Frank

Hello, again, my friends. I have been busy and have just now gotten back to this discussion. Sorry to find that gengwall had to suffer through the swine, but I am glad that he has apparently recovered. And I pray no one else will get it; it is a nasty bug!

Now one of the things that has kept me busy is that, encouraged by Mark’s comments, I have done some review and further inquiry into the Doctrine of the Trinity. And so I may write a third article on this subject. However, though I do not wish to beat a dead horse to death, I will make a final, but brief response to Mark’s critique of my last comments ,#154.

1. Though we could go back and forth on the various, fine details of how Athanasius, Gregory the Theologian, Augustine, and Calvin argued that the One True God is eternally both One Being and Three Persons, and Three Persons and One Being, as one who has read their documents in some detail, I would say that all agree to the following statement regarding both God’s Unity and Diversity: “The Son is everything the Father is as God, except he is not the Father; the Father is everything the Son is as God, except he is not the Son; the Holy Spirit is everything the Father and Son are as God, except he is neither the Father nor the Son.” This statement, as it has been understood among orthodox Christians guards against modalism, tritheism, and subordinationism, yet does not confound the persons nor deny their distinctiveness. As Thomas F. Torrance says, “Each divine retains his unique characteristics as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit in a union without confusion, for the individual characteristics of each of the three Persons do not separate them, but constitute their deep mutual belonging together. There is no Son apart from the Father and Holy Spirit; and there is no Father apart from the Son and the Holy Spirit; and there is no Holy Spirit apart from the Father and the Son. Homoousially and hypostatically they interpenetrate each other in such a way that each Person is distinctively who he is in relation to the other two” (“Three Persons, One Being,” THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD: ONE BEING, THREE PERSONS, p. 145). Now, I believe this is shortest and clearest definition of both the Unity and Diversity of the One Triune God, as taught both in Scripture and the Ecumenical Creeds. My first, question to you, Mark, is do you or do you not agree with it?

2. Secondly, it must be pointed out that in the battle with the Macedonians, who denied the full divinity and equality of the Spirit with the Father, much as the Arians had denied the Son’s full divinity and equality, it was Athanasius and Gregory, not Basil, who had stood firm against any concept of “degrees of Deity” within the Godhead. “It was Gregory Nanianzen, especially in his ‘Five Theological Orations’ and his Presidential Oration delivered at the the Council of Constantinople in 381, who, following his theological hero Athanasius, provided Christian theology with the most influential teaching about the Holy Trinity. Unlike Basil, he had no hesitation in applying the homoousian to the Holy Spirit, and would have nothing to do with his fellow Cappadocians’ description of the divine Persons as ‘modes of Being’ (tropoihupzeos). Moreover, he dissociated himself from the element of subordinationism or ‘degrees of Deity’ implied in the way they related the Son and the Spirit to the Father as the ‘Principle’ (arche) or ‘Cause’ (aitia) of their Deity. Through his alternative conception of the divine Persons as timeless, beginningless, uncaused relations subsisting ineffably in the Blessed and Adorable Trinity, he gave us the most powerful account of the inseparable oneness of the divine Persons, and indeed between the one ever living Being of God and the three coequal divine persons: (Oops! My time is up and I must run an errand. I will complete this later.)