The Incoherent Metaphysics of the Trinity

    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.”

When was the Trinity discovered?

    I’m interrupting the ongoing series of posts about Genesis 1-11 to present something very interesting that I found while reading the 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers. According to most Protestants, the doctrine of the Trinity was revealed by God, through Jesus, to the writers of the New Testament in the 1st century AD. At the very least, it’s believed to be an inference that can easily be drawn from the NT, which was believed by Christians from the earliest times of the church. Protestant trinitarians must believe this, because they reject the infallibility of the Church as believed by the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. If the Trinity was a later discovery, not able to be inferred directly from the biblical texts, this removes the basis for Protestants to believe in the Trinity.

    However, the belief that the Trinity can be inferred directly from the Bible (and was always believed by the church) wasn’t even held by the earliest trinitarians in the 4th century AD. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, the 4th-century trinitarian apologist, this doctrine was first explicitly written down by Athanasius of Alexandria, allegedly under the influence of divine inspiration:

Here too was shown in a very high degree the simple-mindedness of Athanasius, and the steadfastness of his faith in Christ. For, when all the rest who sympathised with us were divided into three parties, and many were faltering in their conception of the Son, and still more in that of the Holy Ghost, (a point on which to be only slightly in error was to be orthodox) and few indeed were sound upon both points, he was the first and only one, or with the concurrence of but a few, to venture to confess in writing, with entire clearness and distinctness, the Unity of Godhood and Essence of the Three Persons, and thus to attain in later days, under the influence of inspiration, to the same faith in regard to the Holy Ghost, as had been bestowed at an earlier time on most of the Fathers in regard to the Son. (Oration 21.33)

There are a few interesting things to note about this passage. First, Gregory says that prior to Athanasius, “few indeed were sound upon both points” — that is, there were very few theologians who held that both the Son and the Holy Spirit were united in Godhood with the Father. Even the belief that the Son was one in essence (homoousios) with the Father was only “bestowed at an earlier time on most of the Fathers”; presumably, by this Gregory refers to the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, at which the Father and the Son were declared to be homoousios. At the Council of Serdica in AD 343, the bishops of the West came up with a statement proclaiming “one Godhood of Father and Son,” without mentioning the Holy Spirit. [1]

    Second, according to Gregory, the doctrine of the Trinity was first set down in writing by the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who became a bishop three years after the Council of Nicaea in AD 328. He, possibly “with the concurrence of but a few,” was the “first and only one” to set in writing that the Son and the Holy Spirit both had a “Unity of Godhood and Essence” with the Father. Athanasius was actually quite radical in his day, and was known as Athanasius Contra Mundi (“Athanasius Against the World”) for much of his ministry, because he was opposed to so many other bishops. He was even deposed from his see by a council of sixty Eastern bishops and the emperor Constantine in AD 335, due to both the radicality of his beliefs and his alleged mistreatment (even assassination) of ‘Arians.’ [2]

    Finally, Gregory also says that the doctrine of the Trinity was first explicitly set down in writing “in later days” (i.e., after the Council of Nicaea) “under the influence of [divine] inspiration.” This is a truly incredible claim, not only because it implies that the Trinity wasn’t taught before ca. AD 330, but because it assumes a view of divine inspiration that every Protestant should be inclined to reject. We don’t believe that any church is infallible (for good reason); why should we believe that Athanasius was? If we do admit that a church father can be inspired, why Athanasius and not his opponents? Personally, I have a hard time believing that a man who was known to use violent tactics (even, allegedly, assassination) to suppress dissent could have been so pious and inspired by God as his friends believed. [3]

    But if the Trinity was such a new doctrine in the 4th century that Athanasius was the first to set it down in writing, then why was it universally believed by the church after that time? First of all, it wasn’t. Although trinitarianism grew in popularity, largely due to the apologetic work of the Cappadocian Fathers, it was by no means universally believed. Gregory of Nazianzus admitted in 380 that “the wise men amongst ourselves [i.e., Christians]” could not agree on whether the Holy Spirit was a power, a created being, or God (Oration 31.5). The first explicit mention of a tri-personal God, the view that God is in some way three persons (i.e., trinitarianism proper) doesn’t occur until the 370s. [4]

    The reason why the Trinity became universally accepted wasn’t because of some consensus reached by the fathers discussing among themselves, but by a twist of fate. The Roman emperor Theodosius I happened to be a trinitarian, and in AD 380, he simply outlawed all other views:

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)

Theodosius I proceeded to depose the Homoian bishop of Constantinople and place Nicenes (still a minority party in that city) in positions of power. This edict was upheld by a ‘kangaroo council’ the next year, called by Theodosius I, which only trinitarian bishops were allowed to attend. [5] From that point onward, until the Protestant Reformation, non-trinitarians were harshly persecuted and not allowed to lead congregations. If Theodosius had been an Arian instead, or a binitarian, the church’s beliefs about God would look very different today.

    The fact is, trinitarianism was a new doctrine, even in the 4th century AD when it was mandated as the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was admitted even by trinitarian apologists like Gregory of Nazianzus, as we saw above (Oration 21.33). Although they believed that their interpretation could be derived from the Scriptures, they fully admitted that this interpretation was new, and was first set down in writing by Athanasius of Alexandria under divine inspiration in ca. AD 330. Protestants, therefore, are on very unsure footing in their belief in the Trinity. Even Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have to recognize the historical contingencies on which their belief in this doctrine rests. Shouldn’t we rather go back to the Scriptures themselves and believe what they say about God: that he is one person, the Father alone, and that Jesus is his human Son and Messiah who was exalted by him? [6]

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[1] https://www.fourthcentury.com/creed-of-the-western-serdican-council/. They believed that the Father and Son were the same in essence, but they did not believe the Father and Son were co-equal like later trinitarians, as they immediately went on to say, “No one denies that the Father is greater than the Son: not on account of another essence, nor yet on account of their difference, but simply from the very name of the Father being greater than that of the Son.” For this reason, Athanasius strenuously rejected to the Creed of Serdica, even though it was signed by about ninety bishops from the West.

[2] https://www.fourthcentury.com/the-council-of-tyre-ad-335/

[3] “In Alexandria itself, he maintained the popular support which he enjoyed from the outset and buttressed his position by organizing an ecclesiastical mafia. In later years, if he so desired, he could instigate a riot or prevent the orderly administration of the city. Athanasius possessed a power independent of the emperor which he built up and perpetuated by violence. That was both the strength and the weakness of his position. Like a modern gangster, he evoked widespread mistrust, proclaimed total innocence - and usually succeeded in evading conviction on specific charges.” — Timothy Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 230.

[4] Dale Tuggy, “When and How in the History of Theology Did the Triune God Replace the Father as the Only True God?”, TheoLogica 4, no. 2 (2020): 27-51.

[5] Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8.5-10; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.7.2-5.

[6] To see what the Scriptures actually teach about the nature of God and Jesus, see my blog post, “The Biblical Case for Unitarianism.”

Reasons to Believe's Argument for the Trinity

    While doing research for my upcoming series of posts about interpreting Genesis 1-11, I came across an article from the old-earth creationist ministry Reasons to Believe, about “How to Persuade a Skeptic That God Must Be Triune.” This article advances a purely philosophical argument for the Trinity, meant to convince skeptics (both theists and atheists) that certain facts about the consistency of the natural world are best explainable by the existence of a triune God. Similar arguments have been made by other trinitarians, from the medieval theologian Richard of St. Victor to the modern Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I don’t think I’ve responded to this argument before on my blog.

Q: I was talking to a skeptic who wouldn’t subscribe to the possibility of the Christian God being 3-in-1. I gave an analogy of a person being mind, body, and soul, and although this intrigued her, she offered that the mind was actually an extension of the soul. Do you have any thoughts or references that I could access to clarify my position?

A: Most Christian theologians conclude, and I would agree, that it is not possible to separate the soul and the spirit of a human. However, standard Christian doctrine asserts that the earthly body of a human is separable. When a human dies having committed his or her life to Christ, the soul and spirit depart from the body to be with the Lord in heaven. Thus, the body, soul, and spirit of a human is not a good analogy for the Trinity. Every member of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Spirit—have always existed and will continue to always exist.

