Contemporary Trinitarianism (Excursus C): The One and the Three

One of the more difficulty topics with which trinitarian theology has always had the burden to conceptualize is the logic of the inner relation between God's Oneness and his Triunity. From the inception of Christianity this tension was more or less felt, especially when one recognizes the strict Monotheistic character of Judaism and the fact that Christians identified Christ and the Holy Spirit as identities of this One God. Early on we get interesting dialectics like the famous Matthean baptismal formula, where we are to baptize "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." The subtle nature of the dialectic is that one immediately notices "name" is singular, thereby, apparently, enfolding the three into a single invocation. Conceptually however (to make a long, very complex story short) the inner logic of the relationship between Oneness and triplicity was hardly reflected upon, and it took many events leading up to Nicaea and Constantinople and beyond to begin terminological and theological precision regarding the coherence of speaking about the Trinity. Even at Nicaea, invoked so often as something of a watershed event, used terms like homousios and hypostasis interchangeably, most notably in a series of anathemas appended to the original Nicene Creed which reads that any who say the son comes "from another hypostasis [Gr. hypostaseos] or substance [Gr. ousias, Lat. substantia], affirming that the Son of God is subject to change or alteration these the catholic and apostolic church anathematises." Thus it is no surprise that one of the main facets of contemporary Trinitarianism and its declension narratives regards the eventual loosening of the inner conceptual and ontological linkage seen between the One and the Three in christian theology.

Once again going back to Karl Rahner in his book The Trinity, Rahner reacts to neo-Scholasticism and aims his critical eye at Thomas Aquinas, who in his Summa Theologia for the first time in Christian history, according to Rahner, solidified a separation between the logical and theological relation between God's Oneness and attributes (which Aquinas treats first and separately) and God as Trinity (which again Aquinas treats after his section "On the One God" is completed). Rahner writes

Here the first topic under study is not God the Father as the unoriginate origin of divinity and reality, but as the essence common to all three persons. Such is the method which has prevailed ever since. Thus the treatise of the Trinity locks itself in even more splendid isolation, with the ensuing danger that the religious mind fins it devoid of interest. It looks as if everything which matters for us in God has already been said in the treatise On the One God....It begins with the one God, the one divine essence as a whole, and only afterwards does it see God as three in persons...But since this approach is justified by the unicity of the divine essence, the only treatise which one writes, or can write, is "on the one divinity." As a result the treatise becomes quite philosophical and abstract and refers hardly at all to salvation history. [The treatise on the One God] speaks of the necessary metapyhsical properties of God, and not very explicitly of God as exeprienced in salvation history in his free relations to his creatures...On the other hand, if one starts from the basic Augustinian-Western conception, an a-trinitarian tratise "on the One God" comes as a matter of course before the treatise of the trinity. In this event, however, theology of the Trinity must produce the impression that it can make only purely formal statements about the three divine persons, with the help of concepts abou the two processions, and about ther relations. Even these statements, however, refer only a trinity which is absolutely locked within itself...Things do not necessary have to be this way every time the two treatises On the One God and On the Triune God are separated and studied in the usual sequence. The important qustion is: what is said in both treatises and how well are htey related to each other, when thus separated in the usual way? (pp.16-20)

Many Trinitarian summary volumes (Grenz Rediscovering the Triune God; Kärkkäinnen The Trinity in Global Context; Letham The Holy Trinity; Olson and Hall The Trinity; Peters God as Trinity; LaCugna God For Us) offer various levels of acceptance of Rahner's basic observation of Aquinas' separation of the two treatises on God. Colin Gunton, in The One, the Three, and the Many pp.138-139 largely agrees with Rahner’s thesis and adds that Aquinas made the assumption that two sorts of knowledge have access to the same being of God, such that one form (rationality—the One God) is immediate and the other (faith—the Triune God) is mediate via revelation. In this way Gunton seems to follow the general Reformed critique of Aquinas coming from thinkers like Francis Schaeffer (e.g. in How Should We Then Live? pp.54-55) that in Aquinas we have the obvious beginning of a disjunction of nature/grace, such that Aquinas has created an autonomous area for reason to inhabit that, though perfected by grace, can nonetheless operate of its own accord.


