvation. That seems to be the misconception under which you are laboring. She is saying that different understandings lead to and/or stem from different faiths.
How much one can vary in understanding and still reach the goal? That is the question.
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Ok, if I take faith as “trust or confidence”, then surely two people with different understandings of the Trinity can nevertheless each place faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am confident that this happens all the time. This is why I am happy to suggest that many people, who I consider brothers and sisters in Christ, wrongly understand the Trinity. The people of God are those who call upon the name of their common Lord (cf. 1 Cor 1:2), who place their faith/trust/confidence in God through Jesus. The understandings of such people can and do vary greatly (cf. 1 Cor 8:6-7).
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I think you misaporend the nature of faith. Trust/confidence are, or can be a component but that trust and confidence is built on interrelationship.
I have, throughout my life, tended to approach God, the saints, theology by saying: if you are real, I want to know you. Then be open to the result.
That’s how I encountered Jesus, Mary, came to the Church and remain in her hopefully growing. My one assumption in all this was the truth I received from my parents that life is an interconnected hierarchy of loving intelligence that we participate in. It is there no matter what we think of it. Our task is to discern it, not create it.
So I have always engaged my discernment and continue to do so.
Beauty is a guide. If, Ben you want to know the Trinity short of joining the Orthodox Church–try AR’s web site and engage in a little poetry.
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Ok, thanks
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I’m more or less with you except for all options being equivalent. Of course, all but one understanding is incorrect. But which one is the correct one?
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Ben, I’m never really sure what to do when someone misses my point so completely. I wonder whether they just skimmed my comment, making no effort to grasp the ideas in it, or whether they are deliberately obfuscating, or perhaps whether they simply aren’t equipped with the mental categories and methods of reasoning to follow me. Either way, I think this conversation has stopped being productive. Another time, maybe?
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Maybe you should start a new thread, it’s hard to keep track of replies on this one.
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Yes, Fr. Kimel doesn’t like narrow columns of type so he prevents nesting more than three or four deep, I guess. There’s an upside and a downside, but I think that wordpress could do a better job of showing comment origin without nesting. Anyway, not sure there’s much more to say at this point.
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This is true. I hate it when comment columns get really narrow. I had nesting set at 4. I just changed it to 5, but the change doesn’t appear to apply retroactively.
And I don’t understand why some of today’s posts appear “before” posts that were written yesterday. Strange.
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The Holy Trinity is known through worship not doubtful discourse based on modern eqalitarianism of all opinions being equivalent. Of course universal salvation tends to drink from the same well.
Play around in the mind all you want, to know God requires obedience, humility and love. He us who He is. What we think does not change Him, but it can keep us from Him.
Our being is contingent and absolutely dependent on His. Not the other way around.
Obedience, humility and love lead to knowledge. Real knowledge, not gnosticism.
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Michael, thanks, but none of that is pertinent to the question under discussion. We are talking about the importance of the Church’s public confession.
As for universal salvation, I doubt St. Isaac or George MacDonald were drinking from the well of modern egalitarianism or the idea that all opinions are equal. Something profoundly different has happened when someone can lay hold of God’s feet and cry to him in faith, “You are better than you seem to say you are.”
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My apologies, Ben. I didn’t in anyway intend to imply that this new creed represents your own views (I do not know if it does or not) but rather to provide it as an example of a recent attempt to express a more biblical, non-Nicene Christianity.
Always lurking behind discussions on this topic is the question of dogma and heresy. This doesn’t mean that we cannot have a civil and constructive conversation—indeed, I think we have having one such conversation at this moment—but it does man that we cannot pretend that the doctrine of the Trinity is mere theologoumenon or a matter of personal opinion. It goes right to the core of ecclesial identity—at least so insist the three oldest Christian Churches (Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism). From our perspective, a rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity is a rejection of Christianity. It’s that important and that central.