    This is also a bad analogy because, biblically, the soul is an emergent property that exists when a body and spirit are joined (Gen. 2:7). Furthermore, each of these three aspects (body, soul, and spirit) only make up a single human person, so it doesn’t correspond to the belief that the one God is three persons. [1]

As to how we can better argue for and establish the existence of the Triune God, I have found by experience that one of the best ways is to show people how science makes sense only if God is Triune. One example would be to point out that love is not possible unless there are at least two persons to express and receive love. The problem with strictly monotheistic religions like Islam and Judaism is that a nonloving entity supposedly created beings that give and receive love. How can the lesser create the greater? To put it another way, in strict monotheism, God must create in order to have any possibility of giving or receiving love. If God is a single person, he is unfulfilled until he creates. For the Trinitarian God, creation is an option. It is not a need.

    This philosophical argument is often made by social trinitarians, who believe that the three persons of trinitarian theology are three selves in principle capable of interpersonal relationships. [2] Their reasoning may be summarized as follows:

1. Necessarily, God is perfectly loving (premise).

2. Being perfectly loving implies actually loving another (premise).

3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).

4. Therefore, if God necessarily loves another, this other must be within himself (from 3).

5. Therefore, God loves another within himself (from 1-2, 4).

6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).

The weak point of the argument is premise 2. Trinitarians who use this argument are being inconsistent in how they apply this premise. If we make an almost identical argument, but for another attribute of God (his perfect forgiveness), it leads to a clear absurdity: [3]

1*. Necessarily, God is perfectly forgiving (premise).

2*. Being perfectly forgiving implies actually forgiving another (premise).

3. God was free to create or not to create (premise, based on God’s aseity).

4*. Therefore, if God necessarily forgives another, this other must be within himself (from 3).

5*. Therefore, God forgives another within himself (from 1-2, 4).

6. Therefore, God is multi-personal (from 5).

This reductio ad absurdum shows that, if we apply premise 2 to God’s forgiveness (premise 2*), it implies that God has an eternally sinful person within himself, whom he eternally forgives. To avoid the absurdity, the trinitarian must show that premise 2* is sufficiently different from premise 2, which is difficult or impossible to do on purely philosophical grounds, since the two premises are almost identical.

    Of course, the trinitarian could appeal to 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”) to show that God is perfectly loving in a different way than his other attributes. But then the argument moves from pure philosophy to an argument from revelation, and a claim that the New Testament is best interpreted in a trinitarian way. This certainly won’t convince any non-Christian skeptic, nor will it convince anyone familiar with unitarian arguments about the New Testament and early church history. The New Testament clearly teaches and assumes that God just is the Father alone, and trinitarianism was not widely believed in the early church until the 4th century, which is hard to explain if it’s truly taught in the New Testament. [4] Even in the case of 1 John 4:8 (“God is love”), the context establishes that “God” refers to the Father, separate from the Son and the Spirit (4:9-16), so this philosophical argument (if true) would prove that the Father is multi-personal.

    What then does it mean to say that God is perfectly loving, or that “God is love”? It means that, given the existence of another person, God will unfailingly love that person. It doesn’t guarantee the necessary existence of that person, any more than God’s perfect forgiveness guarantees the necessary existence of a sinful person. It’s possible to imagine a world where God never created another person, in which case his perfect love would still exist but wouldn’t be expressed, just as it’s possible to imagine a friendly person living alone on an island (he has no friends, but if he did meet anyone, he would befriend them).

The problem with polytheistic faiths is that the multiple gods possess different creation plans and goals. Thus, in polytheistic religions like Hinduism, there is the expectation that the natural realm will be inharmonious and filled with inconsistencies and unresolvable anomalies. However, centuries of scientific research reveal the opposite. The more we study the record of nature the greater level of harmony and consistency we see and the longer the list becomes of resolved anomalies.

    Reasons to Believe (RtB) now explains why monotheism (i.e., the existence of a single perfect God) is the best explanation of the consistency we see in the natural world. This argument may well be true, for in most (all?) polytheistic religions, there are stories about the gods disagreeing and fighting over how to run the world. I’m not sure how effective this would be at convincing an atheistic skeptic, as RtB hasn’t yet argued for the existence of any gods in this article — could the consistency of the natural world be equally well explained given the existence of no gods? In any case, this argument is irrelevant to the Trinity now that we’ve debunked the claim that a single perfect God must be multi-personal.

Science, therefore, establishes why God in some sense must be uniplural, as the Hebrew word for God (Elohim) used in Genesis 1 implies. The uniplurality of God also explains why both singular and plural pronouns are used for God in Genesis 1:26–27.

    These claims are very tenuous, and aren’t agreed on even by most trinitarian scholars. I debunked them at the beginning of this blog post. The fact is that plural titles like Elohim were used as majestic titles, not just for God, but also by the Canaanites for their own gods, for other humans in the Bible, and also for the Father and Jesus as individual persons (Ps. 45:6-7; cf. Heb. 1:8-9). As for the plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26-27, this is almost certainly referring to the divine council which was with God in the beginning (1 Kgs. 22:19; Job 15:8; Psa. 89:7; Dan. 7:10, 26). The divine council’s decrees could be spoken of interchangeably as God’s own decrees, as shown by Daniel 4:17, 24.

One question that remains is why three Persons and not two, four, or more. Both creation and the redemption of billions of humans reveals a division of labor that points to three Persons. Also, John in his first epistle explains that God’s spiritual light in the world has three components: life, love, and truth, wherein the Son takes responsibility for bestowing life, the Father takes responsibility for bestowing love, and the Holy Spirit takes responsibility for bestowing truth.

Psychologists point out that when two people isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, they frequently become codependent in their relationship. A third person breaks the codependency. This need for three persons is illustrated in marriage. The bride and groom unite to become one, where the bride and groom become an ezer (essential military ally) for one another. However, for this alliance to truly build an increasingly loving relationship and an increasingly productive ministry, the married couple must completely embrace God as their ezer.

    This argument for three persons is incredibly selective, and it shows that RtB is starting with their conclusion and trying to find premises to justify it. Psychologists also point out that good relationships involve respect for boundaries and giving the other person space if they need it. Does this prove that there’s a place where the Father doesn’t exist so that the Son can have alone time, which means God isn’t omnipresent? Psychologists point out that good relationships involve accepting each other’s shortcomings. God doesn’t have shortcomings, so does this mean that the Father and the Son can’t be in a good relationship and therefore aren’t perfectly loving? Clearly, RtB is simply assuming that God is three persons and looking for arguments to back it up.

In conclusion, the universe, its life, and God’s plan revealed both in nature and Scripture for the redemption of billions of human beings reveals the work of three supernatural Persons who are one in essence, character, purpose, and plan.

    While there may be an effective argument for this, RtB certainly hasn’t made it. At the most, all they’ve shown is that the consistency of the natural world is better explained by monotheism than polytheism, which unitarians shouldn’t have an issue with. As for me, I’ll stick to the clear teaching of scripture that there is one God, the Father alone, and Jesus is his human Son, the Messiah, and our Lord (John 8:40; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:4-6; 1 Tim. 2:5).

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[1] For more on these three aspects of a human person, see my blog post, “Body, Spirit, and Soul.”

[2] For other Trinity theories, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Trinity.

[3] Dale Tuggy, “Antiunitarian Arguments from Divine Perfection,” Journal of Analytic Theology 9 (2021): 264-266.

[4] See my series of blog posts on the history of unitarianism and trinitarianism in the early church; for a more academic treatment of the data, see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988).

Trinity theories versus Scripture

    Since around AD 381, mainstream Christians have historically insisted that a belief in ‘the Trinity’ is required for salvation, or that it is at the very least a central doctrine of Christianity. The problem with this, however, is that there is no ‘doctrine of the Trinity.’ On the contrary, there are many different ways that the traditional language of “one God in/as three Persons,” or “one essence and three subsistences,” has been interpreted by Christians, most of which are inconsistent with one another. These different Trinity theories are catalogued by philosopher Dale Tuggy in this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In this post, I will give a short summary of each Trinity theory and analyze it using both logic and the teaching of Scripture.

    The axioms of ‘orthodox trinitarianism’

Before actually discussing each Trinity theory, let’s examine the axioms that any Trinity theory must incorporate in order to be ‘orthodox.’ There are six such axioms:

1. There is exactly one god — one supreme divine being.
2. This one god is referred to as “God” or “the LORD” or “Yahweh.”
3. The Father is God, the LORD.
4. The Son is God, the LORD.
5. The Holy Spirit is God, the LORD.
6. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each distinct from the other two. [1]

These are the elements necessary for any minimally orthodox Trinity theory (ignoring claims about eternal generation and procession). Although these six claims are often presented as the ‘doctrine of the Trinity,’ mostly by trinitarian Christian apologists, these claims do not by themselves constitute a doctrine. There are many ways in which they can be, and have been, interpreted, as you can see below.

