The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Thinking Trinity

I just wanted to bring to the members of this forum a new series of blog articles I am writing on the Trinity, with specific focus on the Nicene homoousion. The series begins with this article: “The Radical Homoousion.”

This morning I published the fourth article in the series: “The Jigsaw Puzzle of the Homoousion”:

Once a believer has fully grasped the decisive significance of homoousion, there can be no returning to a more “biblical” or more “historical” Jesus; for the only Jesus that was and is is the incarnate Son eternally begotten from the substance of the Father. The homoousion represents the secret of our Lord’s personhood, a secret both intimated and implied in the New Testament, yet perhaps not so unambiguously asserted as to eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding. In the theological reflections of the first four centuries, we see theologians wrestling with the mystery of Christ and proposing various construals of his relationship with God, proposals that may have initially appeared plausible yet which were eventually deemed inadequate to the apostolic revelation as apprehended in Scripture and Holy Eucharist. The secret kept eluding the conceptual apprehension of the Church.

I do not mean to suggest that in these early centuries Christians did not know Jesus as fully divine. We know many truths that we cannot express in words. Long before the clarity bestowed by the homoousion, Christians worshipped Jesus as the Son of God and offered to him the worship, adoration, and prayer reserved for the One God. This is a knowing of Christ that only the Holy Spirit can give. As the Apostle taught, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3).

T. F. Torrance has likened the early developments in trinitarian doctrine to putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Initially the pieces are spread upon a table, and we cannot see how they fit together. We try numerous combinations, but more often than not they do not quite fit. We may even try to force pieces together but always unsuccessfully (unless, of course, we cheat and resort to the scissors method). But after hours and hours of work, more and more pieces come together and eventually we begin to see the pattern; and once the last piece is put in place, we know the picture. From that point on we can never pretend that we have not grasped how all the units are properly joined nor what image they intend. We know the secret.

In this way the Nicene homoousion entered into the consciousness of the Church and became dogma. Not only does the homoousion now function as the fundamental grammatical rule for homiletical and theological discourse, but it also functions as hermeneutical rule for our exegesis of the Scriptures. Without apology, we read the Old and New Testaments within our knowledge of the identity in being between Christ Jesus and God the Father. The homoousion is the key that opens the Bible and brings all the disparate and confusing elements into a unified story. As Christians have insisted since Pascha, every page, every verse, witnesses to the crucified and risen Son. After Nicaea this deep reading of the Bible becomes even more intensified and powerful: the story of Jesus is nothing less than the story of the eternal God himself. This is the secret of the homoousion.

Not everyone on here is a believer in the Trinity, but for me personally it is spiritual food and drink. Thanks for this long and thoughtful understanding of how the doctrine was developed. I see it as a revelation of the Spirit given to the human spirit, though it is able to be explained logically it is is still not fully comprehensible to the human mind. This is not a detractor to me, but actually a strength, because if I could fit God nicely into a simple definition, fully understanding everything about Him, then I’m very sure He would not be the true God (if you can fully understand someone you can control them and fit them into your life however you want to). My question is how the Holy Spirit fits into the whole homoousian conception of God (with Scripture backing it up)? I can see Jesus Christ and God the Father plainly joined, but what did the ekklesia of Nicea say concerning the Holy Spirit? Thanks.

The 325 Council of Nicaea (the First Ecumenical Council) did not address the question of the divinity of the Spirit; but the 381 Council of Constantinople (the Second Ecumenical Council) most certainly did. While it did not explicitly employ homoousial language to speak of the Spirit, it made it clear that the Spirit is divine and not a creature:

St Gregory of Nazianzus explicitly declared the Spirit to be homoousios with the Father in his Fifth Theological Oration. After 381 catholic Christianity adopted his forthrightness.

I have wondered why, under the intense scrutiny of the Jews at the time, that not a whiff of trinitarian thought was expressed? Certainly had it been, a cry of heresy would have gone up immediately, and we would have a record of it, somewhere?

I’m not attacking the doctrine: I surely do believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Not in the sense that ‘trinitarians’ do, at least not yet; but the silence of the Jews at that time is deafening.

