Three-self Trinity theories have a serious problem and a serious perk

Theologically speaking, there has been a trend spanning more than a century toward a "social" concept of the Trinity within the church, be that Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical (although patchy), and even Orthodox. What this means is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are understood as three literal persons, in a way we would understand personhood from our own everyday experience. Each has a first-person perspective, a will, a uniqueness, all covered in an unsearchable love and submission in the most perfect of social communities. Dr. Stephen Holmes is quite vocal about the problems with such an approach, which sometimes favours distinction over a united Godhead of precisely 1. Today I will try to describe a paradox I notice within the social-Trinitarian "move".

First, I have a silly illustration to try to show how the social Trinity vision is inappropriate to the Biblical presentation of God and Christ.

You want to talk to your Heavenly Father about something. Can you ask Christ or the Holy Spirit to leave the room? Impossible. We are connected to the Father uniquely through his Son: on this all Christians should be on a similar page. We can't have a private conversation with our heavenly Father and say, please, Jesus, I'm ever so sorry, but would you mind just stepping out for a few minutes while I share something on my heart with Father? He can fill you in later if necessary...

There is a very deep connection that social Trinitarian offerings need to explain more fully, if their "divine persons" can truly be understood like persons as you or I understand personhood. Can you think of any human parallel where a son has a deep connection with his Father while having to communicate via an older brother (I know that this 'via' could and should be discussed at much more length)? Nope, that kind of intermediary would usually add distance, not closeness. So inseparability of Father and Son should be an issue for diehard social Trinitarians, because you cannot ask Jesus to leave the room. Some antitrinitarian Unitarians would also likely be tested by this line of reasoning, but John's gospel in particular, I think, requires it.

Now I don't yet re-believe in some kind of divine "essence" or "substance", and I do not think it likely that I ever will on general grounds, because I don't think things have essences. My table does not have "tableness". My phone does not have "smartphoneness" or "Huaweiness". My table is a table because it has properties that speakers of English can agree fit the item. My phone is also clearly a Huawei smartphone. Even humans, I would argue, do not have a human essence per se. We are humans. By saying "we are human" rather than "we are humans", we hint at a distinction that has had implications for Christology in the past - distant past, but not 1st-century past. This kind of language is fine, but you need to realise what underpins it. Scientists examining a newly discovered bug in the rainforest would not exclaim: "it is spider!" They would say: it is a spider! Creatures only tend to lose their articles when truly we talk of their meat! 

Divine isolation is ruled out through relationship (which would be the only possible avenue for developing substance/essence theories as far as I can tell). If I'm right about Thomas' declaration (see my post on this interpretation here), then Thomas is not speaking of Jesus in isolation from his (their) Father. He sees the Father in Jesus. Those who presuppose the existence of some kind of divine substance might be less inclined to notice this, for they hunt for passages that speak of Jesus in apparent isolation from the Father, and say: look, Jesus is God! 

So here I see here a paradoxical perk in some strands of social Trinitarian thinking, because while this kind of deep mutual indwelling is underemphasised in ST's ideas of independent persons, the social-relationship model also downplays the need for any true or literal divine substance.

Time-locked language Part 3

Update on posts Time-locked language Parts 1 and 2: 

We should note that Zizioulas (Holmes, QFT, p13) strongly emphasises the Father's causing principle within the trinity. Holmes says Zizioulas qualifies this causation as something "free and personal, not something mechanical and fixed." The question and challenge raised for this article on time-locked language, is now to find something that is "free and personal" that can be caused in a non-time-dependant way. Can you think of anything?

I think I finally see a way through here in looking back at the Greek word, αἰτία, an old theological principle to which Zizioulas wants to remain loyal. In Strong's Greek NT 156 we have indeed something less mechanical. Here we speak of "guilt", responsibility, accusation, fault, grounds, reason. I cannot deny that this opens a quite different discussion in terms of NT authors' perspective around the notion of causation, however, it really must not be forgotten that this word is not used for this purpose prior to the patristic period, that is hundreds of years AFTER the scriptures were written (it would seem particularly around the debates surrounding the Filioque clause, St Maximus the Confessor, and the 15th Century Council of Florence). Where the Scriptures speak of the interpersonal relationships between God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit vocabulary other than αἰτία is used. The word "send" jumps out very strongly in my mind.

Time-locked language (Part 1)

Source.

Generate.

Spirate.

Proceed.

Cause.

...................Beget. 

?

