The Trinity is a doctrine that has been believed by most Christians since the 4th century AD. This doctrine teaches that God is one, while also being three in a different way. God is one ousia, or “essence,” or “nature,” or “being,” while being three hypostaseis, or “persons.” These are metaphysical terms, drawn from the Greek philosophy that existed when the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated. What happens if we examine the doctrine of the Trinity according to the metaphysical basis on which it rests? Can it help to elucidate what the Trinity actually means, or does it further obfuscate it, or even show it to be utterly contradictory? In this post, we’ll try to find the answer to that question.
The relationship between ousia and hypostasis
In 4th-century Greek metaphysics, ousia was a term that can mean two things: either a type of nature (e.g., “human nature”) or a particular instance of that nature (e.g., a human). This distinction was called by Aristotle the “primary ousia” (i.e., individual) and “secondary ousia” (i.e., genus/species/nature). Hypostasis could also mean a type of nature, but from the Council of Nicaea onwards began to be used solely as a term for a concrete instance of a nature (e.g., a human is a hypostasis of “human nature”). The terms ousia and hypostasis were actually used synonymously by many 4th-century writers, like Athanasius and Epiphanius. [1] So what does it mean that God is one ousia and three hypostaseis?
If we interpret ousia as “secondary ousia” (i.e., genus/species/nature), then it means that God is one nature and three particular instances of that nature. This was the view held by two of the Cappadocian Fathers, who helped to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. According to Basil of Caesarea, “The distinction between ousia and hypostasis is the same as that between the general and particular; as, for instance, between the animal [i.e., humanity] and the particular man” (Epistle 236.6). Gregory of Nyssa held the same conception, as is clear from his work On “Not Three Gods”.
The title of that work notwithstanding, this view does imply the existence of three gods. In this formulation of the Trinity, ousia refers to a particular nature, like human nature; but the existence of a single human nature doesn’t change the fact that 8 billion instances of “human nature” are still 8 billion humans. Therefore, three concrete instances of a divine “secondary ousia” would just be three gods. Gregory of Nyssa argues against this (in On “Not Three Gods”) by claiming that three human persons should actually be called “one human” because they all have a human nature, but this is a clear abuse of language, as shown by the fact that this concept of humanity is not found other than in obscure philosophical writings like Gregory’s. This interpretation of the Trinity thus leads to a contradiction, as it postulates the existence of both one God and three gods.
What if the one ousia is a “primary ousia,” that is, a particular instance of a nature? In this case we have another clear contradiction, because a hypostasis is also a concrete instance of a nature. This view, therefore, postulates that God is both one thing and three of the same thing, a logical impossibility. Such an incoherent view of the Trinity was held by the Cappadocian father Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as the later theologian John of Damascus. [2] Both Gregory and John admitted that thinking about the Trinity led to a logical contradiction, but they believed that it was necessary to affirm what the Church taught, so one must simply avoid thinking logically about God. [3] This view will be critiqued later in my post.
Finally, we could interpret ousia as a concrete instance of a nature, while interpreting hypostasis as a term synonymous with prosōpon, referring to a personality or mode. This takes us into modalism, which, although formally condemned as a heresy, has been popular in Western Christianity as a one-self theory of the Trinity. [4] The view that God is one self, and his three hypostaseis are modes of that self, was held (probably) by Augustine of Hippo as well as more recent influential theologians like Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. [5] This interpretation of the Trinity holds that God is a single self who eternally acts in three different ways (as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) relative to himself.
The problem with this view is that it implies that each hypostasis cannot be called “God,” because a part of a thing can’t be equal to the whole, whereas trinitarian theology insists that they are each fully God. For example, although you might be able to refer to “happy Andrew” and “sad Andrew” (modes of myself) by my name, my happiness and my sadness are plainly not identical to me, and cannot be called “Andrew.” A classical theist would object that God’s attributes are simply identical to himself (divine simplicity), and so each of God’s modes can be called “God.” But then we’re left with the same incoherent claim as before, that God is both one thing and three of the same thing, because each of God’s modes are just identical to God!