Three loose groups of opposition have emerged regarding the specific validity of the criticism leveled at the order and separation of the theological treatises: first, those who argue generally that the order of presentation in theology does not ultimately determine the material conclusions of the subject matter, and on the other hand a second group who argue specifically that this is an improper interpretation of Aquinas methodologically, materially, and historically; and finally a third group who agree that the inner logic between unity and trinity in theology became separated, but disagree that Aquinas is the historical location where, even incipiently, this occurred. In the first group we may briefly cite as a proponent John Frame The Doctrine of God p.620 n.3 who argues that the order presentation does not necessarily alter the explication of the doctrine of God—unless one simply begins with philosophical abstractions about who and what God is. In fact, according to Frame, to argue otherwise is to violate the general order of the bible, which begins with a “pure” Jewish Monotheism, and then proceeds to a New Testament proto-trinitarianism. While this is not the place to offer a full answer to Frame, it nonetheless needs to be mentioned here that Frame has missed the point entirely. Certainly the bible “begins,” with monotheism, but the question of systematic—not biblical—theology (and the context of Rahner’s criticism generally) is not about reproducing the inner logic of progressive revelation via the format of systematics, but of how the ultimate cohesion of an overall exposition represents a modification (or not) of God’s unity of attributes based upon his triunity. Even if Frame’s position that order does not matter is ultimately true, arguing this from the basis of the order of the presentation of the Bible as the final precedent for the order of systematics is in this context a non-sequitur.

In the second group (who defend Thomas against these charges specifically) David Cunningham writes that Rahner’s interpretation does not consider the historical context of the Summa of Aquinas:

“So, for example, when Karl Rahner worries that Thomas Aquinas, by turning first to the doctrine of the one God…and only later to the doctrine of the Triune God, sets in motion the process of decline from a fully articulated doctrine of the Trinity. But Thomas knew that, among the members of the audience to which he was speaking…it would not even have cross their minds to imagine God in anything other than Trinitarian categories. Centuries later, audiences may no longer operate with this assumption; we need to take this into account, but it can hardly be blamed on Thomas.” (These Three Are One p.33)

Similarly but from a different angle, Nicholas Lash points out that the “rational” doctrine of God in Aquinas is not knowledge of God, but of the logic of the knowledge of God, a “retrospective demonstration of the proper use of concepts…grammatical notes upon the Church’s reading of scripture.” (in “When Did the Theologians Lose Interest in Theology?” in Theology and Dialogue: Essays in conversation with George Lindbeck). In this manner Lash notes the distinction between topics for Aquinas is blurred despite the specificity with which he addresses them. Stephen Long seems to follow in the same general direction when he notes "That God is, and is one, is properly understood within the context that God is Triune. They are not opposed to each other. Christian tradition never suggested that once we received God's threeness we then reject God's oneness. As the very structure of the prima pars of the Summa recognizes 'de Deo Uno' [On the One God] and 'de Deo trino' [On the Triune God] can never be set against each other unless something has gone wrong in theology (or someone has badly interpeted what at heologian such as Aquinas was doing)." (Speaking of God p.140) and so too William Placher, though commenting specifically on the so-called "5 ways" of Aquinas, nonetheless his discussion bears on this issue:

Nearly every anthology of radings from the history of philosophy includes "Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God,"...often with a title and introduction that completely misinterpret the passage in at least two ways. First the standard interpretation say that later on, in his discussions of the Trinity, Christ, and the sacraments, Aquinas was operating in the context of Christian faith, but here he was speaking as a philosopher [or natural theologian] laying out arguments generally available to reason. But in Section 1 Aquinas explicitly distinguished the project in which he was engaged (which he called "sacred doctrine" and which depends "on what God has revealed") from "philosophical researches" (which are "pursued by human reasoning.") Nothing in question 2 indicates that he has suddenly switched activities back to philosophy...Aquinas was already operating in the context of Christian faith." (The Domestication of Transcendence pp.23-24)

Wolfhart Pannenberg in his Systematic Theology vol.1, while agreeing with the generality of Rahner’s criticism (that the attributes and nature of God must be thoroughly done from a Trinitarian perspective) he nonetheless notes (p.288) Aquinas himself in a preliminary manner derives the “intradivine processions,” from the concept of God as first cause (Summa Theologia 1.27.1). Pannenberg asks, “How is this compatible, however, with the thesis that the knowledge of the Trinity is the knowledge of faith which rests purely on revelation? Putting this question to himself (Summa Theologia 1.32.1 arg.2 and ad.2) Thomas replied that in matters of revelation like the Trinity, reason can only argue from congruity, and thus elucidate what it already presupposes.” (emphasis mine. One needs to note the similarity here to Augustine’s famous “I believe in order that I may understand,” dictum). Thus already we see that a stark line between the treatises on Unity and Trinity is more porous than perhaps Rahner argues for. This is not a full vindication of Aquinas by Pannenberg though, as he notes later (p.349) and earlier (e.g. p.295 n.122 and p.298) that he is critical of methods which try and derive the concept of Trinity from the notion of Unity (i.e Thomas’ First Cause).

