God Made Simple: First Concern

At the start of this week, I had the pleasure of participating in a discussion on divine simplicity up at EV Church (NSW Central Coast) with Mark Thompson and James Dolezal (via video). [i]

I thought it was a great time. We had a lot of agreement and we all acknowledged the universal desire in orthodox Christian theology to avoid making God a thing of parts:

• a Trinity of different powers or divergent wills;
• a God who is partly loving, partly just, partly sovereign, partly limited etc.
• a God who needs creation to be himself.

Of course, there were a differences in the way we approached things. James, who went first, did quite a bit of the heavy lifting, setting out the need for and meaning of the doctrine. Mark warned of the dangers of letting our prior philosophical conceptions control the way we imagine divine simplicity and added another caution about the need to avoid collapsing the distinction between God and the creation.

In my talk, I focused on two concerns about certain ways the doctrine of divine simplicity has been applied to the doctrines of the Trinity and salvation history. Later, we briefly touched on another aspect of the divine will which makes it more difficult to defend absolute divine simplicity.

My plan here is to present the two concerns over a couple of posts and finally to develop some additional comments about that last matter.

Concern 1—Essence as Super-Person

My first concern is with how divine simplicity is sometimes applied to the Persons of the Trinity.

In Scripture, the Trinity almost always begins with God the Father

In Scripture, the inseparable unity and indivisibility of the Trinity is almost always communicated through language that begins with God the Father. Why are the Father and Son inseparable? Why is their work indivisible? Because the second person of the Trinity is always from the Father: his eternal Word … his perfect Image … his Wisdom … his inseparable Glory. The Father works and speaks through his Son; he loves him and shows him all he does. The Son speaks and judges only as he hears. As Paul writes, quoting the Shema:

“… for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came, and for whom we live, and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
(1 Corinthians 8:6)

This, of course is exactly the form of words picked up by the first lines of the Council of Nicaea and it is the original intention of the language of ousia—to show that the Son is from the father without separation: not a mere creature; not a single individual operating in different modes; not two individuals subsisting coordinately like brothers:

But when I say “one essence,” do not think of two things divided from one, but of the Son subsisting from the Source, the Father – not the Father and Son emerging from one higher essence. For we do not speak of brothers, but we confess Father and Son. The identity of essence exists because the Son is from the Father.
(Basil of Caesarea, Homily 24.4)

For the Cappadocian Fathers at this point, as with Athanasius and Hilary, ousia language serves the analogy of fatherhood. Because Jesus is God’s real Son, he has everything God has and shares in everything God does. The Son and Spirit are distinct in their possession of the essence, but the essence itself—the Father’s eternity, power and will etc—remains undivided. Gregory Nazianzen likens the Godhead to three suns shining with one light. In another letter he writes that:

[Orthodox Christians] worship the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, One Godhead; … One Nature in three personal possessions [trisin idiotésin], intellectual, perfect, self-existent, numerically distinct, but not distinct in Godhead.
(Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 33.16)

Thus, the pro-Nicene model: distinct persons each possessing the one essence based on the monarchy of God the Father.

Long Live Nicaea!

And that model persists in all Christian traditions, East and West. Its structure continues in the way Augustine and his heirs relate the earthly mission of Jesus to his eternal Sonship.^[ii] It persists in Thomas Aquinas’s depiction of the Father working through the Son,^[iii] each having their own distinct modes of acting based on their own ways of possessing the one essence.^[iv] As he writes in his Commentary on John 5:30:

…the Father and the Son do have the same will, but the Father does not have his will from another, whereas the Son does have his will from another … Thus the Son accomplishes his own will as from another.

The Puritans present this framework in terms approaching social relationship: three individuals capable of knowing, loving, and making covenants with each other.^[v] John Owen writes that the Persons of the Godhead are:

… distinct, living, divine, intelligent, voluntary principles of operation or working, and that in and by internal acts one towards another, and in acts that outwardly respect the creation … They which thus know each other, love each other, delight in each other, must needs be distinct … each person having the understanding, the will, and power of God, becomes a distinct principle of operation; and yet all their actings ad extra being the actings of God, they are undivided, and are all the works of one, of the self-same God.
(John Owen, Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity)

So the fourth-century model endures. One divine nature and one work of God: communicated from the Father, wholly, distinctly and indivisibly possessed by the Son and Spirit.

