This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Soteriological Sidebar II: Nominal and Real Personhood

Most of Kevin's reply (Nature of Persons) to my soteriological sidebar on Trinitarian personhood is taken up with illustrating my seeming lack of either logic, consistency, or logical consistency. This may well be true of me, though I really don't think so, but the logic, consistency or logical consistency one exhibits must be true to one's subject matter. One cannot demand of "God talk" the sort of logical consistency that one demands of mathematical formulae, since God is not number. Nor can one demand of these discussions the sort of syllogistic one rightly expects of rationalist proofs. The Christian God is not the God of the philosophers, so, for example, absolute simplicity cannot be ascribed to him. Indeed, it is not so much a matter of logic per se, but more a matter of the premises with which one begins. Non-Christians may look at the conciliar dogma surrounding the person of Jesus Christ, that he was fully (or perfect) God and fully (or perfect) man, that he had two natures and two wills in one Person, and think "Illogical." But if one examines the arguments surrounding the reality of the Incarnation, one will see a thoroughgoing consistent logic being applied to the premises. In these discussions, I think, it is not so much a question of the logic as it is a question regarding the premises.

Be that as it may, very little of Kevin's post criticizing my account of Trinitarian personhood actually deals substantively with the content of my own post, and, more particularly, the problems his own Trinitarian statements give rise to. In fact, the problems continue in the instances that he spends discussing God's Person.

Kevin claims that I have misconstrued his claims.

Clifton goes on to describe his views of the Trinity as taken from Oration XXIX by Gregory of Nazianzus. I have no real disagreent with this Oration and am left wondering what it has to do with this discussion.. That is, until I remember that Clifton is accusing me of subsuming personhood into essence. But this is not the case.

Now I readily admit that I have taken Kevin to be committing this identification. But I have done so on the substance of his nature-personhood explication. He is claiming, and has claimed consistently, that persons are their natures. Indeed, he even went so far as to agree with my assertion that Personhood exceeds essence, but then apparently contradicted himself in saying that it was in the nature of the Trinitarian Persons to do so. So it is not clear to me which it is: Do the Persons exceed their essence; or are they subsumed within it since that is what their nature is, to exceed their nature? In other words, it seems that on this configuration, Kevin is promoting some sort of modalism. All that God is, is his nature, which just happens to be Persons, who themselves are identified with their nature.

Kevin tries to clear things up:

I suspect Clifton believes that it is because, in his own view, Person is prior to essence. I argue that neither is the case but that both are equally ultimate- which is not to say that they are absolutely identical.

By Person being prior to essence, I, of course, mean to assert the monarche of the Father. That it is the Father who is the single cause of the Godhead. The Father's priority is aetiological.

Now, insofar as Kevin describes God's Persons and essence as equally ultimate--that God is not a Person without essence, or an essence without Person--I have no quibbles with it. In fact, he even goes on to say that

persons and essence cannot be separated. When God begets the Son, he does so both as to his person and as to his divine nature. The one cannot exist without the other. And even if we see the Father, who is a Person, as the cause of the Godhead, he is not a Person who exists apart from his own nature. The Father does not exist prior to the divine essence, but begetting and procession are eternal. It is the nature of the Persons of the Trinity to be one God in which the relationships between the persons are expressed in terms of begetting and procession.

And once again, I find no disagreement with these statements prima facie. However, it is precisely here that the problem arises. None of my own claims separate out nature from Personhood. I'm fairly certain I've been explicit on that. But when Kevin writes that it is the nature of the Persons to be one God, and in context of his own claims, it comes too close to the subsumption of Personhood into essence. This is especially the case when the very relationships of the Persons are said to be expressed in this nature.

If what Kevin says, here, is true, we have an enhypostatizaton of the divine nature, but apparently because it is the nature of God's essence to enhypostize himself in a Trinity of Persons. The question, however, logically arises: Must God so enhypostatize his nature? On Kevin's terms, he must do so. But this radically abridges God's freedom. For if it is God's nature to enhypostatize that nature, he cannot but do so, else he is not true to his nature, and thus not God. Nor is it clear why it is that the enhypostatization of God is accomplished by himself in a Trinity of Persons. He might just as well have done so in a Bi-unity of Persons.

