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. Before I do that, let me turn your attention
briefly to the very first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, where
we read these words in verse one: "God, who at various times and in various ways, spoke
in time past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us by His
Son." 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." 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. And so, I just want
us to see here that the Son of God is distinguished from the Father in terms of the idea of personhood.
It is the Father's person who is expressed in the person of the Son. So, even though
we have the distinction between Father and Son, we also have here that idea of a personal
distinction in the Godhead. 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. And that's always a problem with language, because language tends
to be dynamic. It changes its little nuances from one generation to the next. In Elizabethan
English if you called a girl "cute," you insulted her because cute meant bowlegged, where today
it means something quite different from that. And that is the way language has a tendency
to change over time. 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. It was this, first of all in legal terms, a person's estate or a
person's ownings and possessions were part of the persona of the individual. And so in
that sense the term persona had a legal reference point, at least to Tertullian. 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.
You've seen the symbolism of Greek drama where you have the twin masks, one of them frowning,
which goes back to the dramatic tragedy, and the other one with a big smile, that represents
comedy. Well those masks that were used on stage by actors, who had multiple roles, were
called personae. I saw that done once in my life many years
ago. One of the biggest hit plays on Broadway was a modern version of the Biblical book
of Job, and it was entitled simply JB. And Basil Rathbone of Sherlock Holmes fame and
sheriff of Nottingham fame, from the old Robin Hood series. Basil Rathbone played both the
role of God and the role of Satan, in that Broadway production. In fact when I saw it
I was fortunate enough to sit literally front row, center. And Rathbone would stand right
at the front end of the stage. He wasn't five feet away from me during the production of
that play, and he had these two masks and when he was articulating the role of God he
would put one mask in front of his face and speak through it, and when he was articulating
the role of Satan he would take the other mask and speak through that. And that was
a throw back to antiquity when these masks were used to indicate different roles or different
persons. That's why they were called in the plural, personae. 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,
and it also has a role in modern science for some of you who are inclined to understand
how it's used there. But to understand the hypostatic union I want us to review a couple
of basic concepts that we have in our language, and in our vocabulary. Specifically, three
words that we're all familiar with. But these three words are very important when it comes
to understanding the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. 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." And so, we would translate that term "ousios" into English by the word
"being," or synonyms for the Greek concept "being" would include words like: substance,
essence, and the simplest more crude definition of ousias is simply "stuff." And if you go
to the ancient philosophers, who sought for ultimate reality, who were involved in the
task of what we call metaphysics, or that phusis or physics that goes above and beyond
what we perceive in this world. They were looking for ultimate reality, that which does
not manifest change. They were looking for the substance or the essence of things. And
that was called the ousios, or as I said, the essence or substance. 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. Parmenides, who was considered the most brilliant
pre-Socratic philosopher, about whom almost nothing survives this day, is famous for his
statement that he made on one occasion, "Whatever is, IS," because if something is constantly
changing, can we ever really say what it is? Because just as soon as you think you've described
what it is, it's not that anymore. It's changed. And he's saying, "For anything to be real
ultimately, it has to be in a state of being, there has to be a real substance or essence
to it; otherwise it would just be a fig Newton of our imaginations. So Plato made this distinction between being
and becoming because Parmenides said, "Whatever is, IS" and his counterpart was Heraclitus.
Some call him the father of modern existentialism. Heraclitus said, "No, whatever is, is changing."
All things are in a state of flux. The only thing that's constant is change itself. He
said, "You can't step in the same river twice, because by the time you take your second step
the river has moved on. It's not the same river that you stepped in the first time.
In fact you're not the same person, because you've changed, if only by being a few seconds
older. And so he said what is most basic to all the reality that we perceive in this world
is that whatever else we see, even if it's a rock, it's in a process of change. It's
in a process of becoming. 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. And in being there is no potentiality.
