The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons 9781474213226

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Preface

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HIS monograph is devoted to clarifying understanding of the most profound article of the Christian Faith, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The exposition takes place within the frame of the biblical and Nicene tradition of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is heavily influenced by Greek patristic and Reformed theology. with particular acknowledgement of debt to Athanasius the Great. Hugh Ross Mackintosh and Karl Barth. My argument and presentation have taken an open-structured form in the conviction that the truth of the Holy Trinity is more to be adored than expressed. The Holy Scriptures do not give us dogmatic propositions about the Trinity. but they do present us with definite witness to the oneness and differentiation between the Father. the Son and the Holy Spirit. under the conmaint of which the early Church allowed the pattern and order of God's Triune Life [0 impose themselves upon its mind. There took shape within the ecumenical thinking of the Church a specifically apostolic frame of understanding the truth of the Gospel which soon came to be revered as the distinctive mind or ct>p6VT)lla of the Catholic Church. It was to this mind that the great fathers and theologians of the Church intuitively appealed in forming theological judgments and making conciliar decisions. It was thus that something of immense significance for the whole life. worship and mission of the Church took place, the formation of a theological paradigm of understanding which became more and more articulate as the Church sought to expound, clarify and integrate the lruths of the Gospel. and defend them from damaging misinterpretation. I believe it is important to recognise that in these early centuries. as the lruth-content of apostolic Scriptures unfolded within the understanding of the Church, something of definitive and irreversible significance [Ook place. This is very evident in the Nicene confession of belief in 'one Lord Jesus Christ ... of one substance with the Father (OIlOOOOlOS' T4J naTpt)'. In that conciliar formulation of the homoousion the fathers of the Nicene Council were articulating what they felt they had 10 think and say under the constraint of the truth and in fidelity to the biblical witness to Christ and the basic interpretation of it already given in the apostolic foundation of the Church. The explicit formulation of the homoousion at the Council of Nicaea was an absolutely fundamental event that took place in the mind of the early Church. It was a decisive step in deeper understanding of the Gospel, giving precise expression to the all-important relation between the incarnate Son and God the Father, which they made in obedience to God's saving revelation in Jesus Christ and in continuity with the apostolic tradition upon which the Church could not go back. With it a giant step was taken in IX

Introduction

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HE Christian doctrine of God is to be understood from within the unique, definitive and final self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son, that is, from within the self-revelation of God as God become man for us and our salvation, in accordance with its proclamation in the Gospel and its actualisation through the Holy Spirit in the apostolic foundation of the Church. It is in the Lord Jesus, the very Word and Mind of God incarnate in our humanity, that the eternal God 'defines' and identifies himself for us as he really is. Only in Christ is God's self-revelation identical with himself, and only in Christ, God for us, does he communicate his self-revelation to us in such a way that authentic knowledge of God is embodied in our humanity, and thus in such a way that it may be communicated to us and understood by us. Jesus Christ is at once the complete revelation of God to man, and the perfect correspondence on man's part to that revelation required by it for the fulfilment of its own revealing movement. As the faithful answer to God's self-revelation Jesus Christ yields from out of our human existence and life the fulfilled reception and faithful embodiment which belongs to the content of God's revelation of himself to man. Moreover, it is only in Christ in whom God's self-revelation is identical with himself that we may rightly apprehend it and really know God as he is in himself, in the oneness and differentiation of God within his own eternal Being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for what God is toward us in his historical self-manifestation to us in the Gospel as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he is revealed to be inherently and eternally in himself. It is thus in and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that the distinctively Christian doctrine of God in his transcendent triunity is mediated to us. It is certainly the incarnation of the eternal Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ which prescribes for us in Christian theology both its proper matter and form, so that whether in its activity as a whole or in the formulation of a doctrine in any part, it is the Christological patter!! that will appear throughout the whole body of Christian dogmatics. This docs not mean, however, that all theology can be reduced to Christology, but that because there is only one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus, in the pr.:sentation of the doctrines of the Christian faith, every doctrine will be expressed in its inner coherence with Christo logy at the centre, and in its correspondence with the objective reality of God's self-revelation in Christ. On the other hand, because in Jesus Christ God reveals himself through himself and as he is in himself, the ultimate ground upon which our knowledge of Jesus Christ himselfand of God's self-revelation through Christ rests becomes disclosed as trinitarian. It is thus that the doctrine of Christ

