Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity

Stephen R. Holmes, Paul D. Molnar, Thomas H. McCall, Paul Fiddes, Jason S. Sexton, Stanley N. Gundry

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780310498131
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Christians have always believed in the triune God, but they haven't always understood or used the doctrine of the Trinity consistently.

In order to form a coherent view of trinitarian theology, it's important for Christians to have a working knowledge of the two legitimate models for explaining this doctrine:

• Classical – presenting a traditional view of the Trinity, represented by the Baptist theologian Stephen R. Holmes and the Roman Catholic theologian Paul D. Molnar.
• Relational – presenting the promise and potential hazards of a relational doctrine, represented by the evangelical theologian Thomas H. McCall and the Baptist philosopher Paul S. Fiddes.

In this volume of the Counterpoints series, leading contributors establish their models and approaches to the doctrine of the Trinity (or, the relationship between the threeness and oneness of the divine life).

Each expert highlights the strengths of his view in order to argue how it best reflects the orthodox perspective. In order to facilitate a genuine debate and to make sure that the key issues are revealed, each contributor addresses the same questions regarding their trinitarian methodology, doctrine, and its implications.

CHAPTER ONE

CLASSICAL TRINITY: EVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE

STEPHEN R. HOLMES

By Way of Introduction

In a recent book on the doctrine of the Trinity,¹ I approached the subject from a historical perspective, and I want to do the same, at least initially, in this essay. I suggest that there is ground to be cleared before we can begin to work on how a constructive statement of the doctrine should be developed and articulated. We have inherited a number of historical claims that so confuse and obscure our thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity that, without some serious historical work, we will inevitably fail to make sense of it.

Perhaps I can demonstrate this need by illustrating from a different era of history. Anti-trinitarianism in England was common during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. William Whiston and Samuel Clarke, among others, developed a biblicist anti-trinitarianism: rereading the Bible, particularly the New Testament, they found the inherited doctrine of the Trinity to be inadequate to the texts.² At the same time, or slightly earlier, Deists such as John Toland or Matthew Tindal were developing a rationalist anti-trinitarianism, arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity made no logical sense.³

Both of these strands rested on the earlier work of John Biddle, who published a translation of the Racovian Catechism, the confession of faith of the anti-trinitarian Socinian Church of the Friars Minor. To analyze this sudden popularity of anti-trinitarianism, we may start with a revealing, albeit passing, comment from Biddle: “By Person I understand, as Philosophers do, suppositum intelligens, that is an intellectual substance compleat, and not a mood [sic, “mode”] or subsistence, which are fantastical & senseless terms, brought in to cozen the simple.”⁴ On this basis, he argues, to claim that the Son and the Spirit are persons distinct from the Father is to insist that they have a different will to the will of the Father, and, Biddle asserts, “he that hath a will distinct in number from that of God is not God.”⁵

On the Meaning of Words

To grasp the importance of this marginal comment, we need to be aware of the standard English vocabulary of trinitarian doctrine: “subsistence” (a borrowing of a standard Latin term, subsistentia) and “mode of existence” (a translation of a standard Greek term, hypostasis) are both normal English words used for the three persons of the Trinity. But Biddle dismisses them. In his view, they are not even wrong; they are so obviously meaningless that no argument is needed to demonstrate the point. He bases this dismissal of standard vocabulary on an equally undefended definition of the word “person.” This definition is borrowed, as he admits, from the “philosophers” of his day — presumably he means Descartes and those who followed.

So, Biddle redefined the word “person” to mean what philosophers mean by it. On the basis of this redefinition, the identification of “person” with “mode of being” or “subsistence” can simply be rejected as meaningless — and this despite the fact that these identifications were standard in the tradition of English-language theology and directly related to scholastic Latin and patristic Greek theology as well. He is followed in this sort of redefinition by Whiston, Clarke, Toland, and Tindal — all of whom, writing after Locke, similarly also assume novel definitions of ontological terms used in standard trinitarian discourse, including “substance.”⁶