Confusing Additions

But later theology also adds other ways to talk about the divine nature.

Sometimes the essence becomes a sort of conceptual container—we might speak of God as three Persons “in” one being, or three relations “in” the one essence.

Sometimes the essence is imagined as something that the persons “just are”—a single agent or consciousness that subsists and acts in three ways.

The persons are not three centers of consciousness and will, as if they merely work together, share the same desires, and agree to the same plan. Inseparable operations means every act of God is the single act of the triune God. There are not different acts by different agents, but one act according to one divine agency.
(Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity, p227)

Or Mark Jones, discussing the covenant of redemption and quoting John Owen:

If we speak of “agreement” we might imply a multiplicity of wills … “there is a new habitude of will in the Father and Son towards each other that is not in them essentially. I call it new, as being in God freely, not naturally”. But these “wills” are truly the will (singular) of God who, with one mind, orchestrates the plan of redemption without any proper acceptance between, for example, the Father and the Son.
(Mark Jones, “Propositions & Questions (for Fred Sanders) on The Trinity”)

Here, it seems to me, the unity of the Godhead is being set against the distinction of personal possession. John Owen’s careful talk of covenant and distinct intelligent voluntary principles becomes something to hurry past lest it mislead us into tritheism. The essence itself becomes a single mind or agent. Where the Bible grounds things in the Father, now the essence itself becomes the principle of divine action; the means by which all three do their work.

These statements are made in the polemical context of the evangelical subordination debate. But they accurately reflect a medieval habit of referring to the essence in personal terms. Thomas Aquinas at one point makes it sound as if the divine nature rather than Son might have assumed human nature:

… since the Divine Nature is both that whereby God acts, and the very God Who acts … even if the personal properties of the three Persons are abstracted by our mind, nevertheless there will remain in our thoughts the one Personality of God, as the Jews consider. And the assumption can be terminated in It, as we now say it is terminated in the Person of the Word.
(Summa 3.3.2-3)

Thomas makes a similar comment in his Commentary on Boethius:

It is not possible for man to have a joyous life without companionship … God, however, is supremely self-sufficient; wherefore, even though there were no distinction of persons, infinite joy would still be His.
(Commentary on Boethius, 34)

Now let me be clear that neither Thomas, nor Jones, nor Barrett intend, even for a moment, to deny the reality of the Persons. I take it that Thomas is conducting a thought experiment in the first case, and he says exactly the opposite of that second quote in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: “highest joy … cannot be possessed without companionship … there must be one loving supremely and one loved supremely … in the unity of the essence..”

Some of us worry that Christians are turning the Trinity into a social collective like three people. I’m not sure that the solution is to apply those same psychological categories to the one essence instead.

Yet such talk does make it seem as if post-Nicene theology—especially in the West—has two lenses to look at God and that one of those lenses blurs out the distinction between the persons. When we are using that lens, instead of seeing the Trinity as one what and three whos, we see one what and one who – one conscious subject; one mind; one agent possessing one set of attributes.

I think this way of speaking can easily promote confusion and make it harder for us to retain the biblical pattern.

In some academic circles, it fosters what Gilles Emery calls an “unsatisfying” theory of appropriation – where “trinitarian plurality” is “pushed aside” in the external works of the Godhead.

Amongst lay people it turns into the vague, and not very helpful, idea that “Trinity” means God is simultaneously like three human persons and one human person.

It’s worth pausing and asking ourselves which side of that equation are we more unhappy with?

Some of us worry that Christians are applying modern psychological concepts of person and turning the Trinity into a social collective like three people—it’s a legitimate concern. But I’m not sure that the solution is to apply those same psychological categories to the one essence instead.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Several things seem apparent to me after preparing and presenting this material. They are all to do with the way we draw and define categories, and all show that we need to become a bit better at both/and thinking.

Last century, we heard a lot of people claiming that Eastern trinitarianism was different from Western trinitarianism. More recently we’ve been hearing from those who want to deny any significant differences at all.

But of course it’s more complicated than either of those options. The West does preserve the pro-Nicene heritage and also adds its own way of talking about the Godhead. The model which regards the three Persons as relations within the divine essence is different from the framework which begins with the Father and sees the Persons as possessors of the essence. But the West upholds the older way as well as the newer.^[vi] Both things are true at the same time (please note, that the both/and I am endorsing here is historiographical, not theological—essence-as-subject is still an unhelpful addition).