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Ok, thanks. Yes, I recognize that Nicene Trinitarianism is essential to post-Nicene church doctrine. And I am not convinced that I have rejected it, as you seem to claim and warn. I’m looking for clarity where there is usually confusion. Reading polemics between Athanasius and the Arians seems less helpful to me than irenic discussion between Athanasius and the homoiousians. The lesson is that there is a spectrum of views to interact with rather than discrete orthodoxy vs. heresy.
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Michael and Ben, sorry, I hadn’t seen some of the comments yet when I made my most recent replies. I often reply from my wordpress home page rather than checking and re-checking the blog for comments. It might take me a little while to catch up with the way the conversation has gone. Again, sorry if my comments were premature or unnecessarily dismissive.
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Thanks for this thoughtful challenge, Fr. Kimel. Believe it or not, much of what you say here does in fact resonate with me (except for the part about being on the cusp of rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity). All the best,
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Can we read our way into the Trinity? I wonder how people can manage to do anything else, if they are taking St. Matthew 28:18-20 and the Gospel of St. John seriously: for example, having had lots of long, friendly discussions with Jehovah’s Witnesses, all the evasion of the Trinity seems so implausible and contrived.
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You’ll get no argument from me, David! 🙂
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Father Aidan,
from which book of Ch. Yannaras is that quote taken? I have a guess it is from Elements of Faith, but not sure.
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Fr John, it’s from an unpublished paper by Yannaras titled “The Ontological Realism of our Hopes Hereafter.”
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Hi Father,
Is the Yannaras paper you reference on-line? I did a google search and couldn’t find it.
Thanks.
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Brian, I sent you a copy. I also posted the unpublished paper online: http://goo.gl/nS7TDh
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“Christianity” that is solely rational leads to perdition as does “Christianity” that is based on emotive belief alone. This is the Western split that bedeviled me for years existentially and ontologically until I was led to the Orthodox Church. The split is akin to separating the two persons of Jesus Christ and emphasizing either the human or the divine at the expense of the other. Ultimately, such meanderings are a denial of the fullness of the Incarnation.
Peter’s confession that the Jesus Christ before whom he was standing in the flesh was the “Son of the Living God” is a confession that He is fully man and fully God.
For we Orthodox the worship of the Trinity is revealed in Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordon. The Troparian of the Feast of Theophany: “When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, worship of the Trinity wast made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of His word. O Christ our God, Who hath appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee.” Jesus’s Incarnation was about the manifestation of God’s glory as much as it was about our re-sanctification. A non-Trinitarian understanding of God within Christianity is, as David points out, is really quite difficult.
Faith is a combination of experience, thought and belief but if the thought and belief do not lead to or come from an encounter in which we are asked” “Who do you say that I am”, it is pretty arid. If our answer is not the same as Peter’s, we are in trouble.
Since this is the fundamental experience of the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church every time it is celebrated I have to ask. What’s to recover?
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Oh, BTW notice that it is worship of the Trinity…not thinking about or promulgating, etc., etc. etc.
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Eh, they are usualy forgoting that Arians as well used Scriptures. (Mk 15:34, Jn 8:53, Jn 14:28). Acctually entire Triadology is hermeneutic of passages like those previous and those like Jn 10:30, Jn 1:1-3, Acts 20:28 and similar. Our position was allways like, you need Church, body of Christ, to interpret Scriptures. Of course, sola Scriptura could not accept this premise. And that’s how we have many situation where Protestants are puting emphaisie on issues which do not make such big impression on Orthodox, and presumably on Roman Catholics. (Insistance on Soteriology, invention of “Semi-pelagianism”, justification…) Tradition settled those questions centuries beofre Calvin and Luter, and if there is no precise defintion, its simply because nobody raised issue. Evangelicals do not possess enitre Tradition, yett they have portions of it, like belief in Holy Trinity, so they need to re-define it by only argument they acknowledge. Scripture… But, in our eyes its allways futile. Like I said, Arius knew Scriptures no less than most briliant Evangelical scholars. He also considered himself champion of orthodoxy. He fought Modalism… He was even invoking tradition. But Church in painfull and violent process, rejected his doctrine. Why? They did not felt his doctirine articulate faith handed down to them by Apostles, which they were practicing on their liturgies. Like mentioned few times Lex orandi lex credendi. I think point which makes biggest difference between Orthodoxy and Protestantism is ahistoricity of latter.