    One-self Trinity theories

According to Tuggy, “A self is [an entity] who is in principle capable of knowledge, intentional action, and interpersonal relationships.” One human person would be a single self, even if he had multiple personality disorder, because the other personalities within his head would be unable to access knowledge that the person himself did not know (at least subconsciously), and would be unable to have true interpersonal relationships with one another. Different selves, such as multiple human persons, can have knowledge apart from one another, and have truly interpersonal relationships with one another.

    One-self Trinity theories postulate that God is a single great self. According to such theories, the “Persons” within the Trinity are not persons according to the modern sense (selves), but persons in the ancient sense of the word, that is, modes of being in which God eternally and essentially lives. The three Persons can appear to interact with one another at the same time, but are merely different ways that God ‘play-acts’ with Himself. [2] Tuggy quotes several statements from modern one-self trinitarians:

As God is in Himself Father from all eternity, He begets Himself as the Son from all eternity. As He is the Son from all eternity, He is begotten of Himself as the Father from all eternity. In this eternal begetting of Himself and being begotten of Himself, He posits Himself a third time as the Holy Spirit, that is, as the love which unites Him in Himself. [3]

[God] is — at once and necessarily — the unoriginate who mediates himself to himself (Father), the one who is in truth uttered for himself (Son), and the one who is received and accepted in love for himself (Spirit) — and... as a result of this, he [God] is the one who can freely communicate himself. [4]

...when we talk about God as one person, we mean one person in the modern sense of the word [i.e., a self], and when we talk about God as three persons, we mean three persons in the ancient sense of the word [i.e., a persona or role that is played]. [5]

According to these theories, the one god is one self who eternally and necessarily acts as three different Persons; these Persons are not selves, but essential personas of a single self. This type of Trinity theory has been common in Western Christianity since Augustine of Hippo, and was propounded by influential theologians Barth and Rahner in the twentieth century.

    One-self Trinity theories have some difficulty coherently interpreting the six axioms of trinitarianism. Yes, there is one god in the sense that there is one self. But if we say that the single self is God, then the Persons, the modes of being in which God acts, are not by themselves God. Whereas, if we define each mode as being a god named “God” and “Yahweh,” this simply makes three gods named “Yahweh.” Perhaps the best way to resolve this dilemma is simply to say that each mode just is the single self, in the same way that I might have two modes, “happy Andrew” and “angry Andrew,” but they are both still identical to myself.

    The characterization of God as a single great self is well-motivated by Scripture, which constantly depicts God using singular pronouns, having knowledge, and having interpersonal relationships with others. Whenever the uniqueness of God is described, in over a dozen passages, singular personal pronouns like “I,” “Thou,” and “He” are used: Deut. 4:35, 39; 32:39; 2 Sam. 7:22; 2 Kgs. 19:15; 1 Chron. 17:20; Neh. 9:6; Psa. 86:10; Isa. 43:10, 11; 44:6-8; 45:5, 21; 46:9; Hos. 13:4; Joel 2:27; and Mark 12:32-34. In addition, one-self theories of the Trinity take seriously the biblical claim that the Father just is the one true god (John 5:43, 44; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:4-6; Eph. 4:6; 1 Tim. 1:17).

    Nonetheless, one-self Trinity theories fail when they are compared against other aspects of Scripture. The Father and the Son are depicted in the New Testament as having interpersonal relationships with one another, as the Son prays to the Father (Matt. 11:25, 26; Mark 14:36; 15:34; Luke 5:16; 23:34, 46; John 11:41, 42; 12:27, 28; 17); worships and loves the Father (Matt. 4:8-10; Mark 12:29, 30; John 14:31); is loved by the Father (Mark 1:11; 9:7; John 3:35; 5:20; 10:17; 17:24; Eph. 1:6); obeys the Father (John 5:30; 6:38; 14:31; 15:10; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 5:8-9); and mediates the relationship between the Father and humans (Rom. 8:34; 1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 9:15). Furthermore, the Son has different knowledge than the Father (Mark 13:32). According to Scripture, then, the Father and the Son are separate selves by definition.

    In addition, God and the Son have differed at the same time (or eternally). The Son has a Father, but God has no father. Jesus died, but God is undying (1 Tim. 1:17; 6:16). God sent Jesus, and Jesus was sent by God (John 8:42; 17:3). Given one-self Trinity theory, God is triune or trimodal, but the Son is not trimodal. It’s self-evident that nothing can (at one time or eternally) differ from itself; we employ this type of reasoning all the time in our daily lives. Since the Son differs from God, the Son cannot be identical to God or a mere mode of God. Consequently, one-self Trinity theories are not compatible with Scripture.

    Three-self Trinity theories

In contrast to one-self Trinity theories, many Christian philosophers and lay people instead hold to a three-self view of the Trinity. On this view, rather than God being a single self, each of the three Persons is a self, who together make up (in some way) the one god.

    Social Trinitarianism

According to social trinitarianism, the divine essence is a universal — that is, a set of properties belonging to God alone — while the Persons are particulars or instances of the divine universal. One ancient social trinitarian, Basil of Caesarea, said that the relation between the essence and the Persons is like the relationship between the essence, ‘humanity,’ and three instances of humanity, such as Peter, Paul, and John (Ep. 38). The views of modern social trinitarians are the same:

God the Trinity is constituted by three persons (in Boethius’ sense of ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’) who have a common divine essence, and are individuated only by their relations to each other. Having that essence entail[s] each being omnipotent and so perfectly good. [6]

On this view, the three Persons are each selves who exist in eternal harmony and loving relationship. Social trinitarianism has traditionally been popular in Eastern Christianity, beginning with the ‘Cappadocian Fathers’ of the fourth century; however, today it is becoming more popular in the West, especially among analytic theologians like Richard Swinburne.

    It’s unclear whether social trinitarianism manages to interpret the six axioms of trinitarianism in a logically coherent fashion. One difficulty is that concrete instances of universals are entities in their own right; for example, three concrete instances of ‘humanity’ would be three humans. Therefore, three concrete instances of the divine universal would be three gods. Swinburne attempts to resolve this dilemma by saying that both the divine essence and the Persons can be called “God;” since there is only one divine essence, in this sense there is only one god. [7] But this merely papers over the problem, because on this view there are four “Gods” — entities which can be called “God” — and three gods — instances of the divine essence. Thus, social trinitarianism seems to be incompatible with monotheism.

    Does this type of three-self trinitarianism cohere with Scripture? In some ways, it coheres better than one-self Trinity theories. Three-self trinitarianism makes sense of the interpersonal relationship between the Father and the Son, and the difference in knowledge between the Father and the Son. Furthermore, it can make sense of the differences between Jesus and God, because the Son is not identical to “God” (i.e., the divine essence), but is one-third of the divine essence. On three-self Trinity theories, it is possible for Jesus to have died, even though God is undying, because the divine essence did not die when the Son died — it continued to be instantiated in the Father and the Holy Spirit.

