Kevin's reply to my third soteriological sidebar has a single point: he wants to assert that the debate on the generation of the Son cannot but be a debate within the very strict parameters of God's nature and will. My argument has been that the generation of the Son, while inescapably involving nature and will, is by revelation and the Church's experience (and not simply, despite his sarcastic question ending his second paragraph, by virtue of my own definition), first a personal generation, which generation hypostatizes the nature and will of the person so generating.
After a couple of paragraphs of throat clearing, Kevin gets to the heart of his argument in his third paragraph:
Bottom line- it is not possible to remove this question from the nature/will debate.
This, as it stands, is the whole of his argument. By a simple ispe dixit he has removed from the debate, so he thinks, Trinitarian modes of being and of personal exercise of the divine will. What is his evidence? Simply that he cannot apparently conceive of any other way to talk about filial generation and pneumatological procession. For he certainly offers no other evidence than his assertion. The rest of his argument begs this essential question.
He continues immediately from the above sentence:
But, as long as Clifton contends that it is, I have another question. What does this have to do with the larger debate? The subject is monergism and its relationship to the will. A significant ground of my own argument for monergism is the impossibility of libertarian free will. Whatever can be predicated of any person as such can be predicated of all persons. Consequently, if it can be demonstrated that the Father, a person within the Trinity has libertarian free will, then we must allow the possibility that any other person may have libertarian free will. If Clifton can demonstrate that the begetting of the Son is a matter of the Father’s will as unconstrained by his nature, he will have succeeded in shaking my own argument for monergism. Oddly enough, though, he removes the question from the nature/will debate. Which leads me to wonder just what, in his mind, the connection is. Either the Father’s begetting of the Son is a matter of libertarian free will, or, whether as an example of the will exercised according to the nature or not an example of the will at all, it is not relevant to the discussion.
Kevin's failure to grasp the implications for monergism of Trinitarian person-nature dogma is not any proof that such a dogma has nothing whatsoever to do with monergism. It is simply prima facie evidence of the poverty of his imagination.
In point of fact, if God is three Persons, and if those Persons are really, if ineffably distinct, then there must also be a distinction of will. We know there is a such a distinction for Jesus' himself noted that his will was to do the Father's, and in the Garden he prayed, “Nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done.” Either these are distinctions which make no difference, and are therefore merely nominal, or they are real distinctions. If the former, we have Sabellianism. But if the latter, how can the divine will remain one while also having these personal distinctions?
Quite simply, it is the same problem which confronts us with the Trinitarian Persons. How do we speak of three real and distinct persons without devolving into tritheism? And how do we insist on the unity of Persons without descending into modalism? It is incumbent upon us—in order to preserve both the unity of the Godhead and the Trinity of Persons—to address these matters with the distinctions between nature and modes (tropoi) of being, as well as the natural will and the personal mode of willing.
These distinctions are important, otherwise the Godhead has no libertarian free will, something I affirm, and so, apparently, unless I misunderstand him, does Kevin. As Kevin should know, the natural will is the energetic operation of the nature. It is the movement of the nature of a thing toward its telos, or end. For all other creatures than God, their respective teloi, are all in God himself. God, who is perfect being, and hyperousia (beyond being), has no other end than himself. All his natural willing is simply the energetic operation of his nature. This divine will is the same natural will among all the Persons of the Godhead. But the employment of this natural will among the Persons of the Godhead is not identical. This personal employment of the natural will is the mode of willing unique to each Person of the Godhead. The Son does not will to beget but to be begotten. The Father does not will to be begotten, but to beget. The Spirit does not will to send forth but to be sent forth. The Father does not will to be sent forth, but to send forth. The mode of willing of each Person is in complete union with the mode of willing of the other Persons, and that union arises from the single divine will of the divine nature. But that union does not eliminate the very real, if ineffable, distinctions between the modes of willing of the respective Trinitarian Persons.
If, as Kevin's argument ultimately must conclude, the mode of willing is identical to the divine natural will, then there is no distinction between Person and nature. But if there is no distinction between nature and Person, then God is nothing more than his nature. And if he is nothing more than his nature, then his nature determines his will, and he cannot but will that which is his nature. If it is his nature to create, then he must create, he is bound by his own necessity. He does not have free will.
So, while perhaps in some respects it is true that nature and will must be a fundamental part of the discussion of Trinitarian modes of willing, Kevin cannot successfully argue that Trinitarian modes of willing must be subsumed under and within the nature/will debate. This is ultimately nothing more than Sabellianism in some respects, and Plotinian theology in others.
Kevin continues.
Still, despite his quest for irrelevance, Clifton has not succeeded. The question of the Son’s begetting cannot be removed from the nature/will debate and, despite his objections to the contrary, Clifton’s own explanations place him squarely on the side of will. They also create a situation of far more consequence than the debate between synergism and monergism. The point of my harmonization between Gregory and Athanasius was to show that their use of the will could not be the same. The essence of Arianism is found in the proposition that there was a time when the Son was not. If this statement is true, then t