Let me be clear here. I am not denying that Kevin believes in the Trinity, nor that he believes in a Trinity of Persons, all fully God, one in essence, and so forth. Kevin's claims are explicitly Christian ones. Rather it is the logic of his construal of the divine essence and Personhood in terms of that essence, that I am criticizing. I think such a construal is dangerous to Kevin's own explicit Trinitarian beliefs. That is to say, if he follows the logic of his construal instead of the dogma on which his beliefs are based, he will come dangerously close to modalism.

Kevin goes on to demonstrate a misconstrual of my own claims.

Even though he is unbegotten and unproceeding, we cannot abstract the Person of the Father from the divine essence and claim that "Personhood exceeds the divine essence." The question is not one of "a God whose fundamental nature is one of essence." It is that the Persons of the Trinity all have the same divine nature, which, being coextensive with themselves, makes of them one God. This is not a matter of priority.

I said nothing about "abstracting" the Person of the Father from the divine essence. Nor is such abstraction the foundation of my claim that Trinitarian Personhood exceeds divine essence. Rather, my claim is based on the theological fact that God the Father begets the Son and sends forth the Holy Spirit. In terms of real, not merely abstract, cause the one Person of the Father is "exceeded" by the Three Persons of the Trinity, the unity of the Godhead is "exceeded" by the tri-unity of the Trinity. That is to say, the Persons of the Trinity are not merely the same stuff as the Father. They are real, unique and different Persons. Similarly, the tri-unity of the Persons is not merely the same unity of God's nature.

In terms of essence, yes, they all share the same essence. Or, rather, more correctly, each Person is fully and completely God. There is a real coinherence of the Persons of the Trinity. But for that coinherence to be real, they are not the same Person.

I take it that Kevin's intent is to preserve the unity of God, particularly as our discussion has been centered around willing, nature and persons. In fact, my basis for this assumption, are Kevin's own words:

Recall that my contention that God wills according to his nature is in keeping with the contention that all persons will according to their natures. Whether or not this is true is not immediately at issue; however, if I predicate this of all persons but deny it of God, then I have denied his personhood. It is not a matter of subsuming the Godhead into nature but of preserving any meaningful understanding of his Persons.

So Kevin is at pains to preserve the unity of God. But to preserve the unity of God based on God's essence is problematic, as I outlined in my previous sidebar (and to which problems Kevin has not yet given a reply). To recapitulate those points: If we predicate God's unity on his nature, or his essence, we tend toward modalistic conceptions of the Persons (i. e., we enhypostatize attributes, such as "Love," which enhypostatization logically fails to give rise to a third Person); or, we tend toward logically ascribing to God the absence of Personal freedom (i. e., all that God does is determined by his nature and thus necessary for him to do lest he cease being God, for example that God must create the world for it is his nature to do so).

But, as St. Gregory has shown, there is no need to preserve God's unity in terms of his essence. The unity of God is preserved in the monarche of the Father. His eternal act of begetting and sending forth is a sacrificial act of love which communicates his divinity, but which because it is a Personal act, is not merely the bequeathing of a nature, but a generation and procession of respective Persons. That is to say, the Son is not a Person in the sense that he receives the Father's personal nature, but because the act of God in begetting is an act of his Person, him who is begotten is a Person, but a Person who has fully the nature of the one begetting him. So, too, for the Spirit, in terms of the act of procession.

The aetiological priority of the Father in the Godhead is a much surer protection against modalism, than is the prioritization of the divine nature. Which is not to say that one cannot speak of the unity of God from the standpoint of essence. In fact, my quibbles with Kevin here have less to do with whether we speak about God's unity from the standpoint of the monarche of the Father, or from the standpoint of the divine essence. Either is appropriate in its own context.

But the problem comes from the identification of the Persons of the Trinity with the nature of the Godhead. And this is illustrated in Kevin's construals. I am not explicitly claiming Kevin's conception of the Trinity actually is modalistic. Rather, I am explicitly saying, given his construals, it can tend toward that. It is clear that in the context of our soteriological discussion he wants to construe this unity in terms of God's nature and will. But that unity is best perserved in the Persons whose operations enact that will, rather than in the nature of which that will is a faculty.

In this soteriological context, we should also speak of the energies of God, but it will have to be in a future post.

Posted by Clifton at March 28, 2005 09:00 AM | TrackBack