In today's post, I am going to somewhat vaguely, air something of a theological frustration of mine. This frustration is more felt against theologians than God, and more aimed at ancient theologians than recent ones, which should be a big clue to me to go and do some more homework. The frustration is based on:

a. the way causing works in most (if not all) instances in human languages - I argue it is semantically time-locked, or if not completely time-locked, limited to general non-specific effects, and effects which are inherently about change.
b. the way in which the tenses shift from scripture to doctrine (i.e. Jesus was begotten by the Father in scripture, and the Father begets [eternally generates] the Son, in doctrinal parlance).

Because a. took me longer to write than I initially thought, I will post b. separately.

A Time-locked causation

When we try, sometimes I get the impression of "try desperately", to make the doctrinal ideas fit Scripture and the Scripture the doctrinal ideas (Church fathers), or indeed to make the Scriptures agree with one another within the model of the doctrine (Holmes), we forget, or we forgot, something that is very basic indeed. The above words (cause, generate, beget, etc.) cannot be used, or only very rarely used, in describing the eternal or permanent. In my two languages of English and French, these words are inseparable from the notions of time and movement. Of course, that may not be the case in Greek, I need to check, but needless to say, I anticipate issues there also for the simple reason that we have chosen these words as apt and suited for translation purposes. This is why my questions to a fictive, English-speaking, 4th-century pro-Nicene theologian might be: "what does it mean to cause something that has always existed?" "What is there left in the word 'cause' once you remove time from its very essence?" 

And finally: "Please, would you stop misreading (Holmes' word, not mine) Isaiah 53:8?!"

As Christians, we do not believe that any human language is divine, in the sense, for example, that Muslims believe the Arabic language comes directly from Allah. Greek is just Greek, and so on, developed necessarily by humans to express and comprehend their needs and lives. When rain falls and the sun shines and the seeds are sown, and the gods smile, the crops grow. They were not, and now they are. Causation. There is little in causing-vocabulary that lends itself to describing an eternal or permanent action.

This said, I would first like to take a moment to try very hard and disprove my own objection to be sure. Look at two natural examples with me that may seem to create "mind space" for this kind of perpetual causation, examples that would be valid for people back then as they area now: first the moon, then the sun.

1. The moon's gravitational effect

We cannot be sure what people presumed about the phenomena of tides, but for the sake of this article let us assume that some kind of causal connection was made between the location of the moon the tide. Does the moon perpetually cause tides? Yes I think for the sake of this counter-argument, we could say it does. But let us be clear here, we are not saying that one huge lump of water is produced or removed over and over, all we can say is that this phenomenon is perpetually caused by the position of the moon. A permanent effect. So the moon's gravity on our oceans helps us provide a little leg-room on the perpetual side, while still absolutely being locked into movement.

2. Heat from the sun

Let's keep it astral. So does the sun's steady warmth (leaving aside seasons, weather fluctuations, day and night and everything else) provide us with more linguistic head space? Unlike the moon's gravitational effects on the ocean's movements, the heat we sense does not change, and yet this warmth is caused continuously, without it, we would freeze to death in an instant.
Here we certainly can discount 1st or 4th century notions of vibrating molecules, and their movement, besides that would just be getting a bit too theoretical! Well, what is warmth? Warmth is a sensation I feel after I have been feeling cold. So while there is change and time-lockedness there, we could move on to simply say the warmth of the sun is essential to life. The warmth of the sun (in combination with other factors), causes life. Continuously.

So having identified some room for this notion of perpetual causation from natural phenomena, we should note the following key points: 1) permanent causation examples seem fewer and are theoretical, i.e. no two actual tides are identical even in the same location, 2) the only permanent cause examples seem to be phenomenal change-inducing effects, i.e. the warmth of the sun helps cause the crops to grow. There is no specific thing or creature or person that is perpetually begotten or caused in our human languages.

So, as mentioned in the intro, I argue that causing is semantically time-locked, and where not completely time-locked, limited to general non-specific effects, and effects which represent change.

Update: Note that Zizioulas (Holmes, QFT, p13) strongly emphasises the Father's causing of the Trinity. Holmes qualifies this causation as something "free and personal, not something mechanical and fixed." The question and challenge raised for this article on time-locked language, is now to find something that is "free and personal" that can be caused in a non-time-dependant way. Can you think of anything?

I think I finally see a way through here in looking back at the Greek word, αἰτία, an old theological principle to which Zizioulas wants to remain loyal. In Strong's Greek NT 156 we have indeed something less mechanical. Here we speak of "guilt", responsibility, accusation, fault, grounds, reason. I cannot deny that this opens a quite different discussion in terms of NT authors' perspective around causation, however, it really must not be forgotten that this word is not used prior to the patristic period, that is hundreds of years AFTER the scriptures were written (it would seem particularly around the debates surrounding the Filioque clause, St Maximus the Confessor, and the 15th Century Council of Florence).