These redefinitions were natural in that day. Every educated writer knew what “person” meant; good and careful contemporary definitions were available; without an acute awareness of the shape of philosophical history, there was no reason to think it meant anything different. With some historical perspective, however, we can see the nature of the problem here: if the meaning of key terms in an argument or statement is changed, then it is hardly surprising if the argument or statement begins to look incoherent or simply ridiculous. Almost the only writer of the day who saw through such terminological problems was the great Anglican bishop Edward Stillingfleet, whose 1697 Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity traced the changes in meaning of various words with some care and attention.⁷

I mention such obscure early modern debates because, at our present historical distance from them, we can see clearly the way in which unthinkingly assuming a change of meaning of a word reshapes the entire discussion of a doctrine. This gives us a clue to where late twentieth-century thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity, and particularly the development of “social trinitarianism,” has gone wrong.

This, it should be said, is not primarily a claim about analogies. I take it that there are no interesting analogies from creation to the Trinity, particularly not in the sphere of human sociality (on which more later) — but that is not the point here. My argument here is not that improper analogies were drawn from human personhood to divine personhood, but that the word “person” was assumed to mean something (an intellectual substance) that it had not meant in earlier formulations. This is a claim about the changing meanings of words, which must be treated with great care if we are to make sense of ancient, or even early modern, documents.⁸ That said, in this redefinition there was an assumption that the word “person” meant the same thing when applied to human and divine realities. Thus, the doctrine of analogy was denied in favor of a claim that words are univocal, and I do take this to be a problem (again, more on this later).

Words change their meaning over time, and if we want to understand what a writer is saying, we need to know what the words meant for that individual rather than reading our own meaning into the text. I suggest that most of (what I regard as) the misunderstandings of the doctrine of the Trinity in recent decades — and indeed, as the examples above show, in recent centuries — come from a failure to follow this rather obvious rule. Words like “person” and “relation” in particular have been redefined from their original, metaphysical meanings to some supposedly radical new ontological claims in the doctrine of the Trinity — the “social Trinity.”

There are novel ontological claims in the classical development of the doctrine of the Trinity. The most obvious is the claim that a spiritual substance’s logical relation to itself establishes a distinction that is real, but that does not prevent the substance being simple. But claims that the doctrine of the Trinity as it was established in the fourth century establishes a personalist or relational ontology are simply false, being based entirely on a reading of new meanings into old words.

On the de Régnon Thesis

A second methodological myth to be cleared is the so-called de Régnon thesis,⁹ the proposal that the Greek-speaking Eastern church (most noticeably the Cappadocian Fathers) and the Latin-speaking Western church (most notably Augustine) developed visibly different doctrines of the Trinity. In de Régnon’s own presentation, the Greeks started with three persons and claimed they were one God, whereas Augustine started with one God and claimed God was tripersonal. For de Régnon, Augustine’s approach was obviously better. In more recent formulations, the order of preference is reversed: the Cappadocian Fathers saw their way to this radically new ontology, the “social Trinity,” in which persons in loving relationship were the basis of all things. It is said that Augustine, by contrast, missed this innovation completely and so returned to the older ontological scheme that focused on what a thing was, and which was as inadequate as it was pagan.

Against this, I would first note just how unlikely this seems. Augustine stood in a tradition of Latin trinitarian theology that had developed in active engagement with the Cappadocian pro-Nicene tradition, and which included many figures — most notably Ambrose and Jerome — to whom Augustine stood in close relation at various points in his life. There is no doubt that he knew the work of Hilary of Poitiers, Optatus, and Pope Damasus. I find virtually inconceivable the claim that he did not know the work of Ambrosiaster or Gregory of Elvira, along with many others. At what point, then, in this developing tradition of Latin pro-Nicene theology did the basic rupture with the Cappadocians occur? And why did no one notice? It seems virtually impossible to construct a plausible narrative of how the traditions could have suddenly divided — there is no time for a gradual growing apart.

Further, when one looks at the developments of the key concepts between Augustine and the Cappadocians, they often run in almost exact parallel. Consider the idea of relation. The idea is introduced by Gregory of Nazianzus in the third theological oration:

“Father,” they say, is a designation either of the substance or the activity; is it not?