Where does this leave us? We can’t interpret ousia as a nature or a concrete instance of a nature, as both lead to logical contradiction. Nor can we interpret the three hypostaseis as three modes or parts of the one ousia, because this either conflicts with trinitarian theology or leads to logical contradiction. There are only so many ways that one thing can relate to three things, and the Trinity conflicts with all of them. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, is a logically incoherent mess, according to the metaphysical language which it is based upon.
“Unitarians are just rationalists who use philosophy”
A trinitarian might object (as many trinitarians do) that unitarians are simply bringing in philosophy where it doesn’t belong, futilely trying to understand everything about God from a rationalist perspective. The fact is, though, that unitarians aren’t the ones who brought in philosophy and metaphysics to explain God. It was trinitarians themselves who introduced the metaphysical terms ousia and hypostasis to explain their doctrine! The difference is that unitarians simply follow the trinitarian metaphysical logic through to its incoherent conclusions.
In fact, the unitarian conception of God requires much less metaphysical speculation than trinitarianism. Unitarians believe that God is one person, the Father alone, who is perfect in knowledge and power; that Jesus is his unique Son, the ideal human Messiah who perfectly reveals his will and was exalted to become Lord of the universe; and that the Holy Spirit is the powerful presence of God (the Father) acting in the world. This requires no metaphysical concepts to understand (unless “God” is considered to be a metaphysical concept). Unitarians accept that there are many things about God that we can’t understand (Isa. 40:28; 55:8-9; Rom. 11:33-36; 1 Cor. 2:11), but we deny that God expects us to believe anything that is logically impossible.
It’s possible that trinitarians could formulate a Trinity theory that avoids the pitfalls of metaphysics. Something like this has already been attempted by Beau Branson, who recognizes that existing Trinity theories are inadequate. [6] Branson argues that “God” refers properly to the Father, while the god-ness of the Son and Holy Spirit are ontologically derivative from God (the Father), and that this was the view held by the earliest trinitarians. [7] It’s not clear how this is substantively different from subordinationist unitarianism; most unitarians would agree with this, while perhaps disputing the precise nature of the Son and the Holy Spirit (e.g., that the former is eternally begotten and uncreated).
Furthermore, if any trinitarians completely do away with the metaphysical language of ousia and hypostasis, they would end up just as untethered from Church tradition as unitarians. The creeds which promulgate the doctrine of the Trinity also demand that we say God is one ousia and three hypostaseis. Until any trinitarians do come up with a purely phenomenological (non-metaphysical) explanation of the Trinity, the accusation that unitarians are more “rationalistic” than trinitarians is unfounded.
“But the Trinity is just a mystery that can’t be understood”
When pressed into a corner on the logical incoherence of the Trinity, some trinitarians will resort to “mysterianism,” the position that the Trinity simply can’t (and shouldn’t) be understood. [8] Indeed, most Christians simply avoid thinking about the details of the Trinity altogether. After all, God’s ways are far beyond our understanding (Isa. 40:28; 55:8-9; Rom. 11:33-36; 1 Cor. 2:11); of course there are things about him that we can’t know! Does this rescue the doctrine of the Trinity from its own logical incoherence?
No, it doesn’t. The unitarian claim isn’t that everything about God can be understood, but that this particular doctrine about God leads to a logical contradiction. Unless the trinitarian is willing to admit that true contradictions about God can exist — which, unlike the claim that God’s ways are beyond ours, isn’t found in the Scriptures — mysterianism does nothing to rescue trinitarianism. Furthermore, if we can’t even know what the doctrine of the Trinity means, how can anyone affirm it? The language of “one God in three persons” then becomes nothing more than a shibboleth to distinguish ‘true’ and ‘orthodox’ Christians, who blindly follow the authority of the Church, from ‘heretics’ whose only crime is their failure to affirm a meaningless statement!
