Trinitarian theology: unity and subordination

Listening to: Nothing

Dave K has written a post that I began to respond to, but decided to just make it another post here due to its length! Generally, the focus has moved off Christian Hedonism/John Piper now and more on to Trinitarian theology.

Before we get into Trinitarian theology, I should just mention that Dave K said,

Dan Hames thinks the best defence in John Piper's armoury is Trinitarian theology. However I'm less than convinced. The main reason for my doubt is that I'm not sure that Dan Hames' Trinitarian theology is John Piper's Trinitarian theology. To my poorly educated ears Dan Hames' Trinitarian theology seems quite idiosyncratic in a similar way to the way Mike Reeves talks on the Trinity seemed when I listened to them (although I thoroughly enjoyed them).

I have to say immediately that yes, I'm sure my Trinitarian theology is not Piper's, otherwise he'd have wheeled it out by now. Dare I say it, I guess I'd tend to think that if Piper's grasp of Trinity were stronger and more biblical, it could then be a weapon in his arsenal (notwithstanding the excellent critique of Christian Hedonism given by Wink at the Parableman blog, which Dave K also pointed-out to me).

I won't make a secret of the fact that Mike Reeves is my boss and my trinitarian theology comes from him. (Though please don't read everything I say and assume it has come from Mike, because I suspect he'd be defend this position far more comprehensively than I. The strengths in my argument are likely his, and the weaknesses mine!) The thing is, I'd certainly not call this Trinitarian theology 'idiosyncratic', though it seems unusual to our ears. It has come through people like Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, Karl Rahner, and finds its source in the Cappodocian Fathers. Ultimately, though, I'm convinced that this Trinitarian theology is biblical, and that it is free from the philosophical constraints that imprison most Trinitarian theologies we read.

Dave K says,

My concerns about the way Mike Reeves and Dan Hames articulate their Trinitarian theology is that:

It downplays the unity of God to such an extent that I am unclear whether the unity of the Trinity is solely in their 'thoughts' (of love for each other, of their shared purposes etc).

It seems that for them there is no 'priority' within their relationships although there are differences. I know subordination (whether eternal, economic, ontological or functional [!]) within the Trinity is a contested subject but I think it is there in the NT, and I think John Piper agrees.

If the Trinity is of 'one substance' (and I know Mike Reeves doesn't like that term for good reasons) and there is some kind of subordination, or even differing origins, within the Trinity, then I think that Trinitarian theology does little to remove the offence of God's passion for his glory. Although undoubtedly Trinitarian theology demonstrates the love of God and makes God's passion for his glory beautiful, God's concern is still totally self-centred because God is one, and because all the mutual glorification is asymmetric and seems to find rest in the glory of the Father that the Son and Spirit reflect and share.

So we're looking really at two main issues within Trinitarian theology: defining the nature of the Trinity's unity, and the subordination within their relationships.

The unity of the Trinity
First we'll look at the issue of the unity of the Trinity. Dave's concern with my Trinitarian theology is that the 'unity of God is downplayed' and perhaps seems rather too weakly defined. This is by far and away (in my experience) the most common objection to this Trinitarian theology, and one that is, in a sense, the hardest one to defeat because we have a very particular view of God already fixed in our minds- and to overturn it is really quite a big deal.

The majority of us will confess Trinitarianism, think modalism, and operate in simple monotheism. Our problem is that our conception of God is very thoroughly philosophical, and that colours radically our reading of verses like Deuteronomy 6v4. We tend to read that as saying, 'God is one person', and we are doing an injustice to the text when we do so. The hebrew word for 'one' there is echad, which does not mean 'mathematically one'- it speaks about unity and exclusivity. The context of the verse is that the Lord alone is to be worshipped among all the gods of the nations. The point is not about mathematical singularity. Hebrew even has a different word for 'one' in a mathematical sense- yachid. The rabbis would always translate that verse as 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is a unity'- not 'the Lord our God is a mathematical singularity'. The point of the verse is that the one Lord of Israel is uniquely worthy of worship; and it takes into account His Triune nature in stating this.

Why do we read that verse wrongly? Why is our conception of God more philosophical than biblical? The answer, it seems, lies with Augustine who is unfortunately to blame for letting philosophy influence his theology. Historically, Augustine is one of the big daddies of the Western church (that's the Roman Catholic church, and the Protestant church as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox churches). And of course, as members of churches in the Western tradition, we Protestant evangelicals are subject to Augustine's influence. Colin Gunton in his The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (which I confess to not having read through yet) says,

...Augustine either did not understand the trinitarian theology of his predecessors , both East and West, or looked at their work with spectacles so strongly tinted with neoplatonic assumptions that they have distorted his work. The tragedy is that Augustine's work is so brilliant that it blinded generations of theologians to its damaging weaknesses.