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The Christian Perspective

being God. all our knowledge of him comes by divine revelation. for it is impossible for us to know God without his willing to be known. God may b~ and is known only as he makes himself known to us through the revealing and saving agency of his Word and Spirit. This biblically grounded principle. without God. God (annot bt known. was clearly formulated by Irenaeus in the second century in a remarkable clarification of the foundations of Christian theology in the early Church. I God actively reveals himself through himself. through the incarnation of his Son among us as our Saviour and by the power of his Spirit. 'In all things. and through all things, there is one God the Father. and one Word and one Son. and one Spirit. and one salvation to all who believe in him: z This does not imply a preconceived notion of God or any independent idea of God reached apart from the history of his saving revelation to the people of Israel or behind the back of his self-revelation through his Son Jesus Christ and in his one Spirit actualiscd in the midst of Israel. There is no God other than the self-revealed God. and no self-revelation of God apart from the fulfilment of his eternal purpose in his saving and reconciling acts in the life. death and resurrection of Jesus proclaimed to us in the Gospel. As Irenaeus taught, it is only with the incarnation of the only begonen Son. who declares the Father and interprets his Word. that the very God who made himself known in a seminal way through the Old Testament prophets foretelling the advent of his Son. is now made known to us in the saving economy of the New Testament revelation in this trinitarian way.' In Jesus Christ the Word of God made flesh. God the Father has taken the initiative. actively revealing himself to us through himself as the one and only lord

G known only through God. OD

I Set np«ially Irenaeus' discussion of Ihis principle wilh reference 10 Mall. 11.27 &. Luke 10.22 in Ihe opening chaplers of book four of At/wnw hurrs,," Thus 4.11: 'The Lord has laughl us Ihal no one can know God unless God himsdfis Ihe Tcacher. Ihal is 10 say. wilhoul God. God is nOllO be: known.' ('E61Sae(V ~QS b KiJpLos. 6n 9£bv d6lvcII oi.&ls 6WaTQI. 11" OUXl 9£0\1 &MeQVTOS. TOlITlaTlv. C!V(U Ekou 11"" ')'\~(OeCll Tbv Eklw.) Thw. as Hilary formulalcd il. God is known only Ihrough his wilness 10 himself. for he is his own besl Inlcrprclcr. D, Trinifllft. 1.18; cr. 4.36. 1 Ircnacw. At/wnw hllt,"n. 4.11. I Irenaew. Adwnw hurrsn. 4.18-20; &. 4.34.10.

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3 The Biblical Frame

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the preceding chapter anent ion was directed to the fact that God makes himself known through himself alone. that he reveals himself in Jesus Christ and actualises his revelation through his Spirit. which implies that divine revelation is intrinsically trinitarian in its content. movement and structure. Hence. as Karl Barth expressed it. the ratio of the Trinity is the ratio of divine revelation.' This does not mean that the doctrine of the Trinity is a postulate of revelation. as if it could be argued that because God reveals himself in this way he must be a Trinity in himself. for that would mean that the Trinity is not itself part of divine revelation but only an inference from it. On the contrary. God's active self-revealing and the content of his self-revealing are one and the same. for. as we have previously noted. his Act and his Scing inhere in one another. God is who he is in the activity of his saving love toward us. and what he is in his saving activity toward us he is in himself in his eternal Being. Within the course of this revelation God reveals himself to us in a three-fold form and a three-fold way. as he who reveals himself. as he who is the content of his revelation. and as he who enables us through his presence to understand his revelation of himself which we are incapable of doing by ourselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity gives expression to the fact that through Jesus Christ and in his Spirit God has opened himself to us in such a way that in being reconciled to him we lowly sinful creatures may know him. at least in some measure. in the inner relations of his divine Being and have communion with him in his intra-trinitarian Life as Father. Son and Holy Spirit. He reveals himself to us. not only from without or from above. in the advent of his Son as the incarnate Saviour among us. but also from below. in a movement of his Spirit in which through his presence within us he meets himself from our end. thereby bringing us within the circle of his knowing of himself and his revealing of himself through himself. This movement and structure of divine revelation are to be interpreted not in abstract analytic or synthetic terms but only in the concrete soteriological terms of God's actual self-mediation and self-giving to us as the Father. the Son. and the Holy N

• Karl Barth. Chri,llid" l>4puztik (Munich. 1927). p. 150; Stt Chllrrh Dllf"'lIlin 1.1 (Edinburgh. 2nd Nn. 1975). pp. 30411'.