  1. If Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and N. T. Wright are correct in their understanding of the monotheism of Second Temple Judaism, Judaism may have been more receptive to the possibility of affirming the divinity of Jesus than we have previously imagined.

  2. The discourse of the New Testament reveals a pervasive trinitarian grammar, what Wright calls a proto-Trinitarianism. The NT writers may not have speculated much on the divine nature of Christ (that would have to wait for Christianity’s full-court encounter with Hellenistic philosophy), but they certainly had no problem regularly joining the Son and Spirit to God. The trinitarian naming in the baptismal mandate is decisive.

  3. We do not in fact know much at all about anti-Christian polemic during the first century. The literary evidence is extremely limited. Hence we do not really know a great deal about how first-century non-Christian Jews responded to the Christian affirmation of Jesus’ divinity. We probably should not conclude that the Book of Acts tells the entire story about the first-century Jewish response to the Christian “heresy.” It only tells a small sliver of the story–and that from a Christian POV.

Well Dave during the life of Jesus there were many times He was labelled as blasphemous. When He claimed to be one with the Father He was threatened with stoning. When He said that “before Abraham was, I am” He would have been killed by the Jewish people if He hadn’t escaped. Before the high priest when He was asked whether He was the Christ, the Son of God (Son of the Blessed in Mark’s gospel), after saying He was indeed and adding, “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven” Caiaphas tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy”. In claiming to be God’s Son He made Himself equal with God (John 6) not only this but He said He would visit the Jewish people with judgement upon the clouds (a thing that only the Lord God did in the OT). So there was indeed an outcry over Jesus’ claims. Even in Acts Paul says that the Way ( an early term for Christianity) was considered a “sect” (“heresy” in Greek).

That’s the point I was making - there were plenty of cries of heresy and blasphemy, but none directed at the 'Trinity". So while it is true that we are ignorant of much of the various disagreements, as you’ve pointed out - we sure know a lot about some of them.

And calling NT statements ‘proto-Trinitarian’ SEEMS to me to be reading a theory back into the text.
We’ve all read the same “stuff”, and have come to believe in compelling but different interpretations. I appreciate your efforts in elucidating what you choose to believe about the subject, which is a difficult one.

Peace!

“What if Jesus ain’t homoousios with the Father?”

What would happen to the gospel if the Nicene confession of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son were not true? Would there even be a gospel?

Consider the story of Jesus and the paralytic:

Anyone can say the words “Your sins are forgiven”; but do they actually communicate divine forgiveness? They are only words, human words—empty, impotent sounds. As soon as we speak them, they disappear into the wind. We can no more effect the transformation of sinners than we can raise the dead. But the words of Jesus are different. They accomplish what they announce; they effect what they signify. When the Son of Man pardons, he actualizes the pardon of God in human existence: the hearer is changed in his inner being and brought into new relationship with his Creator. As the story makes clear, the absolving word of Christ is more than a declaration of mercy. It is an act of divine grace that reaches “its full reality in the healing and creative work of God upon the whole man” (Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, p. 62).

Underlying Christ’s performative word of forgiveness is his ontological unity with his Father. Torrance elaborates:

I anticipate the kinds of objections that might be raised. Why does it have to be as Torrance describes? Why can’t Jesus simply be a prophet, like Elijah or Jeremiah? If he authoritatively speaks for God, if he does miracles in the name and power of God, isn’t that enough? Perhaps someone might even cite [. This is why the Pharisees were scandalized, as the passage from John attests. And this is why Jesus’ words and deeds were experienced then—and are experienced today—as saving words and deeds. Prophets may speak in the name of God; but they do not save. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” It would take the Church several centuries to work out the appropriate conceptuality by which to express the unique relationship of Jesus to the Lord and God of Israel.

We return to the opening question. If Jesus is not truly one with the Father in being and agency, then his life has no ultimate validity for our lives. If Jesus is not homoousios with the Father, the gospel is evacuated of all power, and there ain’t no gospel.