Augustine's philosophical definition of God was that God is one substance (simple monotheism), and that the idea of Trinity has somehow to be reconciled with this basic fact. So Augustine came-up with ill-fitting analogies to get it to sound plausible. The Eastern church had always approached Trinitarian theology more successfully. The Eastern church, headed-up by the Cappodocian Fathers, realised that on plain reading of the Bible, we are presented quite clearly with three distinct Persons who all are identified as the Lord, the Living God. For the Cappodocians, the 'three' part was really very clear, and it was working-out the unity of the three that was the fun theological project. So Augustine began with one and desperately tried to make three out of it; the Cappodicians started with three and worked-out how the three were one.

They key was realising that God is not a single substance to be philosophically divided, but three distinct persons who are biblically the one Lord God. So Gunton looks at Trinitarian theology pre-Augustine and says,

... the three are not individuals but persons, beings whose reality can only be understood in terms of their relations to each other, relations by virtue of which they together constitute the being (ousia) of God. The persons are therefore not relations, but concrete particulars in relation to one another.

The distinction between an 'individual' and a 'person' is really important in Trinitarian theology, and the history/lingustics behind it are a bit much for me to get a handle on enough to distill here. Suffice it to say that referring to the three members of the Trinity as persons is to say that they are by nature relational with one another; for that it what it is to be a person. So the God the Father is revealed to us as a Father- that's a relational category. The Father is only the Father because He is the Father of the Son: having a Father-Son relationship. Likewise, the Son is revealed relationally to the Father as the Son of the Father. The Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son (there we do depart slightly (!) from the Eastern church, but that's not the point at the moment). He is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are revealed to us relationally- and defined in Scripture primarily by their relationship to one another. Augustine's and neo-platonism's conception of a single God who somehow could be 'split' into three chunks (whether an egg's yoke, white and shell; or H2O in water, steam, or ice) is alien to the biblical revelation of the Lord. It seems that the 'oneness' of God- his unity- is revealed to us as being the relationships between the Trinity which are mutually constitutive. And the relationship is always characterised by love in Scripture.

Guton summarises,

For them [the Cappodocians] the three persons are what they are in their relations, and therefore the relations qualify them ontologically, in terms of what they are.

This conception of the oneness of God feels difficult at first. It's not a oneness you can poke with your finger or draw with a diagram. We are used to Augustine's picture, and we are, as I said before, used to thinking in terms of simple monotheism. The idea that God's oneness is not some sort of 'physical' thing, or a commonality in substance between the persons, feels like you're ripping-out the oneness altogether. Indeed, Gregory of Nyssa (one of the Cappodocian Fathers) had to write a defence called On Not Three Gods just in case he was misunderstood. It's important that we don't see three 'Gods' who all 'happen to like each other a lot' (as Mike Reeves would say); instead, their relationships are revealed as essential to their very existence. If we are gong to base our view of God on His self-revelationalone- rather than philosophy- we understand that the big thing to say about God is that He is three, and that His oneness is the inter-Trinitarian relationships of love. I don't think this is some fort of cosmetic or intangible unity, and I don't think there is any other way to avoid the unhelpful language of 'substance' which lumps the three persons into one person, and which gets us into some form of heresy somewhere down the line.

This Trinitarian theology gives us a more robustly biblical view of the unity of God: that His oneness is the very unity of the three Persons of the Trinity in loving communion.

Subordination in the Trinity
Dave's second concern was whether my Trinitarian theology allowed for any subordination or priority in the relationships between the Trinity. I think I did show this in my original post (though I didn't use the language of subordination) in that the Son is obedient to the Father, doing His will, glorifying the Father by His work etc. The Son also is not party to the knowledge of the time of His return (Matthew 24v36). None of this is denied or altered by my Trinitarian theology. In fact, the emphasis on a personal/relational revelation of the three bears it up. Human father and son relationships are the paradigm the Lord has used to show the relationship between the Father and the Son (and no doubt are built to reflect the relationship between the Father and the Son): it's innate in the relationship (and therefore in the persons ontologically) that the Son is begotten of the Father, obeying the Father, being like His Father.

In fact, it seems harder to reconcile the biblical picture of subordination if one's model of Trinity is of one substance with three persons, because all the three are fundamentally the same 'stuff', just divided into different persons. Rather than distinct persons with fundamentally defining relationality, you have three persons who are essentially of the same 'stuff', and the subordination (the obedience of the Son, the procession of the Spirit) suddenly is arbitrary. You will have come to the point where you could have had the Father on the cross if you wanted, or the Spirit being incarnated. (Some theologians have been there!) I'd hazard a guess to say this is where talk about the 'ontological Trinity' and the 'economic Trinity' come from: they may well be totally pointless categories that miss the point. In the end, it's trying to reconcile a preconceived philosophical assumption about the one substance of the Godhead with the Scriptures' clear teaching that there is some kind of subordination (or 'priority') within the three which is due to their hyspostases being relational and mutually constitutive.

So as far as I can see, this Trinitarian theology better deals with the distinctions between the persons.