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4 The Trinitarian Mind

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HENEVER we seek to define the meaning of something in precise terms we have to make use of other terms which for this purpose must themselves remain undefined. This is very obvious in loolcing up the meaning of any word in a dictionary. but it applies to all acts of knowledge whether in everyday life or in rigorous scientific inquiry. for any formal account of what we know rests upon a base of informal undefined knowledge. from which it cannot be cut off without becoming empty of significance and useless. This means that a complete formalisation of knowledge in explicit terms is impossible. A cognate reason for this is to be discerned in the faCt that in objective knowledge the realities we seek to know in any field inevitably break through the frame of concepts and statements which we use to describe them. even though they are developed under the constraint of those realities. Concepts and statements of this lcind do not have their truth in themselves but in the realities to which they refer. Thw in all authentic knowledge we have to take into account an informal and undefined knowledge grounded in the inherent intelligibility of what we know. and must constantly look for appropriate ways of letting it exercise a regulative force in all our explicit formulations. This is what happens in normal scientific inquiry in which we seck to reduce to rational order knowledge in any particular field. through relying on an ultimate belief in order. or an inarticulate intuition of an ultimate ground of order. which we are unable to prove or bring to explicit knowledge and expression. It is only through relying implicitly on such an inarticulate ingredient in knowledge. the content of which cannot be made fully explicit. that the moS[ rigorous scientific operations are possible. This applies not least but above all to theological inquiry in which we operate with an implicit understanding of God through his self-revelation but which we are unable fully to reduce to explicit undemanding and conceptual expression. for the transcendent intelligibility of God infinitely exceeds all that we can ever grasp or bring to articulate form. God remains utterly inscrutable to us in the essence of his divine Being. I This is why the New Testament speaks of divine revelation as I Karl 8anh. Chllrch Dill""";" 1.1. p. 321 : 'h is of Ihe very nalure of God to be inlCrutable to man. In saying this we nalurally mean thai in his ,,"ealed nature he is inlCrutable. h is the Dnu

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5 One Being, Three Persons

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NDER this title we are following the way in which the agreement berween Athanasian and Cappadocian approaches were brought together at the Council of Alexandria in AD 362 under the presidency of Athanasius: OM Bri"g, thrrt Pmons (s.Lla ooola TpflS tmOOTaaEls).1 Hence we will not be lapsing into what Karl Rahner called 'the Augustinian-Western conception of the Trinity ... which begins with the one God. the one divine essence as a whole. and only aftnwardsdocs it sec God in three persons.· J The 'whole' with which we are concerned is that of the divine Triunity in which 'the One and the Three' and 'the Three and the One' are the obverse of one another. We will take ow cue mainly from Gregory Nazianzcn who stood rather closer to Athanasius than the other Cappadocians. Basil, his brother Gregory Nysscn. and Amphilochius, Gregory Nazianzcn's cousin,) and recall several well-known passages from his Orations to which we have already drawn attemion.

No sooner do I consider the One than I am enlightened by the radiance of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One. When ( bring any One of the Three before my mind I think of him as a Whole, and my vision is filled. and the most of the Whole escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One in such a way as to anribute more greatness to the rest. When I contempl:ue the Three together. I see but one Torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided Light. 4 To us there is one God. for the Godhead is One. and all that proceeds from him is referred ro One. though we believe in l1uec Persons. For One is not more and another less God; nor is One before and Another after; nor are they paned in will or divided in power. nor can you find here any of the features that obtain in divisible thinp; but the Godhead is. to speak concisely. undivided in being divided; and there is one mingling of Light, as it were of three suns joined to each other. s Alhanasius. Ad AntilKMrws. 6; 5« also Ad Snapioflml. I. 2. 10. Karl Rahncr. 171, TrinilJ(London. 1970). p. 17. ) Rcrcr h~n: 10 Nazianzcn's OrvtiDn on ,''' G"ill AlhilNlSilU, OratiDnn. 21. • Gregory N:uianun. Ora,"",,,. 40.41; cited by John Calvin several timrs. IflJritJIlio. 1.13.17; C_m~l4? on John. 1.1; Epulln.6IJ7. I Gregory Nazianun. Or. 31.14. I

