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We are here discussing the first of our implications from the paper
‘First Things First.’
If you begin your doctrine of God with ‘uncreated Creator’ before
discussing the Trinity:
1) You
will never get to a Nicene trinity – you must deny ‘God from God’ – a
begotten deity. (This was the
danger Calvin courted (and those who have followed him.))
The theologian who
begins with ‘uncreated Creator’ has made a decision that will have
massive ramifications for her doctrine of the Trinity down the line.
Imagine a theology
that ran along these lines: ‘We know that there is such a thing as
Trinity, but let’s consider that to be a ‘black-box’ into which we will
look in due time. First though we
will uphold the uncreated Creator-ness of the whole black-box.’ Now, doubtless you could come up with
all sorts of things to say about such a God (Thomas Aquinas managed to
write 80% of his Summas about this uncreated Creator). But at some point, if you’re
Christian, you’re going to have to open up the box. And what will you find? You will find the one God who is
Begettor, Begotten and Proceeding.
Now if you have begun
with ‘uncreated Creator’ then you have concluded that ‘aseity’ (from the
latin a se, meaning ‘from Himself’) is a prime definition of
deity. Once the box is opened you
are faced with the question of how these Three can all be upheld
as fully divine. To deny
that Two of these Three are fully divine may seem tempting – especially
the One who is Begotten and the One who is Proceeding, after all they are
not a se ‘from themselves’ but are emphatically from the
Begettor! Yet to deny their deity
is to be Arian. Hopefully this
will not strike our theologian as a really viable option.
Another move might be
a kind of modalism where you say ‘The Begotten Son is divine not in His
own Begotten Person but in His participation in an underlying simple
divine essence which is definitionally uncreated.’ Then the Son is not divine as the
Son (as One who is Begotten), but only divine as viewed (somehow!)
without any personal relations to the Father. This is Calvin’s doctrine of the aseity of the Son. Calvin,
beginning in book 1, chapter 10 of the Institutes with a
definition of God as uncreated Creator, gets to chapter 13 to discuss the
trinity. He is forced to open the
box and consider the Son and feels obliged to grant to the Son the
fulness of the divine majesty.
Great, he’s not an Arian!
But this means, for Calvin, that the Son must be a se. Calvin knew that he was flying in the
face of Nicea which claims that the Son is God from God, Light from
Light, True God from True God, ‘out of the substance of the
Father.’ Nonetheless he
pressed on and claimed that the Godhead of the Son was in no sense ‘from
the Father’. The Son was ‘from
the Father’ according to His Person, but this was not where His
deity resided. His deity resided
in the simple, divine essence in which He had a complete share. This
simple essence was posited not because of an enquiry after the Three
Persons but because of philosophical commitments bound up with the
uncreated Creator which he had previously assumed.
Hopefully we can see
that this is, at the very least, a woefully deficient trinity. It shirks from the most basic
requirements of a doctrine of tri-unity.
The tri-ness (Threeness) is, for Calvin, the Personal level
where the Son and Spirit could not be conceived of as divine! The unity-ness (Oneness) is, for
Calvin, the essential level where the distinct Persons of the Son
and Spirit become inconceivable (How could you even imagine an unbegotten
Son??). In all this, the Three
Persons do not form the One God – they dissolve into it! The One God does not comprise the
Three Persons – oneness is defined in complete abstraction from the
particular Persons. This trinity
is not a tri-unity, and all because of the prior commitment to aseity. For more on this see the paper on Calvin’s Trinity.
What we must see at
this point is that there really is a choice to be made as to what
doctrine takes priority – whether the doctrine of aseity (that God is of Himself
– definitionally uncreated) comes first and defines what follows in
trinitarian discussions, or whether the trinity of Begettor, Begotten and
Proceeding is considered first and questions of aseity follow. The first option necessarily leads to
either Arianism or Modalism. The second option upholds Nicene
trinitarianism and nuances what we say about aseity. Aseity cannot be intrinsic to our
definition of deity. Rather, in
trinitarian terms, it upholds the fact that there are no forces outside
or beyond the communion of the Father, Son and Spirit on which they
depend or from which they receive their life and being. They receive their life, being and
direction from one another and only from one another. The Triune God is a se (of
Himself) precisely because His being in communion is a being of giving
and receiving within Himself.
There is a way from a doctrine of the Trinity to a doctrine
of the Creator. But there is no
way from a doctrine of the Creator to a doctrine of the Trinity.
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Things First
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