Finally, if we can’t know what the doctrine of the Trinity means, how can we know that it is revealed in the Scriptures? By removing all meaningful content from the affirmation of “one God in three persons,” mysterianism undermines the entire basis for believing in the Trinity, at least for sola scriptura Christians. (For Catholic and Eastern Orthodox mysterians, “one God in three persons” must be affirmed as a meaningless shibboleth simply because the Church demands it.) Thus, Protestants can’t be mysterians if they want to have any basis for their belief in the Trinity. Moreover, this appeal to "mystery" can't be found in the New Testament, which uses "mystery" to refer to a revealed doctrine.
A modified mysterian view, argued for by Matthew J. Farrar, is that God is not “a being” but rather the ground of all being, so it’s wrong to apply the same metaphysical logic that applies to physical beings to God. [10] Once again, though, it’s trinitarians, not unitarians, who apply the metaphysics of ousia and hypostasis to God; unitarians just follow this logic through to its (incoherent) conclusions. Furthermore, as argued earlier, how could God expect us to affirm something that is logically impossible to understand, and how could we possibly know that the Trinity is taught in the Scriptures if we can’t even know what it means? Finally, although it’s true that God is the ground of all being, the denial that he is himself “a being” runs the risk of reducing “God” to a brute fact, rather than the rational, relational, utterly personal Being revealed in the Scriptures.
“But the church has always believed it”
If the doctrine of the Trinity is incoherent (and therefore wrong), why has the Church been in almost 100% consensus about this issue since the 4th century AD? Is it possible that so many learned theologians could have been wrong for so long? And isn’t the doctrine of the Trinity taught in the Scriptures? In fact, this doctrine wasn’t believed by the earliest Christians, but was a later development over the centuries, finally coalescing into what is today considered “orthodox trinitarianism” by the mid-4th century (after the First Council of Nicaea). [10]
To understand just how much Christian theology has evolved even since the early 4th century, let’s consider briefly how John 1:1, the trinitarian prooftext par excellence, was interpreted at that time. The setting is the 330s AD, several years after the Council of Nicaea. Two very prominent bishops, Eusebius of Caesarea and Marcellus of Ancyra, both of whom were considered orthodox at the time, are debating the meaning of this verse. [11]
Eusebius argues that because John refers to the Word as “God” (Gk: theos) rather than “the God” (Gk: ho theos), he indicates that the Word was not “the God who is over all,” i.e., the Father. Rather, the Word is “an image of the God” who was “made like, in the closest way possible, to the archetypal divinity of the Father” (ET 2.17.1-3). “For there is but one true God... ‘and the Word was God,’ but not the one true God” (Eusebius, Letter to Euphration). According to Eusebius, those who declare that the Word is “the Most High God himself” are “strangely confounding things most widely different” (Oratio 11.16).
Marcellus of Ancyra, on the other hand, believed that there is only one God who is a single person because he uses singular pronouns to define his uniqueness (Fragment 91-92, 97). Thus, he argued, the word of God cannot be a second god or Demiurge, but is the literal reason and spoken word of God, similar to a human’s reason and spoken word (Frag. 67, 87-89, 99). It is a “power” (Gk: dynamis) of the Father, rather than a separate person (Frag. 70). God’s word is what animated the human flesh of Jesus, controlling it like a puppet, which is how “the word became flesh” (Frag. 5, 7, 73, 104-105).