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6 Three Persons, One Being

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Being. Three Persons', and 'Three Persons, One Being' are the obverse of one another, or the mirror image of one another. In the previous chapter we found that the one Being of God is to be understood in his interior relations as the Communion of the three divine Persons with one another: to the communion which God establishes with w in the incarnate economy of his redeeming and revealing actS in history there corresponds a transcendent Communion in himself. These may not be held apart, for while God may be known by us only out of himself, we may not have knowledge of him except at a point of access which is both in our creaturely existence and in God himself. This is precisely what we have in the incarnation, where God's self-revelation ~ Father takes place through his self-giving to us in Jesw Christ his Son and in the Holy Spirit who. as the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. constitutes with them the Communion of the Holy Trinity. In this chapter we focus attention more particularly on the Communion of the three divine Persons who in their perichorctic interrelations are the one Being of God. It is only in knowledge of the economic Trinity that by divine grace we have access within the space and time of our earthly existence to knowledge of the ontological Trinity. for what God has revealed of himself in his activity toward us and on our behalf as Father, Son and Holy Spirit he assures w that he really and eternally is in himself. He is in himself the content of his sclf-communication to w. Our knowledge of the economic Trinity, in the ortID (ognos(mtii, and our knowledge of the ontological Trinity. in the ordo t1Jmdi. may not be separated from one another. for they arise together. interpenetrate each other and regulate each other. In looking at the biblical basis of our knowledge of the Trinity at an earlier point we considered various formulations in which there was evident an implicit trinitarian pattern. but it is worth recalling that mention of the Father. the Son and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament was not always made in the same order. The fact that each of the divine Persons could be mentioned first indicates that the order used did not detract from belief in their full equality. In the actual mission of the Church. however, in which the Gospel of God's saving activity was being proclaimed. the spotlight naturally fell on Jesus Christ himself, for it was through him as the one Mediator berween God and man that human conceptions of God were critically transformed and Christian belief in God the

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7 Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity

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our discussion of the formulation of the docrrine of the Holy Trinity in the third chapter we followed a movemenr of thought from the ground level of the incarnate self-revelarion of God in a parrern of implicit trinitarian relations in the economic Trinity through rwo conceptuaJ levels to a fully explicit parrern in the ontological Trinity. In the course of this movement there took place a refinement in our understanding of the basic concepts and relations of God's revealing and saving activity toward us and for us of which we learn in the Scriptures of the New Testament. This involved rwo Stages: the interpretation of the soteriological content of God's three-fold self-revelation mediated to us in the biblical statements about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the light of their ontological substructure expressed in the Nicene homoousion: and the unfolding of the profound implications of the homoousion applied to the Spirit as well as to the Son for an understanding of the eternaJ relations of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. At this third level use was made of the patristic concept of p~richor~sis to express something of the mystery of the Holy Trinity in respect of the coinherenr way in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist in one another and dwell in one another as one God, three Persons. We must now give funher consideration to the notion of ptrichor~sis and the help it gives us in deepening and clarifying understanding of the onro-relations of the three divine Persons to one another in respect of the coordination that obtains berween them and their unity in the divine N

Monllrchill. It was undoubtedly Athanasius who in his elucidation of the dwelling of the Father and the Son in one another provided the thcologicaJ basis for the docrrine of coinherence. 1 He did this by way of elucidating statemenrs ofJesus to the disciples recorded by St John, panicularly, 'I am in the Father and the Father in me'.2 He deepened and refined the concept of the homoousion which gave expression to the underlying oneness in being and activity berween the incarnate Son and God the

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For adumbrations of his thought here sec Athenagoras. U,6tiD P'" Chro';'"iJ. 1O. and Irenaeus.

