In three recent articles, we have considered the simplicity and attributes of God. In doing so, we noted that God is not “made up of” his attributes. When we say God is love, we do not mean that he merely has love, but that he is essentially love. The attributes of God are not things added to his nature to make him what he is, and there are a number of reasons why this must be the case. He would then depend on these things that are not-God, to make him God, and he would then depend on something not-God to have fashioned him as God. We depend on our having minds, wills, bodies, etc. to be human; they make us what we are and we would cease to be what we are without them, yet they do not entirely comprehend what it means for us to be human. For instance, many other creatures have bodies, and the angels are knowing, willing beings without bodies. We are made up of these things, and so we call them essential attributes. The things added to us, without which we would still be human, are called accidental attributes, such as our hair and eye color, our height, and the number of our fingers or limbs. God has no such “accidental” attributes, and his “essential attributes” are not parts of what he is, as is the case with us.
But here's the rub: what about the Trinity? Many Christians today think of God as made up of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. First, we will consider the Second London Baptist Confession’s (2LBCF) statement from 2.3, then we will consider what guardrails this statement requires in terms of our doctrine of God in contemplating the Trinity.
The 2LBCF states:
In this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word (or Son), and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided…all infinite and without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations…(1)
Of course, we could write as many books on this statement as there are on the doctrine of the Trinity, but our aim here is more modest. First, there are three “subsistences,” a statement meaning the subject of the nature. There are three, and the names articulated are those which are given to us in Scripture, that is, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. These three subsistences, or subjects, however, are subsistences of the same divine nature. When you and I speak of our personhood, we can not help but speak of one subsistence in each individuation of our common human nature. Though we are all human, and therefore share in the same common nature, we are distinguished by essence (humanity) and existence (this human). Since God does not “partake” in some generic nature called “divinity,” his essence and existence are the same, which 2LBCF affirms when it says “God, who is not to be divided in nature and being.” Thus, when we say the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, we must be careful to note that they are not three gods, each partaking of some essence called “divinity.” In other words, they are not three Gods in the way Peter, James, and John are three men. Yes, Peter, James, and John all partake in the same human nature, but they are different existences of that nature. This is not the same as the Trinity. When we say the Father is God or the Son is God, we do not mean the Father or the Son is some being that added onto the substance of God nor some concrete instantiation of an abstract substance.
Consider, second, what this means for the attributes. The Confession mentions, for instance, power, eternity, and infinity. Consider for a moment the way these things are said of creatures. First, we recognize that eternity and infinity are apophatic/negations, and therefore not something in which humans partake. To make a point, we can substitute them with something like temporality and finitude. A human named Peter might have power, temporality, and finitude. Likewise, his twin friends James and John may also have power, temporality, and finitude. The twins may have likewise attained to certain levels of excellence in physical and mental health so that their power, temporality, and finitude are almost identical, or maybe even outright the same, while Peter may have been lazier physically and mentally than either of them, resulting in substandard power, temporality, and finitude. When we speak of these things, we immediately recognize that there is some abstract concept of temporality or finitude which we find concretized in each of the men. When we speak of the twins, there is such similarity between them that we can almost say it is identical, but we still recognize that we are speaking of finitude in the abstract concretized in this particular being. However, when confess the three Persons to be God, we do not mean they are similarly infinite, similarly powerful, similarly infinite. They are not, in the words of those on the other side of the Nicene debates, homoiousios, of like substance, but homoousios, of the same exact substance.
Now we would like to consider very briefly one of the common misunderstandings for how we speak of the divinity of each of the Persons. The way people often explain the doctrine of the Trinity is by demonstrating that each of the Persons is divine. None can forgive sin but God alone, and to demonstrate that he is God, the Son both forgives sin and raises the lame. The Son says before Abraham was, “I am.” Christ “is God over all, blessed forever” (Rom. 9:5). When you lie to the Holy Spirit, you have not lied to men but to God (Acts 5:3–4), who knows the thoughts of God (1 Corinthians 2:10ff.). Some have recently warned against this way of going about demonstrating the Trinity in Scripture. Instead of casting off this way of doing Trinitarian theology, let us instead clarify what must be the case for the argument to work. What must be the case is that when Scripture speaks in these ways, it is not merely affirming that there are three divinities, three concrete beings who partake in the abstract nature of divinity. What is correct about warnings against using the proof-text method is that proof texts only work within a system of thought in which those proof texts prove what we say they prove.
People commonly think in tritheistic ways today (even if they formally deny it), so when we make these statements they essentially end with proof that there are three gods. Instead, if we say that there is but one God, indivisible, infinite, and simple, then when we say “the Son is God,” we do not merely mean he is of the “class” of divinity, but that he is the one, eternal, and immutable God, as are the Father and the Spirit. The Trinity is not nearly mysterious enough for most people because they are fundamentally tritheists. However, when we reflect on the Holy Trinity in the context of a rightly formed theology proper, with its denial of the distinction between essence and existence, we are forced to worship the mystery, worshipping the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the one God who has called us into communion with himself.
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