God is pure being; he is pure actuality -- no potential in Him. But in any case, when they
were discussing the difference between being and becoming, they were speaking here of the
difference between essence (which is the being element of something, the substance of it),
and if we want to talk about the becoming dimension in philosophical terms, the key
word that has been used historically is the second one -- existence. I once gave a lecture at one of our conferences
where I publicly denied the existence of God. I said, "I want to emphatically affirm today
that God does not exist. In fact if He did exist I would stop believing in him." Now,
if anything ever sounded like a nonsense statement it was that. But what I meant by that when
I said that, "God does not exist", I said that God is not in a state of becoming, He
is in a state of pure being. If He were in a state of existence He would be undergoing
mutations. He would be changing. He would not be immutable. He would not be the God
that we believe in. Now, when Plato for example was dealing with
these concepts there were basically three categories. There was being, becoming, and
non-being. And non-being of course is a synonym for nothing. And what is nothing? Well to
ask that question is to answer it. Because if I say nothing is something, I'm attributing
something about nothing. I'm saying nothing has some content to it. Nothing has some being
to it. And if it has some being to it, then it's not nothing -- it's something. So one
of the most difficult concepts we have in philosophy to ever deal with is the concept
of nothingness, pure nothingness. Try to think about pure nothingness -- you can't do it.
I mean Jonathan Edwards defined nothingness as what sleeping rocks dream of. The closest
thing that I ever came to a definition of nothingness was when my son was in junior
high. He'd come home from school everyday, and I'd say, "What did you do in school today?"
He'd say, "Nothing" So I would define nothing as what my son did in school everyday. It's
impossible to do nothing. If you're doing, you're doing something. So what Plato was getting at was that human
existence, or that realm of becoming exists -- or is -- somewhere between being and non-being.
You'll notice I started to say exists and then I changed it to is. There is no way people
who object to the use of Greek categories, in Christian thought. I challenge them to
try to speak for two minutes without using some form of the verb "to be." See how long
you can be articulate and communicate anything without falling back on some category of being
or existence. It's absolutely essential to our language, and to all communication. So, in any case, the entomological derivation
of the word existence is that it comes from the prefix in Latin ex which means "out of",
and the root systeri, a verb, which means "to stand." So literally, "to exist" means
to stand out of something. Now that doesn't mean that if you exist you're outstanding.
Don't come to that conclusion. What it means is, it is describing a position or a posture,
and the idea, if I can try some artwork here is, let's say this person is a stick figure,
and that stick figure has one foot in being and the other foot in non-being. So that he
is standing out of being, but he is also standing out of non-being. And so he's in that position
between pure being (he's not pure being) but at the same time we're not nothing. We have
reality attributed to us. And so, we stand out of being, and we stand out of non-being
and so we're in a state of existence. Now, when the church historically articulated
the doctrine of the Trinity, it did not say one in essence, three in existences. It did
not say one in essence -- it did say three in person, but what is meant by the personal
distinction in the Trinity is not so much three distinct existences, but rather the
term that is used is the term "subsistence." and subsistence is just the Latin equivalent
to the Greek concept of hypostasis, because both of them mean basically the same thing
linguistically and entomologically. You hear the term subsistence frequently used in our
culture and in our language with respect to people who are poverty stricken, who are extremely
needy, who are barely surviving, eking out what we call a subsistence level of life,
almost like they are lower than existing. Now the reason for that use of the term is
again, instead of the prefix ex like we have in the word existence, we have the prefix
sub with the same root, and the prefix sub means below or under. And so again if we go
to that Greek concept of hypostatic union, hypostasis means in Greek, standing beneath,
or standing under. So the two words, hypostasis or hypostatic and subsistence mean linguistically
the same thing. And both of them deal with this same root that we find in existence,
the root "to stand." 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. Nevertheless, there are true peculiar attributes of each of the members of the Godhead
that by which we distinguish one from another. 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. One essence, three subsistences.
And that is really about as close as we can get to articulating the historic doctrine
of the Trinity.
