Words Worth Fighting For: The Strange Vocabulary of the Trinity

 

One of the mildly ironic things about Trinitarian theology is that some of its most important words are not found in the Bible. Trinity is one of them. Homoousios, hypostasis, perichoresis, circumincession—none appears in the biblical text as a technical Trinitarian term. That fact has occasionally been turned into an objection by anti-trinitarians, but really it misses why the vocabulary developed in the first place. The church was trying to say, with excruciating precision, what the whole Bible required Christians to believe when individual biblical statements could be bent in several directions. Theophilus of Antioch was already using the Greek trias in the second century, apparently without feeling much need to explain it; by the early third century Tertullian could speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as three personae yet one substantia. The vocabulary became sharper because the controversies became sharper. Arius could quote Scripture. So could the modalists. So could the devil, for that matter. The church needed a grammar that ruled out readings of Scripture that destroyed other things Scripture plainly taught (Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 1:902–29; Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 1–12).

Start with Godhead, because the older English word is easily misunderstood. It does not mean “the three members of the Trinity” as though the Godhead were a committee. It means deity, the divine nature, what it is to be God. Older English translations used “Godhead” for Greek terms such as theiotēs in Romans 1:20 and theotēs in Colossians 2:9; modern translations commonly render these “divine nature” and “Deity.” Related theological words are Greek ousia, “being” or “essence,” and Latin substantia, “substance.” Then comes the great Nicene adjective homoousios: homo- (“same”) plus ousia, hence “of the same essence” or consubstantial. At Nicaea in AD 325 the term fenced off the Arian claim that the Son was the highest creature. The Son is not merely like God. He possesses the one undivided divine being with the Father. Constantinople in 381 carried the pro-Nicene settlement forward in its confession of the Holy Spirit, so that the mature grammar became one divine ousia, wholly possessed by Father, Son, and Spirit (Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 25–44; Letham, Systematic Theology, 97–106).

But if ousia answers the question “what is God?”, hypostasis and person help answer “who is God?” This took time to stabilize. The original Nicene terminology could still use ousia and hypostasis almost synonymously; the Cappadocians, especially Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, helped crystallize the formula mia ousia, treis hypostaseis: one essence, three hypostases. Latin Christianity ordinarily spoke instead of three personae, from which we get “persons.” That word needs handling with care. A divine person is not an autonomous individual who happens to belong to the species “God,” the way Peter, James, and John are three specimens of humanity. That would yield three gods rather quickly. Father, Son, and Spirit are irreducibly distinct, yet each possesses the whole numerically one divine nature. Hence the Athanasian Creed’s later insistence that Christians neither confuse the persons nor divide the substance, language echoed centuries afterward in Reformed confessions such as Westminster 2.3 (Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 29–36, 101–30; Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 1:902–29).

The next cluster of terms describes the distinctions among those persons: generation, procession, spiration, personal properties, and taxis. The Father is unbegotten; the Son is eternally generated or begotten of the Father; the Spirit eternally proceeds. “Begotten” does not mean created, produced at some remote moment, or brought into existence. Nicaea deliberately said begotten, not made. These are eternal relations of origin within the divine being. Taxis means “order”: Father, Son, and Spirit are not interchangeable names, and their relations cannot simply be reversed. The Father does not proceed from the Spirit, nor is the Father begotten by the Son. Yet order is not inequality of deity. Letham puts the pattern in the familiar patristic form: from the Father, through the Son, by or in the Spirit. The eternal processions also stand behind the temporal missions: in redemptive history the Father sends the Son, and the Father and Son send the Spirit, revealing in time something true of who God eternally is (John 1:18; 5:26; 15:26; Gal. 4:4–6). This grammar runs from Nicaea and Constantinople through Augustine, medieval theology, and the Reformed confessions (Letham, Systematic Theology, 111–23; Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 47–72, 153–72).

Then we get to the wonderfully ungainly family of perichoresis, circumcession, circumincession, circuminsession, coinherence, mutual indwelling, and interpenetration. They are circling the same astonishing reality: the Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, and the Spirit is not external to either. Jesus gives the biblical seed almost verbatim: “the Father is in Me, and I in the Father” (John 10:38; cf. 14:10–11; 17:21–23), while Paul speaks of the Spirit searching even “the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10–11). Perichōrēsis emerged gradually, first in related Christological usage and then explicitly in Trinitarian theology, with John of Damascus making it central to his account. Through Burgundio of Pisa’s twelfth-century Latin translation of John, the idea entered Western vocabulary. Circumincessio stresses reciprocal movement or interpenetration; circuminsessio stresses indwelling or coinherence. English writers also use circumcession. And, since it comes up constantly, perichoresis does not etymologically mean “the divine dance”: chōrein concerns going, making room, or containing, not dancing in a chorus. As I wrote yesterday, the dance may be a metaphor, but it is not the definition (Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 133–45; Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 1:892).

Another pair of terms keeps all of this from turning into three divine job descriptions: inseparable operations and appropriation. The ancient principle is often expressed in Latin, opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt: the external works of the Trinity are undivided. Creation is not one-third Father, one-third Son, one-third Spirit. The one God creates, sustains, reveals, redeems, sanctifies, and judges with one divine power, knowledge, and will. Yet Scripture can fittingly appropriate particular works to particular persons because the persons act according to their personal relations: the Father sends, the Son is sent and assumes flesh, the Spirit is poured out and indwells. Appropriation distinguishes without dividing. Perichoresis helps explain why: the persons never operate as three independent agents standing beside one another. The external works manifest the indivisible life of the God who eternally coinheres within himself (Letham, Systematic Theology, 109–11; Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics, 175–97).

This is why the old vocabulary is worth keeping, even when it makes a Sunday-school teacher reach for the whiteboard. These terms are not passwords for admission to the theological guild. They are guardrails around the identity of the God who saves us. Homoousios tells us that the Christ hanging on the cross is truly God, not an intermediary creature. Hypostasis keeps Father, Son, and Spirit from collapsing into masks. Eternal generation and procession tell us that their distinction belongs to God eternally, not merely to the economy of redemption. Perichoresis keeps distinction from becoming separation. Inseparable operations remind us that the whole Trinity is for us in salvation. So Christian prayer, worship, baptism, and assurance become self-consciously Trinitarian: to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19 gives us one name, yet names Father, Son, and Spirit; Galatians 4:4–6 gives us the Father sending the Son and then the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, “Abba! Father!” The vocabulary eventually disappears into doxology, which is where good theology is always supposed to end (Letham, “The Holy Trinity and Christian Worship,” 91–93; Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 1:929–56).