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I dont think you could draw to much paralels between Homoiousians and Samuel Clarke, nor modern Evangleicals for that matter. First, Homoiousians were not Sola Scriptura minded. They were accepting Tradition. In fact Arians did to. Both parties were holding Councils, and tought them to be authoritative. Problem with homousios was more about ousia denoting property in New Testament Greek than about being extra-biblical. Nicene creed had line about Son being born from essence (ousia) of Father. So change of meaning was scandalous. Also, person responsable for assimilation of Homoiousians into Nicene Orthodoxy was Saint Basil the Great. Athanasius is here aproving movement started by Basil, which included shift in theological grammar. (Hypostasis being shifted from Nature to Person). Anyway, I am not verry acquitaned with Samuel Clarck, but he is considered clear subordinatinist. It was not something Homoiousians would sign to. In fact they were rejecting such doctrine numerous times. Its rather Homoian standpoint.
Anyway, what would be benefit of reviving long defunct and, deficient position, from point of Christian Orthodoxy (not Eastern Orthodoxy, but something held by almost all Christians)? I understand you have personal struggle to accept what you percieve extra-Biblical teaching, but like, fr Aidan said, its going back.
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Thomas C. Pfizenmaier rejects attempts to brand Samuel Clarke as an Arian by arguing that he actually falls within a tradition that goes back to the homoiousians in this book (link below). Subordinationism comes in different flavours, some false, some possibly true. If you aren’t familiar with him, then how do you know the homoiousians would reject him? http://books.google.ca/books?id=OemH4jKItGQC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=The+Trinitarian+Theology+of+Dr.+Samuel+Clarke&source=bl&ots=n2HIZ_wDT2&sig=JOOBl013U4P3dv3Aky9Sg_La6lw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=c6SZU-vpKYKhyATHxoDwDw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20Trinitarian%20Theology%20of%20Dr.%20Samuel%20Clarke&f=false.
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Ben, you have taken exception to the sentence in my article where I state that you appear to be on the cusp of abandoning the trinitarian doctrine. I went back to your article today to see why I got that impression. I was reacting to “Option C: Perhaps the Christian God is not the Trinity?” Given your enthusiasm for this option, was I off-base drawing the conclusion that I did? In any case, if I misinterpreted you, I again tender my apologies.
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Thanks for asking. I suggested that “a face value reading of Scripture and early church history supports option C” and quoted Samuel Clarke who claims, after surveying the evidence, that
I don’t see how this empirical claim amounts to denying the doctrine of the Trinity. I suspect that even you could grant this claim, with the caveat that subsequent church history interpreted scripture differently than its earliest readers (and authors). I’d recommend caution (and mercy perhaps?) before almost calling someone a Trinity denier. Let’s not jump to conclusions and draw battle-lines here. The face value interpretation is worth exploring, even if you think that later tradition trumps it. In any case, I wrote
Rather than denying the Trinity (and I hope a face-value interpretation in good faith doesn’t amount to such a denial), I invite the reader to help me see the threat. You’ve kindly taken me up on that invitation, and it is still open!
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I dont have access to Clarke’s works, nor Pfizenmaier’s. But, this last sentence, if we take out words in parethensis in first part, and change word allways in second, does not sound problematic from Orthodox position, Christ is refered as God in Scriptures, on two places without any doubt, and there are controversies on few dozen other passages. In fact, when we pray to God, we pray to faher. Also, take look on Nicene creed: “We believe in one God, Father…”
But about denying doctrine of Trinity, well, statement “There is Trinity”, or to be even more paleo-Christian: There are Father, Son and Holy Spirit could not be equated with Doctrine of Trinity (Father, Son and Spirit are three persons of God, who share same Divine nature). Arius was not denying Trinity. He was trying to offer his own understanding. In fact he was reacting to one previous trinitatian model, modalism. So, my point is when we speak about Doctrine of Trinity, we have specific model of Trinitarian doctrine in mind. Homousians and homoiusians were divided over one letter. Not over their faith.