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hMmn. 3.6.2.

John 14.11. Cf. also John 10.30. and 14.10.

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8 The Sovereign Creator

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the last two chapters our thought has centred on the Triunity of God as three Persons. one Being. and towards the end of the last chapter attention was directed particularly to the concept of ptr;chorts;s for our understanding of the coactivity of the Holy Trinity. It was pointed OUt that it is very easy when using technical terms to think concepts rather than the realities denoted by them. Technical terms are a kind of theological shonhand which helps us to give careful expression to basic truths and their conceptual interconnections. as we noted earlier. in the passage of theological clarification from one level of understanding to another and back again. However. in the last resort they are no more than empty abstract propositions apart from their real content in the specific self-communication of God to us in his revealing and saving acts in history in which he has made himself known to us as Father. Son and Holy Spirit. It was such an essentially dynamic approach to the coactivity of the three divine Persons that we found to be entailed in the theological shorthand of ptrirhomis. In this chapter we will be concerned to pursue that funher in regard to the doctrine of God as the Sovereign Creator. In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which gives expression to the basic doctrinal content of divine revelation. belief in God as the Sovereign Creator is presented within a trinitarian structure: one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. one Lord Jesus Christ through whom all things were made. and the Holy Spirit the Lord and Giver of life. Integrated with these three statements there are clauses about the saving incarnation of the Son of God. his crucifixion. resurrection. and final advent. while clauses on the forgiveness of sins. the rcsurrectionof the dead and the life of the world to come are included in the third article on the Holy Spirit. This signifies to us that the doctrine of the Creator belongs to the heart and substance of the Gospel. so that beliefin him is appropriately formulated within the evangelical interrelations of the economic Trinity. While the concept of God as the Creator of the universe derived originally from the Old Testament revelation and had been developed by Judaism. it was radicaliscd through the New Testament teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ as the Word of God by whom all things that came into being have been created. from whom they derive their intelligible and lawful order. and through whom and in whom the whole universe of visible and invisible realities consists or HROUGHOIJI'

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9 The Unchangeableness of God

TYahwth:

HE unchangeableness of God

is one of the major themes of the Old Testament Scriptures. In them we hear from God that he has revealed himself to mankind as 'I am who I am - I shall be who I shall be," the self-existing, self-living, self-affirming God whose being is his ever-continuing life and whose life is his ever-continuing being. God does not speak of himself simply as the One who is, but introduces himself as Yahwth in the first person as 'I am - I shall be', and even then not in a static but in a dynamic mode, as 'I am who I am - I shall be who I shall be'. And he goes on to characterise himself as he who is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he who will deliver his people from bondage, who will always be their God and claim them as his own people. 'This is my name for ever, my memorial unto all generarions.'! And so through the prophets sent to Israel, God kept proclaiming himself to Israel throughout their history: 'I am Yahr,wh your God from the land ofEgypt.'J 'I am Yahwth, the first and the last, I am he. '4 It is as such that God reveals and names himself as the living. speaking and acting God who is who he is in the undeviaring self-determination of his own Life and Activity, and is who he is in covenanted relation with his people and who ever will be their Lord and Saviour. Yahwth is he who is and invariably will be in the living reality and self-consistency of his own eternal being. He is Lord God who made heaven and earth and all that is, and makes himself known to mankind in and through his Word and Act as he who never will be other than he is in his Word and Act. There is no other God than this God who makes himself known to mankind and who reveals himself to them in this way, and who thereby denies reality to any other god and discounts any other possible way for human beings to know him. As we have already noted, that is the irr.pon of the those Old Testament passages which speak of God as 'the jealous God',~ which is not what it appears in English to be, for it means that the very nature of the Lord God excludes the possibility of there being

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EJiod. 3.13.1-4. EJiod. 3.IS.

I Hos. 12.9; 13.-4. "sa. -41.4; 0.10.13. 2S; -4-4.6; -48.12. I EJiod. 20.S. 3-4.14; Dan. -4.24. S.9. 6.1 S. 29.20. 32.16. CIC.

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