by Herman Bavinck
For a true understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity three questions must be answered: What is the meaning of the word “essence”? What is meant by the word “person”? And what is the relation between “essence” and “person” and between the persons among themselves? As for the term “being,” Aristotle defined οὐσια as “a class of things that are neither present in, nor predicable of, a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse.”96 Initially, that is how the word was used in theology and applied both to the three persons and to the one divine being. Gradually, however, οὐσια was used in another sense and became the term for the essence or nature of a thing, what Aristotle had called “the being of a thing.” And so it became a synonym for nature (φυσις). Since φυσις is a derivative of φυναι or φυω (to become or be by nature), just as natura comes from nasci (to be born), some authors considered it less well suited to describe the being or nature of God.97 Still, the word, like the word “nature,” gained currency in theology and was supported by 2 Peter 1:4. So οὐσια, φυσις, substantia, essentia, and natura became the regular terms for the one divine essence, the Godhead in general, quite apart from its “subsistence” and from its “modes of subsistence,” and hence for the divine nature as it is common to all three persons. This one simple divine essence is essentially distinct from all creaturely existence and possesses all the attributes we treated earlier.
The distinction between this divine essence and the three persons in God has its analogy in the life of creatures. Here, too, we make a distinction between the nature of persons and the persons themselves. Paul, John, and Peter all possess the same human nature but, as individual persons they are distinct from that nature and from each other.98 But a double danger immediately presents itself at this point. According to nominalism, “being”—that which is common or universal in any given category—is no more than a “name,” a concept or term. Accordingly, in the doctrine of the Trinity this philosophy leads to tritheism. Excessive realism, on the other hand, associates the word “essence” with some subsistent thing that stands behind or above the persons and so leads to tetratheism or Sabellianism. Even Gregory of Nyssa did not quite succeed in surmounting this exaggerated realism. In support of the argument that God is one and that we may not speak of three Gods, he denied the applicability of number even to finite creatures. According to him, it is wrong to speak in the plural of those who share a single nature and so to speak of many people.99 This, however, is to overlook the essential difference between God and his creatures. Undoubtedly, there is an analogy between the divine and the human nature. On account of that analogy it is proper for us to speak of “nature” also with reference to God. At the same time this analogy also presupposes a very important difference. The concept of the nature of humans is a generic concept. Indeed, human nature exists, not outside of and above, but in people, in individual persons. Still it exists in every human in a unique and finite way. Like the gods in polytheism, humans are of like substance but not of the same or of one substance. Human nature as it exists in different people is never totally and quantitatively the same. For that reason people are not only distinct but also separate. In God all this is different. The divine nature cannot be conceived as an abstract generic concept, nor does it exist as a substance outside of, above, and behind the divine persons. It exists in the divine persons and is totally and quantitatively the same in each person. The persons, though distinct, are not separate. They are the same in essence, one in essence, and the same being. They are not separated by time or space or anything else. They all share in the same divine nature and perfections. It is one and the same divine nature that exists in each person individually and in all of them collectively. Consequently, there is in God but one eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient being, having one mind, one will, and one power.100 The term “being” or “nature,” accordingly, maintains the truth of the oneness of God, which is so consistently featured in Scripture, implied in monotheism, and defended also by unitarianism. Whatever distinctions may exist in the divine being, they may not and cannot diminish the unity of the divine nature. For in God that unity is not deficient and limited, but perfect and absolute. Among creatures diversity in the nature of the case implies a degree of separation and division. All created beings necessarily exist in space and time and therefore live side by side or sequentially. But the attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, goodness, and so on, by their very nature exclude all separation and division. God is absolute unity and simplicity, without composition or division; and that unity itself is not ethical or contractual in nature, as it is among humans, but absolute; nor is it accidental, but it is essential to the divine being.