We could grant that they did not have specificaly articulated Triadology we have today. But from our perspective, there is difference of form, not of material, in their faith. Earliest Christians were empathicaly rejecting to say: Kyrios, Kaisar (Dominus Caesar), but they were constantly exclaiming Kyrios, Hristos, (Dominus Christus). Kyrios (Lord) was signifying Divinity to them.
I fully agree. 🙂 But you see, from our perspective, your dilemma is long settled. I dont think father Aidan had intention of confronting you. Just, Orthodox, and I would Presume Roman Catholics, are amused when they read about rediscovering Ancient Church beliefs, practices… We simply think we are same Church founded on Penetecost. And we are believing our faith was handed down to us. And you see, this Church, or 4th Century Church, if you prefer set out canon of Bible, upheld by all streams of Protestantism. Exactly Athanasius the Great (Canon of New Testament) and Gregory Thelogian (he was speaking about 39 book canon of Old Testament, he was not rejecting deutrocanonical books though, but did not saw them on equal footing with books from Hebre canon). You are implicitly accepting their authority to determine what constitues Bible. Of course, for most Protestants this acceptance is unconscious… But never the less, if they were good enough to determine form of Bible, they would be autority in its interpretation. That was main argument of fr Aidan I think. Reading Scriptures as something else than book of Church is problematic. Also, apropo face value, Christians were first reading Old Testament, and they were not limiting themselves to face value, they were interpreating it Christologicaly.
But historicaly, all forms of Subordationism are rejected. Origen could be rightly described as father of Christian theology. But his complex and aparently contradictory Triadology was rejected by Church because of subordinationist passagess. I dont know if you are farmiliar with his Trinitarian model, but to be honest I would find it interesting to know your reaction on his teaching.
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Arius’ error was to teach that the Son is an exalted creature, as I understand it. I don’t have any problem with the three persons-one nature formula, I just want to clarify what it means without resorting to contradiction or obfuscation. I don’t expect that formula to be in the bible, but I do think there is evidence to support something like it. I think Richard Bauckham, for example, does a good job of clarifying what constitutes the “divine identity” in scripture. That being said, monotheism in scripture and the early church seems to rest upon their being one Father rather than upon one divine person or one divine nature. I think Samuel Clarke argues persuasively for this conclusion.
Even if one treats the bible as a document handed down from history, rather than as a divinely inspired or ecclesially sanctioned authority, one can still detect the grammar used by its authors to speak of God and his Son. And although the Son is called God, this appears to be a divine title. No one wants to say that the Son of God is the Son of himself. Neither is the Son of God the Son of the Trinity in Scripture. The Son of God is the Son of his Father, God, the creator of all things visible and invisible. This God creates through his Son/Word, but there is never ambiguity about God being the ultimate source of all things. If we have lost this grammar somewhere along the way, I think it might be instructive to look at it afresh, if only to avoid the “broken telephone” effect of tradition.
Lastly, if by subordinationism you merely mean asymmetry, all forms of subordination are not rejected. The Son is from the Father. The reverse is not true. The Son was crucified, the Father was not. Biblical (and frankly Nicene Creed) grammar enshrine certain differences between the Father and the Son. A completely symmetric Trinity, while not subordinationist, would be false in my view. Some sort of Trinitarian asymmetry is unavoidable.
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Just in case you’re interested, Clarke’s book can be found here: http://goo.gl/c5FH3F. By the way, ddpbf, what is your first name? I hate addressing people by their initials. 🙂
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Ben, one general point germane to this thread: you appear to have taken my piece as an attack upon your personal beliefs, but if you take a look at the article again, I think you’ll see that I only invoked your blog piece as a foil, so to speak, to address the sola scriptura project and its relationship to Christian dogma. One cannot derive, except perhaps by chance, the ecumenical doctrine of the Trinity by means of a straight or plain reading of the Bible, because (1) the Church Fathers did not see themselves bound to a literalistic reading of the Bible and (2) their reading of the Bible was conditioned by their sacramental, liturgical, and spiritual experience.
