Understanding the Trinity: Language, Essence, and Distinction

In our last session in our study of the Trinity, we looked at the difference between contradictions and mysteries, with specific reference to the formula for the Trinity that has developed in church history. We saw the importance of precision in language that we capture the content of Scripture itself, and in this final lecture, I want to look at some of the terms that are used historically to articulate our confession of the Trinity. [00:00:01]

Here we have Christ referred to again as the Son of God. "Whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world." He is the agent of creation. "Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down by the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." [00:01:42]

Obviously, the Christology that we find in the book of Hebrews is exceedingly high and one of the reasons why the early church was inclined to affirm the deity of Christ. But here we have this interesting concept where the Son of God is seen as the brightness of the Glory of God, which is a reference to His deity, and the express image of His (that is the Father's) person. [00:17:08]

Now one of the problems that we have admittedly with the language of our expression of the Trinity is that when the early church used the term "person" to distinguish the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost from each other, the term "person" was used in a somewhat different manner from how the term "person" is used in our culture today. [00:28:58]

It was the church father Tertullian who had a background not only in theology, but also in law, in legal studies and in the legal field, who introduced the Latin term, persona in an attempt to express the Logos Christology of the time. There were basically two references to the concept of persona in antiquity in the Latin language. [00:38:58]

Also in antiquity, the term persona translated into the Latin from the Greek concept of the drama of the period. The way drama was carried out, was that sometimes actors on the stage had multiple roles or multiple parts in the play -- the same actor having more than one part. And when an actor was changing his role during the play, he would put a different mask in front of his face, and he would speak through that mask, because the mask indicated the role that he was playing at the time. [00:49:04]

Now that's the original concept that Tertullian introduced into Church history but as the church developed over the first four or five centuries the concept of person became more specified than that. And the Greek word that was used was the word hypostasis, or we call it in English hypostatic -- the hypostatic union, and the word hypostasis also has a certain significance in the Greek language. [00:58:31]

Those three words are first of all essence, second of all existence, and third of all, subsistence. Now you've all heard those three words at one time or another in your lifetime. Essence, existence, and subsistence, and to understand the import of these concepts we have to go back a little bit into Greek thinking and Greek philosophy where we've already seen that with respect to the term homoousios, and homoiousios at Nicea, and so on that the term ousios is the present participle of the Greek verb "to be." [01:26:23]

Plato made a very important distinction between being, and becoming. And again, this distinction was rooted in what we call pre-Socratic philosophy, in the philosophers before Socrates. Those of you who have looked at our course on the Consequence of Ideas, which gives us an overview of the history of philosophy, would be familiar with this. I've mentioned that two previous philosophers to Plato were locked in conflict about the role of being and becoming in reality. [01:48:53]

But you see Plato is saying that nothing can become something unless it participates in some way in being. Because if it were totally becoming, and this is the way Aristotle said, if it were totally becoming, it would be only potentially something, and something that is pure becoming would be potential anything but actually nothing. And this is why Aristotle as well as Plato argued that for becoming to be meaningful there had to be some prior being. [02:11:06]

So in this case what the church has said is in God there is one essence, but three subsistences. There are three personae -- that is, who stand under the essence. They are part of the essence. They are all of the same essence, but we are making a distinction that I say before that is not essential. There is not an essential difference in the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, because all three have the essence of deity. [02:54:24]

We say the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, but we don't say that the Father is the Son, and the Son is the Holy Spirit or that the Holy Spirit is the Father. We don't do that, because we make these real distinctions. They are real, but they do not disturb the essence of deity. So that the distinctions with in the Godhead are, if you will, sub-distinctions within the essence, sub-points within the singular being of God. [03:13:07]