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No God Behind the Back of Jesus

What if the Nicene assertion of Christ’s Jesus’ consubstantial unity with the Father is not true? In the previous article I focused on the story of the paralytic and Christ’s word of forgiveness and argued that if Christ is not one in being and agency with God, then his word of forgiveness is only a human word, lacking ultimate validity and redemptive power. A prophet may speak in the name of God; but his word remains at infinite remove from the transcendent Creator whom he represents. A prophet may speak promise and judgment on behalf of YHWH; but he cannot command the seas and recreate the cosmos. The word of the prophet is not homoousios with the eternal Word.

One might expand upon this theme in various ways. If Christ is not consubstantial with the Father, then his death on Golgotha is not the death of God for the sins of the world. If Christ is not consubstantial with the Father, then his resurrection on Easter morning is not the rebirth and transfiguration of humanity. If Christ is not consubstantial with the Father, then we will not be judged at the Last Day by the Crucified who still bears upon his body the wounds of ransom and love.

Every important soteriological claim of the gospel depends on the consubstantiality of the Son and Spirit with the Father, for every important soteriological claim depends on the identity of God in his self-communication and self-giving. As T. F. Torrance liked to say, “There is no God behind the back of Jesus.”

This evangelical truth was firmly impressed upon Torrance during his service in World War II as a chaplain for the British army. After one engagement in Italy, TFT went in search for wounded:

The homoousion of the Council of Nicaea boldly declares the ontological identity of Jesus Christ with the Creator of the universe. During the fourth century Arians and Semi-Arians were content to affirm the likeness of Christ to the Father. They might disagree about the points of likeness; but they all agreed that there could not be an identity of being. In their eyes, such an assertion would compromise the simplicity and holy transcendence of the Deity. The Son is a creature, created by the unbegotten God from out of nothing. No matter how exalted a creature he may be, the distance between the Son and his Maker is infinite. The one thing that the Arian Christ cannot communicate to humanity is God.

George D. Dragas identifies the fundamental difference between Arius and St Athanasius on this point—the potential of the world to bear the uncreated Deity:

Thus the Holy Trinity is to be understood as “transcendentally immanent or immanently transcendent” in his relation to the world (p. 30). As Dragas notes, Athanasius is not engaging in philosophical speculation, for he has learned of God through his ineffable nearness in the Incarnation: in Christ the Creator has stepped out of his anonymity and made himself known “in the most concrete, tangible and unexpected way, in and through the particular human historical existence of the man Jesus” (p. 22). The incarnate Son, the Nicene Creed confesses, is homoousios with the Father. In the words of the Apostle Paul: “For in Christ Jesus the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). And the Apostle John: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. … No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:14, 18). Yet even in his self-revelation and enfleshment, God remains incomprehensible mystery. At no point does the divine essence become an object of human perception and intellectual conceptualization. Here is no static apophaticism and kataphaticism. “We do not have God’s being per se, as an object” explains Dragas, “but God’s being in his act, an act which is apophatic with respect to its ontological origin but kataphatic with respect to its power and effectiveness” (p. 46).

The Arians, on the other hand, rejected the homoousion because of a monistic construal of divinity that would not allow them to entertain the possibility of the Creator’s personal inhabitation of his creation: “They could not, in other words, see God as parousia which can enter the context of our humanity. They only saw him as hyperousia and drew a sharp division between God’s transcendence and God’s immanence in the world” (p. 42).

“There is no God behind the back of Jesus.” In the Word made flesh God truly reveals himself and is identical with his self-revelation. St Basil the Great beautifully expresses the evangelical significance of the homoousion: “All things that are in the Father are beheld in the Son, and all things that are the Son’s are the Father’s; because the whole Son is in the Father and has all that the Father has in himself. Thus the Person of the Son becomes as it were the Form and Face of the knowledge of the Father, and the Person of the Father is known in the Form of the Son” (Ep. 38.8).

The young soldier to whom Torrance ministered on the battlefield wondered if God is like Jesus Christ. This is a question with which many Christians have wrestled in their lives, a question that cuts to the very heart of human existence. The homoousion of Nicaea gives the answer:

If the όμοούσιοϛ τω Πάτρι is not true, then the gospel lacks the grounding in the transcendent life of God that it needs to be gospel. To know God in Jesus Christ is to know God as he truly is—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And to know the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to know and enjoy eternal life. There is no other God, no other salvation, no other gospel.