We need similar nuance when it comes to the way we think about the category of divine Person. As we see above with John Owen and Thomas, it is possible to believe that the Persons of the Trinity can personally possess the one divine nature without dividing it. Just because there is one one wisdom does not mean there must only be one subjective possession of that wisdom. Nor do we necessarily divide the godhead by speaking of the persons having the one will in different ways—or even having a harmony of will.^[vii]

It shouldn’t be too hard for us to adjust our thinking here. Even in human life we see how distinct individuals (especially married couples or twins) can become so attuned as to finish or anticipate each other’s words. Surely it is not difficult to imagine that something like that might true to an infinite and perfect degree for the Persons of the Godhead. The black and white thinking of—it’s one consciousness or it’s tritheism is too simple and, as I hope is evident from the above, also oversimplifies the orthodox tradition.

Finally, if that last point it true, we should be a bit more charitable toward each other. I take it that those who insist on God having one mind or being one agent aren’t meaning to promote modalism; nor should they assume that those who speak of the Persons loving each other and acting toward one another are crypto-tritheists. As I said in the question time, if a modern evangelical says what John Owen said in the quote above, he or she would be condemned as an historically ignorant social trinitarian. Meanwhile, Owen gets the benefit of the doubt—partly because he is John Owen and partly because it suits a certain narrative to distinguish him from current evangelicals and align him with medieval scholasticism.

This is not a great way for us to argue with each other.

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[i] I will add a link for video of the symposium if it becomes available.

^[ii] For example De Fide et  9.18. See similar comments in Thomas, e.g.

The Father’s “showing” and the Son’s “hearing” are to be taken in the sense that the Father communicates knowledge to the Son, as He communicates His essence. The command of the Father can be explained in the same sense, as giving Him from eternity knowledge and will to act, by begetting Him. Or, better still, this may be referred to Christ in His human nature. (Summa 1.42.5)

^[iii] “The Son acts by reason of the Father who dwells in him by a unity of nature” In Ioan. 14:12. Also (2Sent 13.1.5):

[the Word] works by the same power, though this is a power it receives from the one working. And in this way, we say that the Father does work through the Son, since he is the cause of the works worked together with the Father by a single and indivisible power, though he receives this power by being born of the Father.

^[iv] See extended discussion of this, and its relationship to the usual terminology of “appropriation” in Gilles Emery, “The Personal Mode of Trinitarian Action in Saint Thomas” in The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Volume 69, Number 1, January 2005, pp. 31-77. Emery, following Thomas describe the persons as distinct subjects (operantes):

The action of the Father and the Son is one; the principle of this action is also one (it is the divine nature or essence); the effects of the action are common to the Father and to the Son, But the actors (the subjects of the act: operantes) are personally distinct and their mode of action is also distinct… (p51)

This is, as he says:

…restates the Cappadocian Trinitarian doctrine formulated by Basil of Caesarea: each divine hypostasis is characterized by a tropos tes huparxeos (literally, “mode of existence”) which defines the concrete content of its proper hypostatic subsistence. (p55)

^[v] This is more like the Cappadocians: “[as the Father’s image] if the Father will anything, the Son Who is in the Father knows the Father’s will, or rather He is Himself the Father’s will.”
(Gregory of Nyssa, Answer to Eunomius’s Second Book 1)

See too Barrett (in 2016), quoting Swain:

Because the Son eternally proceeds from the Father in his personal manner of subsisting, so too does his personal manner of willing proceed from the Father. The Son’s willing submission to the Father in the pactum salutis is thus a faithful expression of his divine filial identity as the consubstantial, eternally begotten Son of God.

^[vi] It’s also true that the Western approach can sometimes be found in the East, though it is less pronounced. See for example, John of Damascus, Exposito Fidei 1.13

^[vii] So Thomas on John 1:2:

… lest his statement, and the Word was God, be taken to mean that the Word has an opposed will, [John] added that the Word was in the beginning with God, namely, the Father; not as divided from him or opposed, but having an identity of nature with him and a harmony of will (concordiam voluntatis). This union comes about by the sharing of the divine nature in the three persons, and by the bond of the natural love of the Father and the Son.