They intend to impale us on a dilemma, for if we say that it names the substance we shall then be agreeing that the Son is of a different substance, there being a single substance and that one, according to them, preempted by the Father. But if we say that the term designates the activity, we shall clearly be admitting that the Son is a creation not an offspring. If there is an active producer, there must be a production and they will declare themselves surprised at the idea of an identity between Creator and created. I should have felt some awe myself at your dilemma, had it been necessary to accept one of the alternatives and impossible to avoid them by stating a third and truer possibility. My expert friends, it is this: “Father” designates neither the substance nor the activity, but the relationship, the manner of being, which holds good between the Father and the Son.¹⁰

Compare this to Augustine, in Book V of De Trinitate.:

With God, nothing is said modification-wise because there is nothing changeable with him. And yet not everything that is said of him is said substance-wise. Some things are said with reference to something else, like Father with reference to Son and Son with reference to Father; and this is not said modification-wise because the one is always Father and the other always Son.… Therefore, although being Father is different from being Son, there is no difference of substance, because they are not called these things substance-wise but relationship-wise; and yet this relationship is not a modification because it is not changeable.¹¹

If these two theologians are using fundamentally different ontologies, it is remarkable that they can argue a technical point in exactly the same way.

I suggest, then, that to think adequately about the doctrine of the Trinity, we need to be careful about terminology, not letting historically accidental shifts in the meaning of certain words mislead us, and to resist the temptation to assume a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western approaches, unless such a difference can be demonstrated from careful reading of the texts. With these caveats in place, I turn to the origins and development of the doctrine.

The Origins of Trinitarian Doctrine in Reflection on the Bible

The set of conceptual distinctions and definitions that we refer to as “the doctrine of the Trinity” was largely formally defined as a result of fourth-century debates, although inevitably those debates built on what had come earlier. The dispute between Arius and his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, over the origin of the Son from the Father — is the begetting of the Son eternal, or in time? — led to the Council of Nicaea (AD 325). The failure of Nicaea to settle the broader issue of the relationship of the Son to the Father, and the later debate that involved the status of the Spirit, led finally to an ecumenical settlement generally reported to be enshrined at the Council of Constantinople (AD 381).¹²

That said, it would be wrong to suppose that trinitarian thought was a fourth-century novelty. Instead, I would argue that the worship of the church had been fairly consistently trinitarian, or “proto-trinitarian,” from the earliest days of Christianity. The fourth-century developments were theological formulations that were adequate to making sense of how what was said and assumed in worship could properly be said/assumed. The ecumenical doctrine established by the Council of Constantinople, then, and developed by Augustine is a successful attempt to state theologically the things the churches had always tacitly assumed in their worship.

Israel’s Monotheism and Early Church Worship

A proper statement of the doctrine must begin in Scripture. Again, however, I want to raise something of a protest against the way this has often been narrated in recent trinitarian theology. The powerful and lasting witness of the Old Testament to the oneness/uniqueness of Israel’s God needs to be taken with at least as much seriousness as passages such as the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. The contemporary fashion for an almost Marcionite assumption that everything the Scriptures have to say about God’s life is found in the gospel narratives of the Father-Son relation must be resisted. These passages are important and are to be taken with the utmost seriousness (as is every Scripture), but they are not the only biblical witness to God’s life.

The particular form of Israel’s monotheism is important: famously, the Shema, the confession of faith from Deuteronomy 6, admits varying translations: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (NIV) or “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (NRSV). We do not need to decide between these translations — the Hebrew is ambiguous — but the very fact of ambiguity is sig...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION: JASON S. SEXTON
• 1. CLASSICAL TRINITY: EVANGELICAL PERSPECTIVE: STEPHEN R. HOLMES
• 2. CLASSICAL TRINITY: CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE: PAUL D. MOLNAR
• 3. RELATIONAL TRINITY: CREEDAL PERSPECTIVE: THOMAS H. MCCALL
• 4. RELATIONAL TRINITY: RADICAL PERSPECTIVE: PAUL S. FIDDES
• CONCLUSION: JASON S. SEXTON
• GLOSSARY
• SCRIPTURE INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX
• AUTHOR INDEX