    However, in other ways, three-self trinitarianism fails to account for the Scriptural evidence. God is consistently presented as a single great self, who uses singular pronouns thousands of times. When describing His uniqueness, God says,

I am the LORD, and there is no other beside Me. I will strengthen you even though you do not know Me, that they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting that there is none beside Me. I am the LORD, and there is no other. (Isa. 45:5-6)

Singular pronouns are also used in over a dozen other places to describe God’s uniqueness (see above). The God of the Bible is not a ‘what,’ but a single, unique self. For God to be multiple selves, and yet talk about Themselves as a single self, would be divine deception. [8]

    Furthermore, according to multiple places in the New Testament, the Father is the only god, or “the one God” (John 5:43, 44; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:6; 1 Tim. 1:17). But if three-self trinitarianism is true, then the Father is not the only god, because He is neither the divine essence, of which He is only one-third, nor the only instance of the divine essence, of which He is one of three. Consequently, any logically coherent three-self Trinity theory is simply incompatible with the testimony of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

    Trinity Monotheism

A more modern three-self Trinity theory is Trinity monotheism, which is the view that God just is the Trinity, because one of the divine properties is being triune. In contrast to social trinitarianism, which considers each of the Persons to be an instance of the divine essence, Trinity monotheism considers the Trinity to be the only instance of the divine essence. Here are some quotes from Trinity monotheists:

The persons of the Trinity are not divine in virtue of instantiating the divine nature. For presumably being triune is a property of the divine nature (God does not just happen to be triune); yet the persons of the Trinity do not have that property. It now becomes clear that the reason that the Trinity is not a fourth instance of the divine nature is that there are no other instances of the divine nature. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not instances of the divine nature, and that is why there are not three Gods. The Trinity is the sole instance of the divine nature, and therefore there is but one God. [9]

According to the doctrine of the Trinity [sic] there are three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of whom is fully divine, fully God. There is, furthermore, a single concrete divine nature—a single trope or instance of Godhood—that is the nature of each of the three Persons... The divine essentia, in other words, consists of a single trope of Godhood or divinity. [10]

The primary modern proponents of this view, J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, suggest that God is a single soul which possesses three complete sets of cognitive faculties, or ‘centers of consciousness.’ [11]

    Ignoring whether this concept is possible and whether three sets of rational faculties would count as three selves, does Trinity monotheism adhere to the axioms of trinitarianism? Not at all. Certainly, on this view, there is only one god, God the Trinity. But because the Trinity alone is God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not God. Moreland and Craig embrace this implication of their theory, saying that the three Persons are divine in a different and lesser sense than the Trinity; they admit that this is not the ‘orthodox’ view, but claim that it is nevertheless consistent with Scripture. [12]

    But is Trinity monotheism consistent with Scripture? Unfortunately, no. Like social trinitarianism, this theory fails to make sense of the more than a dozen instances in which God’s absolute singularity is described using singular pronouns (see above). If God were a composite of three selves, then They would use plural pronouns when describing Their uniqueness, not singular pronouns. Furthermore, the New Testament states that the only god is the Father (John 5:43, 44; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:4-6; Eph. 4:6; 1 Tim. 1:17); under Trinity monotheism, the only god is the Trinity, not the Father. Thus, in addition to its failure to be ‘orthodox,’ Trinity monotheism is inconsistent with the testimony of Scripture.

    Four-self Trinity theory

Chad McIntosh has recently proposed a new Trinity theory, which aims to solve the Scriptural and logical problems of other three-self Trinity theories. According to this theory, the three Persons are three selves, but the Trinity as a whole is also a ‘corporate’ self. [13] McIntosh appeals to the biblical idea of ‘corporate personality,’ in which multiple individuals are, by virtue of their unified action, considered together as one self (e.g., Dan. 7:13, 14, 27; Mark 5:6ff; Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12). [14] Therefore, God is really four divine Persons: three “intrinsicist persons” and one “functional person.”

    If the names “God” and “Yahweh” can refer either to the corporate Self or the three Persons, then this theory makes sense of the axioms of trinitarianism. There is one god, God, the corporate Self; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each God and are three selves; and each One is distinct from the other two. Furthermore, in some ways, it makes sense of Scripture. Because God is a single corporate self, He can use singular pronouns and engage in interpersonal relationships; yet because the Father and the Son are separate selves, They can have interpersonal relationships with each other.

    However, in other ways, this theory fails to cohere with the testimony of Scripture. It’s questionable whether corporate personality exists in the Bible to the extent that four-self Trinity theory requires. Yes, multiple individuals can be “one” (John 17:21, 22; Gal. 3:28), but such group entities never speak as a single self. In one of the examples that McIntosh gives, the group entity actually uses plural pronouns (“we;” Mark 5:10). Yet God uses singular pronouns in the Bible almost without exception, including when describing His uniqueness. This would still be divine deception, although perhaps to a lesser degree than on other three-self Trinity theories.

    Furthermore, four-self Trinity theory fails to make sense of the New Testament assertion that the Father is the one and only god (John 5:43, 44; 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:6; 1 Tim. 1:17). According to this theory, the Father is neither the one “functional person,” of which He is only a part, nor the only “intrinsicist person.” Instead, the Father is merely one of three intrinsicist Persons who together comprise the one functional Person. Thus, four-self Trinity theory is no better than any other three-self Trinity theory when it comes to its consistency with the testimony of Scripture.

    Relative identity theory

There are a few trinitarians who believe in three selves within God, but don’t follow any of the theories laid out above, because of their conceptual difficulties. Instead, they argue that the concept of identity is itself flawed, and we should instead accept relative identity theory. This theory states that claims of numerical identity are unintelligible, and we can only use claims of relative identity (e.g., “X and Y are the same F,” but not “X is identical to Y”). For example, we cannot say that Paul just is Saul, but we can say that Paul and Saul are the same human or the same apostle. Therefore, it’s possible to say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same god, but not the same self, without being contradictory; They are “God-identical but Person-distinct.” [15]

    This theory is compatible with the six axioms of trinitarianism. There is one god, God; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each God, because all three are the same god; and each One is distinct from the other two. Furthermore, this theory is (for the most part) compatible with Scripture. It accepts that the Father is the only god (John 5:43, 44; 17:3; 1 Tim. 1:17), because the Son and Holy Spirit are the same god; but it is also compatible with the fact that the Father and the Son have an interpersonal relationship, because They are different selves. The theory runs into some trouble with the Bible’s depiction of God as a unique self, but this can be explained away by the fact that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “God-identical.”

    However, the problem with relative identity theory is that it is obviously logically inconsistent. It is a self-evident truth that, if X and Y are the same F, then X and Y just are one and the same. For example, the claim that “Paul and Saul are the same apostle” means that Paul is an apostle, Saul is an apostle, and Paul and Saul are one and the same. So then, it is simply not possible for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be the same god and different selves:

1. For any X and Y, if X and Y are the same F, then X and Y are numerically identical.
2. The Father and the Son are the same god.
3. Therefore, the Father and the Son are numerically identical. (from 1, 2)
4. Therefore, the Father and the Son are the same self. (from 3)

Relative identity theorists would object to this argument, because they argue that numerical identity is unintelligible. But is this really true? Is the claim that “Paul just is Saul,” or “Yahweh just is God,” really impossible to understand? Virtually all philosophers and lay people would say “no.” Furthermore, relative identity theory seems to contradict the axiom of trinitarianism which says that the one god is “God” and “the LORD.” If there is no concept of absolute identity, then it is false that the LORD just is the one god and vice versa. Therefore, although relative identity theory may be more compatible with Scripture than other Trinity theories, it’s not logically coherent.

    Mysterianism

Some trinitarians, rather than committing to any one of the Trinity theories that have been proposed, simply say that the Trinity is an unintelligible “mystery.” Mysterians typically fall into two categories: negative mysterians, who claim that the axioms of trinitarianism are impossible to interpret in an orthodox way, and positive mysterians, who claim that the Trinity is apparently contradictory. Nonetheless, they continue to believe in the Trinity because they believe it has been divinely revealed (whether in Scripture or by Church councils). Some early pro-Nicene Christians were mysterians, such as Gregory Nazianzen, and many trinitarian Christians still are today.

    Positive mysterians may have a point about orthodox trinitarianism being apparently contradictory. The Athanasian Creed, an anonymous fifth-century work which is considered to be the standard of orthodox trinitarianism by Catholics and even many Protestant churches, states that “we are compelled by Christian truth to acknowledge each Person to be by himself God and Lord,” and yet it also says that “we are forbidden by catholic religion to say that there are three gods or three lords.” This logically collapses into a claim of numerical identity — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit just is the same god, self, person, etc. But we are also told not to “conflate the Persons.”

    So the Athanasian Creed declares that, in order to be saved, one must believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are and are not numerically identical. This is a clear apparent contradiction. The same confusion appears in other trinitarian declarations of faith, such as those of the Eleventh Council of Toledo (675) and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Fortunately, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants are free to disagree with these trinitarian statements of faith, while remaining within the orthodoxy of their own tradition; but the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity appears to be contradictory.

    Is mysterianism an adequate solution to the logical problem of the Trinity, from a Scriptural perspective? No, it’s not; the term “mystery” (Gk: musterion) in Scripture refers to something which has been made known, quite the opposite of something which continues to be unintelligible or contradictory. [16] Furthermore, although there are certainly things about God which cannot be fully known, that which has been divinely revealed is supposed to be intelligible to humans (Deut. 29:29). Why would God require us to believe a doctrine that quite literally cannot be understood, in order to be saved? This is not compatible with the Scriptural depiction of God as a loving god who wants all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). Therefore, mysterianism also fails to be a Scripturally sound theory of the Trinity.

