PS: By chance, Google brought me to your blog… I am writing my next book, The Emzine Story (which does address some of these matters in a more detached manner, that is, detached from religious and even certain scientific preconceptions)

It’s not that you haven’t been clear, or that I haven’t understood your points; but you’ve brushed aside the most salient point, and that is the idea of essence/accidents. I honestly don’t care, to be frank (but in love of course), if Thomas asserted that these categories don’t apply to God — of course it’s easy to see why he would say this; but this presents a hole in his schema (his logic is inconsistent). I’m displeased with a simple assertion, and that is all Thomas does.

Beyond this, what’s really necessary is to demonstrate how substance metaphsyics makes the most sense of the categories of scripture relative to a doctrine of God. You’re certainly right to note my preference for a cataphatic approach — I don’t see what else is scripturally available.

Anyway, I thank you again for the discussion; stop by the blog anytime. (Oh don’t worry mispelling, it’s just a blog ;-).

Let me take one last shot and then I’ll be quite, and I hope I say this with the grace and charity that we have together in Christ (I do wish I was sitting at a table with you so you could see me smiling as I speak).

If I’ve not been not been clear, there is no before or after in God. Processions are eternal, thus relations are eternal, thus persons are eternal. It is because God is simple (read that to mean – not a creature) that we speak of persons and essence separately – he we have to speak of both to speak of the one God who is three persons. The ineffability of the Creator is what necessitates our use of analogy.

If these sort of distinctions are not accepted as biblical, then I realize the theological conclusions I’ve suggested won’t be satisfactory to you – and not to sound churlish but I’m the only one in our discussion who has cited where the view I commend here, Augustine’s and Thomas’, comes from a particular reading of Scripture. Both men wrote a number of commentaries which further expound their views from Scripture.

I really do hear your concerns about the danger of constructing a doctrine of God apart from the history of salvation culminating in Christ and the giving of the Spirit, and I’ve read errant theological views which do that and I do not want to fall into that trap myself. However, I just don’t think the Augustinian and Thomistic accounts are prey to that critique. They recognize the presence of the incarnate Son, if he truly is God, says something about the pre-incarnate Son and they turn to Scripture to learn what precisely that might be. In short, a doctrine of the immanent Trinity furnishes the description of the personal agents and the modes of temporal action proper to them. It indicates the force of the drama of the gospel derives from the infinite capacity of these agents – immeasurably more full of life than any temporal reality (to freely paraphrase my thesis advisor). Thus, if the eternal nativity of the Son is lost, then the gospel collapses into mere history (to quote Luther).

When I see you set ‘Christ’ against ‘a notion of God prior to Christ’ it demonstrates to me the sort of univocal collapse of Christology into Trinity which I’ve tried to avoid. You seem to be taking the Barthian: Jesus Christ *is* the revelation of God (of course he is!) to support that univocal notion: Jesus Christ is the Second person without reserve (and vice versa?). To me, this univocity explains your discomfort with ‘abstract Godness’ (a sort of equivocity), which you assume is the only other option we have if we aren’t talking ‘personally/relationally’ about God on the basis of Jesus Christ. I also take this to be what is behind all your worries about aphophatic/via negativa (equivocal) and your recommendation of a cataphatic/via positiva (univocal) approach. In short, it all seems very binary as I understand your view – equivocal or univocal with no place for analogy. That does follow Duns Scotus as I understand what he said about universals at least. If that’s the case, I can see why Aquinas, and much of the analogical tradition, will never quite satisfy you. So, as I understand it, that is the crux of our difference here.

Thanks again for indulging me in the discussion, even if I in no way convinced you otherwise, and I’ll keep you in mind for my questions (just saw you had a blog) when I get back to reading Torrance.

If we translate Basil’s “idiomata” as the “idiomatic” or “idiosyncratic,” though, that changes everything. In that case the “One” or the in-common base or grounds of all, is the truth; while personalities are … idiosyncratic.

Let me just say while I appreciate Scotus, I’m not sure I totally follow him either. This notion of procession is most problematic to me. Who do you have prior to the procession? That is the fundamental problem with the “Tradition” as you lay claim to it (there are other ways to construe the touchstones that Nicaea provided).