Neither Eusebius nor Marcellus held to the trinitarian interpretation of John 1:1, which is that “the Word was God” (Gk: theos ēn ho logos) refers to a second person in the one God. This view, which today is the hegemonic interpretation of the verse, doesn’t even seem to have crossed their minds. This incident serves to demonstrate just how much Christian theology has evolved (and narrowed) even since the First Council of Nicaea. How did this happen? There were many theological controversies throughout the 4th century, finally ending when the pro-trinitarian Roman emperor Theodosius I simply outlawed all other views in AD 380:
According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the singular Deity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in equal Majesty and in a Holy Trinity. We order the followers of this law to embrace the name of Catholic Christians. But as for the others, since, in our judgment they are demented and insane, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of Heretics, and shall not presume to give to their assemblies the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation, and in the second the punishment of our authority which, in accordance with the will of Heaven, we shall decide to inflict. (Edict of Thessalonica)
This edict was upheld by a ‘kangaroo council’ the next year, called by Theodosius I, which only trinitarian bishops were allowed to attend. [12] From that point onward, until the Protestant Reformation, non-trinitarians were harshly persecuted and not allowed to lead congregations. The fact is, a consensus arrived at by coercion is no consensus at all. Rather than accept the logically incoherent doctrine of the Trinity simply because it was forced on Christianity by an emperor, we should return to the Scriptures to see if, just maybe, this doctrine is actually not biblical after all. [13,14]
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[1] For an analysis of how the use of these terms changed over time, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1952), 157-196.
[2] John of Damascus understood the Trinity in light of the ideas of perichoresis and circumincession, that the persons of God fully indwell each other (loosely drawn from passages like John 14:11). He used the analogy of three suns, which fully overlap each other in all three dimensions to form one sun. Obviously, the issue with this is that three objects which totally overlap each other don’t continue to be three objects, but become only one object. Thus, perichoresis and circumincession fail to solve the contradiction that arises from the claim that God is one thing and three of the same thing.
[3] Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 31.33; John Damascene, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith I.14.11; cf. Charles C. Twombly, Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 12-16.
[4] Dale Tuggy, “Trinity [1.1-3],” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 20 November 2020, accessed 5 May 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/#OneSel.
[5] On Augustine, see Dale Tuggy, “History of Trinitarian Doctrines [3.3.2],” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, accessed 5 May 2024, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/trinity-history.html#Aug; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Volume I: The Doctrine of the Word of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 1; Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997 [1967]), 101-102.
[6] Beau Branson, “No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity,” Journal of Applied Logics 6, no. 6 (2019): 1051-1092.
[7] Beau Branson, “One God, the Father: The Neglected Doctrine of the Monarchy of the Father, and Its Implications for the Analytic Debate about the Trinity,” TheoLogica 6, no. 2 (2022).
[8] Dale Tuggy, “Trinity [4.1-2],” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/#Mys.
[9] Matthew J. Farrar, “Why the Trinity Just Doesn’t Make Sense to Christadelphians,” dianoigo (blog), 27 August 2018, https://blog.dianoigo.com/2018/08/why-trinity-just-doesnt-make-sense-to.html.
[10] For the history of development of Christian theology in the 1st through 4th centuries, see my blog post series about “The evolution of early Christian theology.” See also R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988) for a great scholarly treatment of how trinitarianism emerged from the theological upheavals of the 4th century AD.
[11] Maurice Wiles, “Person or Personification? A Patristic Debate about Logos,” in The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird (Oxford: OUP, 1987), 281-289; for a longer analysis of the beliefs of Eusebius, Marcellus, and their contemporaries, as well as a history of the post-Nicene period, see posts five and seven in my blog post series, “The evolution of early Christian theology.”
[12] Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8.5-10; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.7.2-5.
[13] To be sure, I’m not saying that all trinitarians believe in the doctrine of the Trinity just because the Church teaches it. (That’s certainly not why most Protestants believe it.) Most Christians believe it because that’s how they’ve been taught to interpret the Bible, so as to rule out all other views as heresy. But their belief in the Trinity can ultimately be traced back to when this doctrine was forced upon most Christians in a coercive, top-down fashion, in AD 381.
[14] To see what the Scriptures actually teach about the nature of God and Jesus, see my blog post, “The Biblical Case for Unitarianism.”
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