    Conclusion

There are several important takeaways from this survey of Trinity theories. First, the mainstream catholic narrative about trinitarianism is false. It’s not true that the Trinity has been universally believed by Christians, because there’s no such thing as ‘the’ Trinity. Rather than there being just one ‘doctrine of the Trinity,’ there are many interpretations of creedal trinitarian language, none of which have ever enjoyed universal support among Christians (although lay Christians tend to assume that their particular interpretation is ‘the’ Trinity). This is largely due to the fact that, when trinitarianism was first enforced as orthodoxy in AD 381, there was no widespread agreement on what it meant. The language of “one God in three persons” is merely a shibboleth of mainstream catholic tradition.

    Second, it is not true that ‘the’ Trinity is inherently contradictory, as some unitarians have claimed, because (again) there’s no such thing. There are many different interpretations of trinitarianism, and most are logically coherent, although some Trinity theories — e.g., relative identity theory and positive mysterianism — do assert or imply apparent contradictions. Nor is it true that the Trinity is polytheistic; in fact, monotheism is one of the axioms of ‘orthodox trinitarianism.’ Nonetheless, some Trinity theories — such as social trinitarianism — do also imply polytheism, so they’re inconsistently monotheistic (that is, they assert one god and three gods).

    Finally, and most importantly, none of the Trinity theories that have been put forth so far are consistent with logic and/or the testimony of Scripture, even when the axioms of trinitarianism are taken for granted. One-self Trinity theories go against the interpersonal relationship between the Father and the Son, while three-self Trinity theories contradict the clear Scriptural teaching that God is a uniquely great self. Meanwhile, relative identity theory and mysterianism contradict the simple logical concept of numerical identity. Although these theories might not exhaust all possible interpretations of trinitarianism, trinitarians must come up with an interpretation of “one God in three persons” which does not contradict Scripture or basic logic. Otherwise, unitarians will be seriously disinclined to believe it.

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[1] https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/bowman_robert/trinity/trinity.cfm

[2] This is different from Sabellian modalism, which postulates that the three Persons do not exist eternally, but that God exists sequentially, in time, as these different Persons. Perhaps He lived in Old Testament times as the Father, then ‘begat’ Himself as a human being to become the Son, and finally became the Holy Spirit to live within believers. This is different from one-self Trinity theories, which instead postulate that the three modes (Persons) are eternal and essential to God.

This non-trinitarian theology appears to be entirely ruled out by passages in which the Father and Son are seen to be interacting with one another simultaneously (see esp. Matt. 3:16-17). Nonetheless, it remains somewhat popular among lay Christians, usually those who are more biblically illiterate. Some more sophisticated modalists argue that Jesus, “the Son,” is actually the human mind which was united to the divine Person of “the Father.” Therefore, when Jesus was interacting with the Father, he was interacting with Himself, that is, interacting with the divine Person to which he was united.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Volume I: The Doctrine of the Word of God, transl. G. T. Thomson, H. Knight, G. W. Bromiley, and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956): 1.

[4] Karl Rahner, The Trinity, transl. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1997): 101-102.

[5] Alistair McGrath, Understanding the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: 1988): 131.

[6] Richard Swinburne, “The social theory of the Trinity,” Religious Studies 54 (2018): 419.

[7] Ibid., 425.

[8] Dale Tuggy, “Divine Deception and Monotheism,” Journal of Analytic Theology 2 (2014): 186-209.

[9] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003): 590.

[10] William Hasker, “The One Divine Nature,” TheoLogica 3, no. 2 (2019): 57, 59.

[11] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 594.

[12] Ibid., 590-593.

[13] Chad A. McIntosh, “The God of the groups,” Religious Studies 52, no. 2 (2016): 167-186.

[14] Ibid., 177-181.

[15] Michael C. Rea, “Relative Identity and the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Philosophia Christi 5, no. 2 (2005): 432.

[16] Mark 4:11; Rom. 11:25; 16:25; 1 Cor. 2:7, 10; 15:51; Eph. 1:9; 3:3; 6:19; Col. 1:26, 27; 4:3; 1 Tim. 3:16.

Summary: “The evolution of early Christian theology”

    Over the past two months, we’ve been examining the history of early Christian theology during the first four centuries AD, to see how theology evolved during this period and why trinitarianism eventually came to be viewed as the only ‘orthodox’ position. I thought it would be good to have a shorter summary of the history of early Christian theology, since these last eight posts have been pretty long — altogether, more than eighty pages of text! So in this post, I’ll summarize all of the main points from the past eight posts, but without including citations or excerpts from primary writings, to keep it relatively short.

    Summary

The traditional view of the history of early Christian theology goes something like this: ever since the early days of the Church, all Christians were agreed on the main points of trinitarian theology, that is, that there is one God and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co-equal and co-eternal Persons within the one God. But in the fourth century, a heretic named Arius came up with a new doctrine that said that the Son is created and less than the Father. Although he managed to gain a lot of followers, the bishops got together at the Council of Nicaea and unanimously condemned him, creating a creed that expressed the traditional faith of trinitarianism, only using a few new words like “essence” to counter the Arian heresy. After Nicaea, all the orthodox Christians got along in agreement on the doctrine of the Trinity.

    However, the actual history of early Christian theology is much more complex than this simplified caricature. The earliest Christians, rather than believing in trinitarianism, believed that God was the Father of Jesus alone, and that Jesus was subordinate to the Father. This is exemplified in the writings of Clement and Polycarp, who were bishops in the late first century and early second century; they never referred to Jesus as “God,” only the Father. Christians were divided on the issue of Jesus’ pre-existence; some writers, such as the author of the Odes of Solomon, believed that he pre-existed his birth only as an impersonal plan in God’s mind, whereas others, such as the author of the Apocalypse of Isaiah, believed that he was a high-ranking heavenly being who was born.

    At this time, in the late first and early second centuries, there was little discussion on the Holy Spirit. It’s unclear whether most Christian writers considered it/him to be a person, and those who did — like the authors of Shepherd of Hermas and Apocalypse of Isaiah — considered him to be an angel, not equal to God in any way. There was no clear doctrine of the Son or the Holy Spirit that was accepted by orthodox Christians at this point, merely a general agreement that they were subordinate to God, who is the Father.

    In the second century, there was a new development in Christology. As a result of Hellenistic influence, Christians began to see Jesus as a being who was created at the beginning of time, through whom God created the world. In the Platonic worldview, God is too transcendent to deal directly with creation, so He creates a Demiurge, the Logos, through whom He creates and interacts with the material universe. Because many Christian apologists in the later second century came from Hellenistic philosophical backgrounds, they began to see Jesus as the Logos-demiurge, a ‘second god’ subordinate to the God and Father.

    The first Christian writer who is known to have supported Logos theory was Justin Martyr, an apologist of the mid-second century. Justin argued in his book Dialogue with Trypho that God is so transcendent that He cannot interact with His creation, and so all of the appearances of “God” in the Old Testament must be the Logos-demiurge. This, in Justin’s view, was evidence for Christianity over against Judaism because it showed that there was a second god (Jesus) subordinate to the one God. However, he admitted that most average Christians in his day did not agree with him, and instead considered Jesus to be a human who did not pre-exist his birth.

    In the late second century, immediately after Justin, all of the ‘proto-orthodox’ catholic theologians were Logos theorists: Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage. These theologians began to use the terms “trinity” and “essence” to describe the relationships between God, His Son, and His Spirit, but they used them in a very different way. Whereas, for trinitarians, the Trinity is God, for these theologians, God is a member of the ‘trinity;’ and the Father alone possesses all of the divine essence, but He derives the Son and Spirit out of His own essence. For them, the Son/Logos is a created being subordinate to the one God, the Father.

    After this period, a new Christology began to emerge, known as one-stage Logos theory or subordinationism. In this view, the Son/Logos exists eternally alongside God, who is the Father, but the Son is still a second god or demiurge subordinate to Him. The first theologian who may have held this view was Irenaeus of Lyons, at the turn of the third century; but he was not very clear on his view of the Logos, though he definitely believed that the one God was the Father.