Consider another related dogma—the creatio ex nihilo. Does Scripture teach it? An increasing number of biblical scholars would say no, at least not explicitly. It appears to clearly be a 2nd century “revelation,” imposed upon the mind of the Church as it sought to elaborate the Christian doctrine of creation in conflict with gnosticism and Hellenism. Yet this post-biblical insight is a necessary postulate for the elaboration of the doctrine of the Trinity. It enables the distinction between theologia and economia, and without this distinction, we cannot properly talk about a doctrine of the Trinity.
I know that these considerations are not presently of great concern to you. You have other fish to fry, just as I do. But I raise them so that evangelicals like yourself (and there seem to be a lot of them who are doing precisely the same thing as you are) might reflect further on the relationship between Bible, Tradition, Church, and dogma.
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Well said. Creation from nothing is a good example. Apparently God’s people did just fine without it until someone proposed the opposite (I presume). At which point, the doctrine was established. Even still, post-biblical doctrines need to be compatible with the grammar and intention of Scripture, as best as we can identify them.
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Interpolating my oar, here: what is the exegetical history of 2 Maccabees 7:28 which, in the Vulgate, includes “intelligas, quia ex nihilo fecit illa [= “caelum et terra “] Deus”?
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I ask two questions: What is to recover? What is gained by rethinking what the early Church spent several centuries working out?
If one wants to be a Christian there are certain things that one must accept on faith. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is one of those. It has to be the assumption one makes in going forward. As one worships in a believing community the ability to understand, comprehend and accept into oneself the specific truths such faith leads to will be made known as necessary.
Of course, larger issues of the impact and the specifics of that faith in our time and place are certainly necessary, but it is really easy to allow enthusiasm for speculation to lead away from the truth.
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I believe its correct. I did not have chance to read Thalia, but I got same impression from Church History lessones.
I must admitt I dont see substantial difference between first two options. Since one Father is Divine person. 🙂 Also, according to Capadocian fathers, what we today understand under being , existance is person. They shifted meaning of Greek word hypostasis (closest equivalent in English is existance, I believe) from nature (Physis) or essence (Ousia) to Person (prosopon). Accrding them there is no naked essence. It is allways hypostatized in Persons. Furthermore, one Hypostasis, those of Father is cause of other two. Father is giving birth, aeternally to Son and Spirit proceed from Father. I do not think your opinion is far from their. Asked by Anomeans, Saint Gregory defined Son as not name of essence (implying modalisam, there is no difference between Father and Son), nor energy (which could be interpreted by them as acceptance of Son being creature), but Son is name of relation. Son is drawing his existance from relation with Father. His Hypostasis is His relation with Father. Also, I think its necessary, to underline, in Capadocian, and Eastern Orthodox Triadology, Divine will belongs to nature not to person. So all three Persons have one will. That’s imprtnant since from Carthesius, we take for granted our self-consciousness is our Identity, perosnality. Hope this will help you to understand our position on Trinity.
I dont think Eastern Orthodox, (or any orthodox Chrisitan, as upholder of Nicene Trintarian formula) can seriously dispute last sentence. I first hear symmetry in this context, but I think I understood you. Pater non Est Filius, Filius non est Pater, Spiritus non est Pater… etc. There is difference between Persons. I would recomend you to take a look in Eucharist prayer from Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great. Prayer is sent to Father. And its implied in this prayer, Father is cause (arkhe) of other two Persons. Anyway, apropo subordinationism, in triadological context, subordinationism imply ontological difference. Not just difference of personal atributes.
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I think we are understanding each other!
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Thanks, I will try to read, as much as my newborn daughter and her mom allow me to.
http://tinyurl.com/lrl37jg
Its hm, internet nickname I coined from my initals in ASCII and initals of my Alma Mater – (p)Православни (b)богословски (f)факултет – Orthodox Theological Faculty (of Belgrade University).