The real problem with what you are describing (promoting) to me, is that it, again, is incompatible with the God of the Bible (who is a relationship through and through). The second you speak of God as a substance before He is a person you’ve lost the gist of scripture’s communication about God.

You brushed aside my point on essence/accidents, but this was to quick. This clearly represents a Thomistic/Aristotelian anthropology; which logically proceeds from a Thomist doctrine of God (i.e. so the persons of the Godhead correlate to “His” accidents — a subsistence [as you've described it]). Your position ultimately, in my view, slips right into an implicit modalism (because God’s ousia is not defined by the eternal generation, but instead by a singular substance wherein the persons are only functions/or modes of expression relative to the defining substance — so there is no reason for the distinctions or properties of the persons except for ad hoc ones).

The bottom line is, Josh, you need to present a God who is consonant with the one presented in Scripture. It is really odd to me, to construct a notion of god prior to ever meeting Him in Christ; and this is exactly what the Thomist synthesis has done.

Nicaea is open for interpretation (which is what Ayres illustrates); I don’t think the Thomist interpretation is the best way.

I do thank you for this discussion, Josh.

Sola scriptura,

Bobby

On the notion of “classical” I might have spoken hastily here, but like Ayres I tend to see a lot of consensus in the patristic material than some admit (I’m a systematician after all). I think Augustine is right in line with what Ayres identifies as the pro-Nicene consensus, and I think Aquinas develops that line of thought in a fairly consistent way going forward (yes of course there are differences). We probably shouldn’t wrangle over the word “classical”… I’ll stick with pro-Nicene, because Nicaea 325 says the Son is “begotten of the Father before all worlds… begotten, not made, being of one substance (homoousion) with the Father.” I don’t think there is much argument that the fathers clearly define eternal generation (“begotten, not made”) as “being one substance with the Father” (homoousion)… so they were thinking in substance metaphysical terms, with a processional model of God, and generation is specified as a communication of essence. This is what I have been trying to represent.

Thanks again.

I’m currently not convinced ‘love’ is the best way to name what is common in God. I wrote a paper last year critiquing how folks co-opt the Trinity for gender debates and tried to run with the idea of ‘love’ (which I realize is a possible reading of the Johannine material), but it seemed unsatisfactory in the end to me. I think the main reason why was trying to figure out how to conceive of love as the most basic aspect common to God. I tried to run the notion of eternal generation and spiration as ‘acts of perfect love’ where love is a ‘giving of self’ (von Balthasar does something like this), but I found it problematic. Here I tend to agree with Aquinas and think the most basic thing I can predicate of what is common to God is that he ‘is’ (classically this has found support in Ex 3:14, and I know there are critiques of that reading). In short, I am unable to conceive of a God who loves prior (logically) to his being. Further, I think the notion of love I expressed above does run the risk of imposing some lack in the inner-life of God and impinging upon his eternal perfection – as the perfect wholly realized God. Therefore, it seems clearer to me to conceive of the processions eternal movements of sheer delight, “always active, yet always in repose” (to quote Augustine) which constitute the inner life of God. In short, the processions are the way to conceive of the triune ‘life.’ Thinking of the processions as ‘life’ also finds Johannine support as you are well aware (John 1:4; 5:26; 11:25; 14:6; 1 John 5:20…). It seems to me the concept of life can ‘fund’ the concept of love quite well (love as an overflow of God’s abundant life). I’m unconvinced the logic works the other way.

However, you mentioned Scotus… and I’m relying heavily on a notion of analogy here – that all we predicate of God we do analogically (similarity with ever greater dissimilarity – this applies to what I said above about ‘life’ especially; or what I said, and the point Kyle makes from Oliver, about the processions as ‘motion’ in God). I understand Scotus to say we either think and speak of God univocally or not at all… so maybe this also explains why you might not be experiencing the hesitations I do when predicating notions like ‘love’ as basic to God (and why going Jesus Christ to Trinity seems more straightforward and less in need of the conceptualities I’ve suggested). I don’t really want to go in to a full defense of theological analogy, but suffice to say it is rooted in a conception of the Creator/creation distinction which is never transgressed – rather it is condescended to and accommodated by God (providing knowledge of God which is ectypal, but never archteypal).

All this is probably fodder for another thread as you said!