    The first person to clearly hold to subordinationism was Origen of Alexandria, the first systematic theologian who lived in the mid-third century. Origen believed that the Son is eternally begotten by the Father, and is a second god subordinate to God, the Father, who is only divine by participation within the Father. Origen was likely the most influential Christian theologian during his own lifetime and the decades after his death, so his doctrine of subordinationism was subsequently accepted by many Christians. His contemporaries in the West, Hippolytus of Rome and Novatian of Rome, also held to subordinationism and believed that the one God was the Father alone, although it’s not clear whether they thought the Son was created or eternally begotten.

    After the mid-third century, several new sects began to develop. Although subordinationism continued to be the majority position, modalism (the view that the Father and the Son are the same person, God) and bi/trinitarianism (the view that the Father and the Son are separate persons but co-equal) began to rise in influence. The first bi/trinitarian was Gregory Thaumaturgus, a disciple of Origen who lived in the late third century, who still referred to the Father as the one God, but argued that God gave an equal power to the Logos.

    By the early fourth century, these three sects were in tension with one another. The subordinationist unitarians were the oldest, largest, and most influential sect, including politically influential theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Lactantius. The modalists were a smaller but still influential sect, including Marcellus of Ancyra and Eustathius of Antioch. The bi/trinitarians were newer and smaller still; in fact, the only certainly bi/trinitarian theologians of the early fourth century were the bishops of Alexandria, Alexander and Athanasius.

    In the year 318, Alexander of Alexandria began to make public statements about the Son having no beginning and denouncing all the subordinationist theologians of the East. One of his presbyters, Arius, took umbrage at this, believing that if the Son had no beginning, then he could not have been begotten. (It doesn’t seem that Arius thought that the Son was created in time, but was referring to the Father as the metaphysical “beginning” or cause of the Son.) In response, Alexander examined Arius’ theology and found it to be ‘heretical,’ excommunicating him from the church of Alexandria and sending word to the surrounding churches to refuse communion with Arius.

    In desperation, Arius sent a letter to his influential subordinationist friend Eusebius of Nicomedia asking him for help. Eusebius began to write to other churches, telling them Arius’ side of the story and asking them to admit him. However, Alexander also sent an encyclical letter to all the churches of the East, accusing Arius of saying that there was a time when the Son did not exist. Arius and his fellow radical subordinationists tried to make peace with Alexander, but he ignored their attempts at reconciliation and continued to spread accusations against Arius.

    Meanwhile, in the year 324, the Roman emperor Constantine defeated all other claimants to the throne and united the Empire. After politically unifying the Empire, he wished to religiously unify the Empire, and sent letters to Alexander and Arius ordering them to make peace with one another over their “small and insignificant questions.” But when they refused, Constantine summoned a council of sixty bishops to Antioch in 325, which condemned Arius and also excommunicated three of his subordinationist supporters, including the widely influential Eusebius of Caesarea.

    Constantine also summoned a more general council of several hundred bishops to the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor. This council virtually unanimously condemned Arius, for several theological and political reasons, including the anti-‘Arian’ propaganda of Alexander of Alexandria and the fact that Eusebius of Caesarea (the leader of the classical subordinationists) was in a precarious position after the council at Antioch. However, the creed produced by the council did not advocate trinitarianism specifically. On the contrary, it included language that would be acceptable to all three sects — subordinationists, modalists, and bi/trinitarians — to avoid further division and conflict, and make the decision more unanimous against Arius.

    However, the fragile peace established by Nicaea would not last long. The classical subordinationists, who were the majority party in the East, saw the Nicene Creed as too accommodating to the modalists and trinitarians. Even Constantine reversed his policies soon after the council, and allowed Arius to return in 327, and to be reinstated as presbyter in 335 (although Arius suddenly died the night before he was to be reinstated). That same year, in 335/6, two councils of Eastern bishops condemned and excommunicated Athanasius of Alexandria (the leader of the trinitarians) and Marcellus of Ancyra (the leader of the modalists). This broke the peace that had been established by the Council of Nicaea.

    The first order of business for the subordinationist bishops of the East was to draft an alternative to the Nicene Creed that was more conducive to their beliefs. They did this in 341 at a council in Antioch, where they created a new creed called the Dedication Creed; this creed avoided the term homoousios (“one in essence”) and refused to call the Son “true God,” though it also condemned Arius’ views. In response, the Western bishops — who were also mostly subordinationists, but more friendly to trinitarians and modalists — drew up their own document at the Council of Serdica in 343, which condemned the Dedication Creed and re-affirmed the Nicene Creed, though it was likewise explicitly subordinationist, saying that “no one denies that the Father is greater than the Son... the very name of the Father is greater than that of the Son.”

    This conflict between the Western and Eastern church continued for four decades, never quite reaching a consensus between the two. Although there were a few times when peace seemed to have been reached, like at the Council of Constantinople in 360, this was quickly shattered. As a result of the evangelism of pro-Nicene trinitarians like Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, trinitarianism began to grow in popularity in both the East and the West during the 360s and 70s. Nevertheless, this consensus was growing only slowly, and there was still a lot of tension between East and West during this period.

    The conflict was quickly and forcefully brought to an end by the pro-Nicene emperor Theodosius I, who ascended to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire in the year 379. On February 27, 380, he passed an imperial edict declaring that only those who 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” were true “Catholic Christians,” and all others were “Heretics” who were considered criminals by the state.

    To formalize this decree, Theodosius summoned a council of about 150 pro-Nicene bishops to the city of Constantinople (no anti-Nicenes or non-trinitarians were allowed to attend). They settled on a specific trinitarian interpretation of the Nicene Creed, and came up with a slightly modified creed now known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which was more conducive to trinitarianism. Now having the authority of both imperial law and ecumenical council behind him, Theodosius declared that all churches must be presided over by trinitarian bishops, and forbade the “heretics” from meeting publicly in any town. Trinitarian Christianity was now the official religion of the Roman Empire.

    Conclusion

The history of early Christian theology is much more complicated than most Christians today believe. Trinitarianism was not always believed by Christians; on the contrary, most of the earliest Christians saw God as the Father alone, until the fourth century. The earliest Christians viewed Jesus as the foremost (mere) human, the Messiah of God, who is subordinate to God. As time went on, more Christians began to see Jesus as the Logos-demiurge of Hellenistic Platonism, who was created in the beginning as subordinate to the one God, the Father. However, trinitarianism did not become a major theological sect until the fourth century, and only became the official ‘orthodox’ view by the decree of the Roman emperor Theodosius I.

    Seeing as trinitarianism was not the view of the earliest Christians, and it only became official ‘orthodoxy’ after Theodosius I forced the Church to adopt it as such, it’s inadvisable to unquestioningly take it as the truth. Instead, we should turn back to the New Testament to see what the earliest, inspired Christians actually believed about God and Jesus.

The evolution of early Christian theology: Triumph of trinitarianism (part 8 of 8)

Part 7: https://universalistheretic.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-evolution-of-early-christian_01643517408.html

    In the last post, we looked at the disputes between the Western and Eastern Church which arose after the Council of Nicaea, and the creeds which were produced as a result of this conflict. These creeds show that trinitarianism was by no means the majority opinion, even decades after the Council of Nicaea (which was never intended to advocate trinitarianism anyway). By the year 361, this conflict still showed no signs of being resolved, and subordinationism was still the majority position in both the East and the West. How, then, was this conflict resolved in favor of trinitarianism only twenty years later? That is the question that we will try to answer in this final post on the history of early Christian theology.

    The Cappadocian theologians

During the 360s and 370s, several new and influential trinitarian theologians began to crop up in the West and the East, in the tradition of Athanasius of Alexandria. In the West, one such theologian was Ambrose the bishop of Milan, who argued that the Son was equal to the Father (De fide 4.78-96) and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together comprised one God (De fide 1.6-10). In the East, one such theologian was Epiphanius the bishop of Salamis, who argued the same (Panarion 51.21.30; 62.3.8; 76.18.7-9, 54.4-6). However, arguably the most influential trinitarians in the East during this period were the three ‘Cappadocian Fathers’: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus.

    The Cappadocian theologians were strong advocates of trinitarianism who argued at length for the equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and their single Godhood. The first, Basil of Caesarea, was particularly influential. Basil was initially a Homoiousian, and attended the 360 Council of Constantinople in the entourage of leading ‘semi-Arian’ Basil of Ancyra. [1] However, he became a pro-Nicene trinitarian by the influence of his mentor Dianius, the bishop of Caesarea, who died in 362. [2] Finally, in 370/1, he became bishop of Caesarea, and spent the rest of his life fighting for the reconciliation of East and West and the acceptance of trinitarianism.