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With apologies, the only Ben Naismith I have yet read are his comments here. But it would seem that he is thinking in terms of what is usually (or at least often), called ‘the Monarchy of the Father’: that the Father is the sole Arche (Beginning/Beginner, etc.) of the Godhead, fully Enhypostasizing the Ousia, fully ‘imparting’ (while fully ‘retaining’) the Ousia to the Son in Begetting Him, Who Co-equally fully Enhypostasizes the Ousia, and also, fully distinctly, fully ‘imparting’ (while fully ‘retaining’) the Ousia to the Spirit in Spirating Him, Who, fully distinctly also Co-equally fully Enhypostasizes the Ousia, which Begetting-Being Begotten and Spirating-Being Spirated/Proceeding are equally Eternal with the Father, with the Begotten One and the Proceeding One being Co-equal (and so not strictly ‘subordinate’, while strictly ‘Dependently Recipient’). I am no great shakes on the Ante-Nicene Fathers (even in translation), but have the impression that a lot of what is sometimes seen as strictly ‘subordinationist’ is in fact what I (for want of knowing the technical terms) here will call ‘Dependently Recipientist’. Eric Voegelin has an imagery he uses in various contexts (I think, including Trinitarian theology) which I think can be fruitfully borrowed: that of ‘compactness’ and ‘differentiation’ – it (in this case orthodox Trinitarian understanding) is all ‘there’ from the start, but ‘compactly’, awaiting – and undergoing – subsequent ‘differentiation’.
(Of course, lurking here are the Filioquist controversies, depending upon if and how the Spriit is seen as Spirating/Proceeding Through – or even ‘From’ – the Son.)
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This is helpful, thanks.
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Wow—one sentence! 🙂
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Influence of the Nicene Creed in older translations? (!)
(When I was living in the House of St. Gregory in Oxford, one of my house-fellows was dismayed to find the style of his doctoral dissertation on Hegel getting alarmingly Hegelian…)
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No one has yet mentioned the most critical dimension of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity—namely, its soteriological intent. St Athanasius & Company weren’t asserting a particular metaphysic of divinity and they certainly did not think they were offering a superior explanation of how God can be one and three. They saw, rather, that the kind of subordinationism being asserted by the Arians threatened the heart of the gospel—namely, God is who he has revealed himself to be. If this identity is not asserted, then what we see in Jesus is not God and what he does in Jesus is not God acting for the salvation of humanity. That is the whole point of the Nicene homoousion.
We can speculate on why it took the Church three hundred years to come to this incisive, and decisive, insight into the apostolic revelation. Eventually the Church came to understand that this insight was given by the Holy Spirit, and this is why the Church cannot go back on the Nicene dogma. She now knows that Jesus and the Spirit are divine, in the fullest and maximal sense possible. She now knows that the death of Jesus on the cross was the death of God. She now knows that the resurrection and ascension of Jesus means humanity’s elevation into the eternal life of the Godhead. She now knows that the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit is nothing less than God himself drawing near to humanity in the most intimate and closest way possible. At every point the Nicene dogma protects the good news that in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit we are dealing with God and not with some quasi-divine intermediary or an exalted creature.
This is why philosophy can only exercise an ancillary role in the explication of the trinitarian doctrine, for the doctrine was never intended to be an explanation of God. It was intended to be a rule of doxological and proclamatory discourse.
See my series “Thinking Trinity.”
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I wonder how much of this insight is already there in Philippians 2:9-11 (in its immediate context), especially in the quotation of Isaiah 45:23 (in its broader context: cf. the Septuagint translation).
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I second Ben’s suggestion about starting a new thread. The present thread has become pretty unwieldy. May I suggest that folks continue the conversation under either the Torrance or Jenson citation that I posted this morning.
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“If this identity is not asserted, then what we see in Jesus is not God and what he does in Jesus is not God acting for the salvation of humanity. That is the whole point of the Nicene”
You have indeed gotten to the heart of the matter, Father Aidan. How could it be that “he who has seen me has seen the Father” if Jesus is anything less than consubstantial with Him? I would also add that, apart from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, it would be virtually impossible to speak of a God who is love itself.
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