[223] The glory of the confession of the Trinity consists above all in the fact that that unity, however absolute, does not exclude but includes diversity. God’s being is not an abstract unity or concept, but a fullness of being, an infinite abundance of life, whose diversity, so far from diminishing the unity, unfolds it to its fullest extent. In theology the distinctions within the divine being—which Scripture refers to by the names of Father, Son, and Spirit—are called “persons.” In the East theologians initially used the word προσωπον for person, a word that corresponded to the Hebrew פָנִים, meaning face, external appearance, role. But this word was open to misunderstanding. Sabellius taught that the one divine οὐσια or ὑποστασις assumed different προσωπα or faces. Challenging this interpretation, the church fathers contended that the three προσωπα in the divine being were not simply appearances or modes of revelation, but “enhypostatic προσωπα,” that they consisted in hypostases Thus προσωπον was replaced by ὑποστασις, a word that first of all means “basis, substructure, firmness,” and second, that which is real and does not merely consist in appearance, or that which exists independently in distinction from “accidents” that inhere in something else.101
In the West the Latin word “persona” was used, a word that first of all meant “mask”; then it came to describe the role of an actor; from here it began to refer to the condition, quality, or capacity in which a person acted, and in jurisprudence it meant a person’s standing before the law. This term, accordingly, was also fairly woolly; and in Tertullian it even became interchangeable with words such as “name,” “species,” “form,” “degree,” “thing.” The word was nevertheless kept in Latin even when in the East προσωπον had been replaced by ὑποστασις, the reason being that the word ὑποστασις had no suitable equivalent in Latin. The term “substantia” would not do because it was already in use for “essence.” This difference in terminology, however, repeatedly occasioned misunderstanding between the East and the West. The Greeks related the Latin persona to their word προσωπον, and the Latins in turn understood ὑποστασις to mean substantia Each party criticized the other for the poverty of their language. Basically, however, both parties taught the same thing, namely, that the three divine persons are not “modes” but “subsistences.” Thus, in the language of the church the word προσωπον or persona acquired as an essential feature the quality of self-existence, ὑποστασις, subsistence. In Athanasius and the Cappadocians the word ὑποστασις still has that meaning. But later the word persona gained still another characteristic. If the word persona meant no more than ὑποστασις, self-existence, in distinction from “accident,” it could also be used of things In the christological controversy theologians were forced, in the face of Nestorianism and Monophysitism, to devise a more exact definition of the words “nature” and “person.” Thus, in Concerning the Two Natures and One Person of Christ, a work attributed to Boethius, persona was defined as “an individual substance possessing a rational nature.” The word “persona” now expresses two things: self-existence and rationality (or self-consciousness). This is its meaning in scholasticism,102 as well as in the works of the older Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed dogmaticians.103
ENDNOTES
96 Aristotle, Categoriae 1a, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. E. M. Edghill, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928).
97 [Pseudo-]Gregory of Nazianzus, “Ad Evagrium” (ed. note: “Epist. 26,” in PG 46:1102–7; recognized there as “nongenuinus”); Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, ch. 2.
98 Basil, Epist. 43, NPNF (2), VIII, 146.
99 Gregory of Nyssa, “To Ablabius,” NPNF (2), V, 529–30; cf. D. Petavius, “De trinitate,” in Theol. dogm., IV, ch. 9; J. Schwane, Dogmengeschichte, II2, 156ff.; I. A. Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, II, 315ff.; J. Kleutgen, Die Theologie der Vorzeit vertheidigt, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Münster: Theissing, 1878), III, 85ff.
100 Athanasian Creed, 9–18.
101 Cf. also the use of the word ὑποστασις in the New Testament (2 Cor. 9:4; 11:17; Heb. 1:3; 3:14; 11:1); and see H. Cremer, Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek, s.v. “ὑποστασις.”
102 P. Lombard, Sent., I, dist. 23 (cf. 25–26); T. Aquinas, Summa theol., I, qu. 29; Bonaventure, Sent., I, dist. 23, qu. I; and dist. 25.
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From Reformed Dogmatics Volume 2 by Herman Bavinck