    Basil of Caesarea was a firm believer in the equality of the Son with the Father, unlike the subordinationists who (at the time) were the majority party in the East. This can be seen in the second chapter of his book On Faith (De fide), which articulates the relationship between the Father and the Son:

The Father is the principle of all, the cause of being for whatever exists, the root of the living. From him proceeded the source of life; the Wisdom, the Power, and the indistinguishable Image of the invisible God; the Son who was begotten from the Father; the living Logos; He who is both God and with God; He who exists essentially; He who exists before the ages, not a late addition; He who is Son, not something possessed; He who is Maker, not something made; He who is Creator, not a creature; who is everything that the Father is...

Therefore, the very designation “Son” teaches us that He shares in the nature [of the Father], not created by a command but having shone forth from the Father’s substance and been conjoined to Him instantaneously beyond all time, His equal in goodness, His equal in power, sharing in His glory. And indeed what is He but the seal and image that reveals within Himself the whole Father?

Basil also argued that the Holy Spirit is equal to the Father and the Son in his book On the Holy Spirit (10.24; 17.41-43). With regard to the relationship between the three Persons, Basil says that they comprise one ousia and three hypostases, and that the relationship of ousia to hypostasis is like the relationship of “living being” to a “particular human” (Ep. 236.6). In other words, the three share the essential characteristic of being God, but are three separate existences.

    Basil also argued at length that his belief that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are separate and co-equal was not polytheism. Consider the following passages from his On the Holy Spirit and Against Sabellius:

For we do not count by way of addition, gradually making increase from unity to multitude, and saying one, two, and three; nor first, second, and third. For “I, God, am the first, and I am the last.” [Isaiah 44:6] And we have never, even at the present time, heard of a second God... We do not fritter away the theology in a divided plurality, because one Form, so to say, united in the invariableness of the Godhood, is beheld in God the Father, and in God the Only-begotten.

For the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son; since such as is the latter, such is the former, and such as is the former, such is the latter; and here is the Unity. So that according to the distinction of Persons, both are one and one, and according to the community of the Nature, one. How, then, if one and one, are there not two Gods? Because we speak of a king, and of the king’s image, and not of two kings. The majesty is not cloven in two, nor the glory divided. (On the Holy Spirit 18.45)

For even if they are two in number, they are not disjoined in nature. Nor does anyone who says “two” introduce estrangement [between them]. There is one God because there is one Father. But the Son is also God, and there are not two Gods because the Son has identity with the Father. For I do not behold one Godhood in the Father and another in the Son; nor is one nature this and the other that. So then, in order to make clear for you the distinctness of the Persons, count the Father by Himself and the Son by Himself, but in order to avoid secession into polytheism, confess one essence in both. In this way both Sabellius [modalism] falls and the Anhomoian shatters. (Against Sabellius 3)

In Basil’s view, like that of the subordinationists and earlier Logos theorists, the Father is most properly called “God.” However, the Son is also essentially God by virtue of being the Son and Image of the Father. Thus, there is only one God (the Father) but the Son and the Holy Spirit are also God because they share the entire essence of His Godhood. In this way, Basil believes that he has preserved monotheism while also affirming the separateness and co-equality of the three Persons — although it’s questionable whether this actually removes the charge of polytheism.

    The second Cappadocian theologian was Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of Basil of Caesarea. Gregory was mentored and taught by his older brother Basil, and was ordained bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia by him in the year 372. He was convicted of maladministration by a council of Homoian ‘Arians’ in 375, deposed by a synod at Nyssa in 376, and exiled by the anti-Nicene Eastern emperor Valens; however, he was allowed to return to his episcopate upon the death of Valens in 378. [3] Gregory was a prolific writer and wrote many treatises on the Trinity (over against subordinationism), most notably his book Against Eunomius.

    Gregory of Nyssa’s theology is identical to that of Basil. He states that the Son and Holy Spirit are not lesser than the Father, and says, “we know of no differences by way of superiority or inferiority of attributes in the Divine nature” (On the Holy Trinity). In On the Holy Spirit and On the Faith, he argues that the Holy Spirit is fully divine and in no way inferior to the Father and the Son. With regard to the relationships between the Persons, he says that the one ousia is like the general descriptor “human” and the three hypostases are analogous to specific humans, such as “Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy” (Ep. 38.1-3). [4] In other words, like his brother Basil, Gregory believed that the three share the essence of being God, but are three separate existences.

    This reasonably opens Gregory’s theology up to the charge of tritheism. After all, if the one ousia is like the characteristic of being human, and the three hypostases are like three human persons, but three human persons are considered to be three humans, then doesn’t this mean that the three Persons are three Gods? Gregory responds to this accusation in his short treatise On “Not Three Gods.” In this writing, he argues that multiple human persons (for example, Luke and Stephen) should actually be considered one human, because of the shared ousia of humanity! It is merely an “abuse of language,” he says, to refer to more than one person as more than one ‘human.’ Therefore, the three Persons are properly considered one God. This is a very strange argument, and as with Basil, it is questionable whether it actually removes the charge of polytheism from Gregory of Nyssa’s theology.

    The third Cappadocian theologian was Gregory of Nazianzus, who was a close friend of Basil of Caesarea. Gregory was ordained as bishop of Sasima by Basil in 372, but disliked his episcopate and fled to a mountain retreat. He returned to Nazianzus in 373 to help his ailing father, where he took over the episcopal duties; but when the people tried to declare him bishop in 374, he fled again to a monastery where he remained until 378. [5] He returned again in 379 when he heard that Basil was dying, and read the eulogy at his funeral. That same year, a council at Antioch asked him to go to Constantinople to convert the people to trinitarianism, to which he reluctantly agreed. Finally, he was declared archbishop of Constantinople (i.e., de facto religious leader of the East) by the pro-Nicene emperor Theodosius I in 380.

    Gregory of Nazianzen’s theology was somewhat different than that of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. He agreed that all members of the Trinity were co-eternal and co-equal — “in the Trinity there is nothing created, nor in servitude, nor accidental... for in the one-in-essence Persons there is nothing greater or less with regard to essence” (Oration 40.42). However, rather than trying to articulate the relationships between the Persons, he instead argued that the Divine essence is unknowable, and so it is futile to try to know how He, paradoxically, comprises three hypostases (Orations 28.6ff; 29.3; 38.7-8; 40.41). When describing God as the Trinity, he says the following:

One Godhood and Power, found in the Three in unity, and comprising the Three separately, not unequal in essences or natures, neither increased nor diminished by superiorities or inferiorities; in every respect equal, in every respect the same; just as the beauty and greatness of the heavens is one; the infinite conjunction of Three infinite Ones, each God when considered by Himself; just as the Father, so also the Son, and just as the Son so also the Holy Spirit; the Three, One God when considered together; each God because one-in-essence; One God because of the Monarchy.

No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illuminated by the splendor of the Three; no sooner to I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three, I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are filled, and most of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the Rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see only one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light. (Oration 40.41)

As you can clearly see from this passage, Gregory of Nazianzus does not even make an attempt to explicate a logically coherent doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, he simply accepts it as a beautiful, paradoxical, incomprehensible ‘mystery.’

    In summary, the three Cappadocian theologians all had a clearly trinitarian theology, and their influence was integral to the acceptance of trinitarianism in the East. Basil of Caesarea had a theology very similar to modern-day ‘social trinitarianism,’ that is, the belief that the three Persons of the Trinity are three different divine selves who comprise one God by virtue of their shared essential characteristic of being God. Gregory of Nyssa had the same theology, using the analogy of three human persons with a shared ‘human nature’ to describe the three Persons. When defending against the charge of polytheism, he argued, strangely, that multiple human persons should actually be considered one human. The third Cappadocian, Gregory of Nazianzus, does not even try to articulate a doctrine of the Trinity, but accepts it as paradoxical and incomprehensible.

    Further attempts at reconciliation (362 - 379)

Now that we have examined the theology of the ‘Cappadocian Fathers,’ we can return to looking at the history of the post-Nicene conflict between East and West. As we saw in the last post, there was a sincere attempt at reconciliation from 357 to 360, culminating in the 360 Council of Constantinople when the subordinationist Creed of Nike-Thrace was accepted as an ecumenical creed. However, this attempt at peace suffered a severe setback upon the death of the anti-Nicene emperor Constantius II, when violent conflict erupted in the streets of Alexandria (where the ‘Arian controversy’ first began).