Though slightly wary of the possibility that lay latent in Aquinas between two types of knowledge, Robert Jenson notes the so called “Five-Ways” proofs as independent rational ascertainment of God have to be relativized by the first questio’s founding stipulation “that all knowledge of God is dependent on divine initiative” so that the “[proofs] do not start with a nature or world grasped from a perspective neutral to faith.” (Systematic Theology vol. 2:155-156). Mutatis mutandis this would seem to apply to Jenson’s concept of Aquinas’ methodology as a whole, in that, even if present in a compartmentalized section of the Summa, the elaboration on God’s attributes in the context of unity is already implicitly operating within an assumption of the whole doctrine of God, simply emphasizing a peculiar aspect of it. (As an aside it is somewhat interesting to note that this seems to be a slightly different take than the opinion that Jenson puts forward in the Prolegomena in volume one, where he regards Thomas as a historical jumping off point for the separation of natural from revealed knowledge).

Others disagree that Aquinas' theology allows for any turning of the two treatises against each other, but also admit that Thomas does an insufficient job of tying them together. William J. Hill in his The Three Personed God pp.259-268 thus analyzes Aquinas and attempts to do what he thinks Aquinas did not, namely elaborate on the inner conceptual link between Aquinas treatise, and connect, for example, God as actus purus to God as Trinity. A similar project is undertaken also by Thomas Weinandy in Does God Suffer?:

"I would argue that there is a mutual complementarity between God being pure being and being a trinity of persons. God is a trinity of subsistent realtions because he is pure being and he is pure being because he is a trinity of subsistent relations. neither has ontological precedence or importance. This further grounds the truth that pure being must be absolutely relational and that subsistent relations must be fully in act as pure being. Actually, it is not the one being of God as pure being that meks God one [for Aquinas] but rather the oneness of God ultimately resides in the ineter relatedness of the three persons. What makes the persons three is the very same thing that makes them one, that is, subsisting as pure relations fully in act in accordance with their pure being. They only subsist as three distinct subjects in their oneness, and they only exist as one in their specific threeness. (p.127-128 n.48)

Thus not to belabor the point more than it has already been, the basic importance of the point in regards to the separation of treatises regards, perhaps not the order, but the material content of theology contained in the treatises. The difficulty in Rahner's criticism is perhaps, as Cunningham noted, that to elaborate Aquinas as the incipient cause of later separations is to ignore the historical context of Aquinas and his work, and also to place history as a linear series of possibilities which merely tweak pre-given spectrums of possible thought. Thus, should Aquinas be the "first" to introduce the separation of treatises, it is then argued (a la Rahner) that all later separations appear merely as modfications of Aquinas' initial (if misunderstood) move. But this is to create a far too simple picture which ignores that the actual historical separations of the trinity and unity, have fairly contingent, historically particular reasons (e.g. the rise of rationalism and wooden biblicism, as with the Socinians and later the Racovian Catechism which bears Faustus Socinus' legacy) and not merely the eventual journey instigated by Aquinas. History is, it seems, a much more polyphonous and multi-trajectoried thing, that we have to be careful to name the instigators for particular things with a caution that does not indicate a development that was merely contained in initial formulations in a germ or seedlike manner, which then merely blossomed as the necessary culmination or inner logic of the matter (this appears to often be the Idealist or Hegelian legacy of many of the historical analyses of trinitarian declension narratives, very often ideas or legacy are read as containing all the materials for later developments given the right contextual and developmental traditions, but it seems to ignore that perfect new and incongruent, contingent contexts can completely change and re-utilize traditional material in ways which exceed the scope of any linear development).

Nor is this merely a matter for those interested in historiography. It has widespread ramifications for positive material theological formulations. As was already mentioned in an earlier post, the separation of treatises here, along with other factors (such as the Hellenization trope I briefly dealt with) has led many, such as Moltmann, Volf, and others, to turn perichoresis, for example, against a unity of substance. This is not only because "substance" language is often (misleadingly) taken to be static, Hellenized, and incapable of making sense of an involved, loving God, but also because, given the acceptance of the separation of treatises diagnoses of Rahner and others, perichoresis as a dyniamic trinitarian unification, appears to "solve" the problem of the one and the three, or the order of treatises, by unifying them. Whether or not this is the case we can see how immediately relevant genealogical reconstructions which utilizes certain tools such as Rahner's can be to effect such a change in thought. It is in this way (and I am not an expert to make a comment here) that if, as many cited here have claimed, the genealogy is not quite what Rahner insisted it was in his seminal book, or if a similar separation happened at a different historical place and time, then perhaps the material and positive theological formulations which occur in contemporary trinitarianism, which rely heavily on their historical reconstructions, might be different as well.