    Following his third exile, Athanasius was re-established as bishop of Alexandria by a council in 362, only a few months after the ‘Arian’ bishop George was put to death by a mob of Athanasius’ supporters. Athanasius was exiled again by the pagan emperor Julian in October of the same year, but was allowed to return by Julian’s successor Jovian in 363. Jovian, who was firmly pro-Nicene, called another council of 20 bishops to Antioch where the Nicene Creed was re-affirmed. However, Jovian died in February 364 and was succeeded by Valens, an anti-Nicene.

    The doctrinal conflict between East and West continued after the accession of Valens. In 365, a council was convened at Lampsacus, composed of Eastern supporters of the late Basil of Ancyra. This council denounced the creed of the 360 Council of Constantinople and instead supported the Dedication Creed of Antioch (see previous post), advocating the use of the word homoiousios (“like in essence”). Another council in Antioch in 367 also supported the Dedication Creed, denouncing the Nicene Creed. In the West, the pro-Nicene party continued to be the majority, as evidenced by the 369 Council of Rome and the 370 Council of Alexandria which both advocated the Nicene Creed over against the Dedication Creed.

    In the early 370s, several failed attempts at reconciliation were made by the Cappadocian theologian Basil of Caesarea. He sent several letters to Athanasius of Alexandria, [6] but despite their agreement on trinitarian theology, his letters were ignored. Basil then sent two letters (Epp. 90; 92) to the bishops of the West, but the bishop of Rome, Damasus, refused to accept them and sent back a letter requiring Basil to sign a statement of faith. Feeling somewhat insulted, Basil refused to sign the statement, but he continued expressing his desire for peace (Ep. 156).

    Despite Damasus’ rejection, in 374, spurred on by Valens’ persecution of pro-Nicenes like himself, Basil sent another letter to the Western bishops asking them to petition the Western emperor Valentinian I for help (Ep. 243). Unfortunately, this too was ignored by Damasus, who again sent back a letter (titled Ea gratia) with a trinitarian statement of faith for Basil to sign. [7] Finally, in 377, Basil sent a defiant letter asking the Western bishops to write to all those in the East with whom they disagreed, in a final attempt at reconciliation (Ep. 263). Unfortunately, any response to this letter — if there was one — has not survived.

    In spite of the failure of Basil’s attempts at reconciliation, a consensus was slowly beginning to grow between the West and the East in favor of the Nicene Creed and trinitarianism. This was largely as a result of the evangelism of the Cappadocian theologians. In 376, a council at Iconium in Asia Minor concluded in favor of the Nicene Creed and condemned those who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. Another council at Antioch in 379, which was attended by about 150 participants including Gregory of Nyssa, drafted a (lost) pro-Nicene creed that included anti-‘Arian’ statements. However, there still remained a large (perhaps majority) Homoiousian party in the East, as evidenced by the 378 Council of Carian Antioch which condemned homoousios in favor of homoiousios.

    The conclusion of the conflict (380/1)

By the end of the 370s, the conflict between the Western and Eastern Church was beginning to decrease, but only gradually. However, political factors would soon forcefully bring this controversy to an end. On August 9, 378, the anti-Nicene Eastern emperor Valens was killed in battle, which diminished the political power of the Homoiousians and made it possible for exiled pro-Nicenes, like Gregory of Nyssa, to return to their episcopates. This was compounded by the fact that the pro-Nicene trinitarian Theodosius I became emperor of the East in early 379 (after a short interregnum).

    Unlike earlier emperors, who were mostly only indirectly involved in the religious controversies of the fourth century, Theodosius I was willing to forcibly promote his favored doctrine of pro-Nicene trinitarianism. On February 27, 380, Theodosius — along with the emperor of the West, Gratian, and his coregent Valentinian II — issued the following edict, known as the Edict of Thessalonica:

Emperors Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius Augustuses. Edict to the people of Constantinople.

It is our desire that all the various nations which are subject to our mercy and moderation, should continue to profess that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition, and which is now professed by the Pope Damasus and by Peter, bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness.

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.

This edict established trinitarian Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Orthodoxy was to be defined by the doctrine of Pope Damasus and Peter of Alexandria (the successor to Athanasius) — that is, the single Deity and co-equality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those who agreed with this doctrine were to be called “Catholic Christians,” while all others were officially branded “Heretics” and considered criminals by the state.

    Although this was technically not yet imperial law, since there was no way to enforce it within the churches, the writing was on the wall. In November of 380, Theodosius entered Constantinople and deposed the ‘Arian’ bishop Demophilus, who chose to be exiled rather than affirm the Nicene Creed. In his place, Theophilus established the Catholic Gregory of Nazianzus as archbishop of Constantinople, making him the de facto religious leader of the East. Soon afterward, on January 10, 381, he passed another edict known as Nullis haereticis which forbade the "heretics" (that is, any non-trinitarian) from meeting publicly within any town. [8]

    Having declared that all non-trinitarians were non-Christians, forbidden from meeting in any town, Theodosius called an ecumenical council to Constantinople to formalize this decree within the Church. The council was attended by about 150 pro-Nicenes. Thirty-six ‘semi-Arians’ tried to attend, but were denied admission when they refused to affirm the Nicene Creed and the homoousios — which just shows how the conclusion of the council was already decided at the outset. [9] In the end, the Nicene Creed was officially re-affirmed, and a slightly modified creed was drafted:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

And [we believe] in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one-in-essence with the Father; through Him all things were made;

for us humans, and for our salvation, He came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and became fully human; for our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered death and was buried. He rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures; He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father; He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.

And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who in unity with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets; and [we believe] in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

This creed, known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, merely affirmed what had already been decreed by Theodosius, that is, that trinitarianism was the only ‘orthodox’ theology. Initially, this creed wasn’t considered very important — in fact, it was only first mentioned 70 years later at the Council of Chalcedon, which led some scholars to doubt its authenticity, although most accept it as authentic [10] — but what was most important was that one specific interpretation of the Nicene Creed, that of trinitarianism, was now the only officially ‘orthodox’ view.

    Immediately after the Council of Constantinople ended, in July 381, Theodosius issued another official edict (known as Episcopis tradi) which declared that all churches must be headed by trinitarian bishops. This edict began by saying, “We now order that all churches be handed over to the bishops who profess Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of a singular Majesty, of the same Glory, and of one Splendor; who establish no difference by sacrilegious separation, but the order of the Trinity by recognizing the Persons and uniting the Godhood.” Thus, trinitarian Christianity was definitively established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, by the authority of ecumenical council and imperial law.

    Conclusion

As a result of the intervention of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, the conflict which began over sixty years prior was concluded in favor of trinitarian theology; but at what cost? If the same thing happened today, it would be considered an outrage that the government was involved in what should have been a purely religious theological debate. Trinitarianism was not even the original teaching of the church, rather, it was the newest theology, barely a century old at that time! Had Theodosius not become involved, it’s hard to say what the outcome of the ‘Arian controversy’ would have been. Due to the influence of the Cappadocians, trinitarianism would likely still have won, but not as forcefully.

    In light of the fact that ‘orthodox trinitarian doctrine’ is largely ‘orthodox’ only because of political influence, and it wasn’t advocated by any known Christian writer until the third or fourth century, should we really accept it unquestioningly? Or should we return to the actual texts of the New Testament to see what the earliest Christians really believed about the nature of God and Jesus? If you are a Protestant, the answer should be obvious; if you are Catholic or Orthodox, the question is still a legitimate one. Since trinitarianism simply did not exist until the late third century, it cannot have been revealed by God in the first century, nor taught by Jesus and his disciples.

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[1] Anthony Meredith, The Cappadocians (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1995), 22.

[2] R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988), 680.

[3] R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 715-716.

[4] With regard to Basil’s Epistle 38 being attributed to Gregory of Nyssa, see J. Zachhuber, “Again: The 38th Letter of Basil of Caesarea as the work of Gregory of Nyssa,” ZAC 7, no. 1 (2003), 73-90; Giulio Maspero et al., “Who Wrote Basil’s Epistula 38? A Possible Answer through Quantitative Analysis,” in Gregory of Nyssa: Contra Eunomium III, eds. Johan Leemans and Matthieu Cassin (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 579-594.

[5] R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 702-703.

[6] Epp. 61; 66; 67; 69; 80; 82.

[7] R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 758.

[8] See a translation of Nullis haereticis here.

[9] Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 5.8.5-10; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.7.2-5.

[10] R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 812-815.