Why Historical Theology Matters

For many evangelical theologians and pastors, 2016 will be remembered for one of the most contentious debates over the Trinity ever.

I am not interested in going into the weeds of the debate (particularly the more acrimonious exchanges), yet it does emphasize the importance not only of being creedal and confessional but also of understanding the debates in which they were forged. The good news is that after a few or more centuries of functional unitarianism in academic theology and frequent neglect in evangelical circles, the Trinity is one of the most popular topics in both audiences today. The bad news is that the versions of Trinitarian theology that receive the most attention often reflect the agendas of the author more than the actual positions that formed the ecumenical consensus of orthodox Christianity.

The fourth century was the richest postapostolic era in terms of providing the foundations and formulations that we often take for granted. How are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit one in essence (homoousia) and yet distinct persons? There are several ways of coming to a wrong answer, and the church was well aware of all of them by the late fourth century. The Nicene consensus, forged through controversy and finally adopted at the Council of Constantinople in 381, yielded a simple formula that said what had to be affirmed and denied (over against the various heresies), yet it expressed humble restraint before the majestic mystery. There are two processions in the Godhead: The Son proceeds from the unbegotten Father as the only begotten, and the Spirit proceeds by spiration (being breathed) from both the Father and the Son. This single act of double-procession is eternal—there is no point in time when the Son or the Spirit was not God. It is perfect, admitting no degrees of sharing in the divine essence, and it is necessary. While the missions in the economy (history) of creation and redemption are contingent (resulting from a free decision), the double-procession is essential to the life of the Triune God. Thus God is God without creation, but he cannot be God without the eternal procession of the Son and the Spirit from the Father. The external works of the Trinity in our world reveal the Godhead but must not be confused with the immanent life of the Trinity in these eternal processions. God doesn’t depend on the world for his existence and identity.

But to understand the results—especially as we confess in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed—we have to engage the context of controversy, revision, overreactions, further revision, and so on, that produced this consensus. When we do, we discover that we are often reinventing the wheel and it’s not always round. Many of the dead ends of the fourth century are repeated in contemporary projects and debates.

Being and Doing: Historical Confusion on Trinitarian Procession and Mission

Many (like the early Origen) taught an ontological subordination, where the Son and the Spirit were seen as different in rank, authority, and essential Godhood from the Father. Arianism went further, placing the Son on the “creature” side of the Creator-creature ledger, saying that though the first and most glorious creature, the Son is qualitatively different from the Father—not of the same essence. Others argued that “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” are just different names or masks for one person—like personas on the stage in a one-person play. Hence, they were called modalists (or Sabellians, after the Roman presbyter who taught this view). In reaction against this rejection of the plurality of persons, others veered toward tritheism—namely, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are different persons in exactly the same sense as human persons; consequently, there are three gods.

Among the important conclusions of these church fathers is the distinction between the eternal processions (also called the immanent Trinity) and the historical missions (the economic Trinity). While the Triune God reveals himself truly in history, we do not know what God is in himself or how the processions of the Son and the Spirit from the Father actually work. But if we confuse the processions and the missions, then we open the door to heresies such as Arianism, where Jesus’ statement about his inferiority to the Father (for example, in John 14:6) is taken to refer to his eternal status.

Navigating between the Scylla of one heresy and the Charybdis of another, the ancient pastors we justly revere arrived at not only a simple but a grand statement of the faith. In the process, they showed us their work, as it were, wrestling with opponents and sometimes each other in the letters, treatises, and biblical commentaries that are with us today. Exploring the history of the developments leading to Nicaea isn’t just a great way to pass the afternoon; it is essential in order to go beyond merely repeating their words, much less thinking we can come up with a better formula. We need to try to understand the deeper contexts and arguments that led them to their conclusions.

In Lewis Ayres’s magisterial work Nicaea and Its Legacy, he observes that while “Trinitarian theology” has become a cottage industry, many theologians engage the legacy of Nicaea “at a fairly shallow level, frequently relying on assumptions about Nicene theology that are historically indefensible.” It is remarkable that Ayres addresses this criticism not to the general public or the media but to “modern Christian theologians.”1 There is plenty of evidence of such “historically indefensible” interpretations across a broad spectrum, ranging from conservative to liberal, especially in recent years. Often, the theologian comes to the subject with a set of convictions about the way things should look in the world today and then proceeds to develop a Trinitarian theology to ground it.

For example, Jürgen Moltmann is famous for developing a social model of the Trinity that eliminates the unity of essence in favor of a unity of purpose and will. Then he offers this model as a way of justifying a political, economic, and cultural program of democratic socialism. However, virtually no specialist in patristic studies recognizes the fourth century in Moltmann’s version of the story. As conservative Protestants, we are alert to the penchant for “theologies of correlation” (that is, systems in which the ideals of modernity function as central dogmas). We know when liberals are projecting their own secular assumptions, as if they were talking about God when they’re really talking about humanity. But it is more difficult to detect it when conservative agendas are in play.

(The) Father Knows Does Best

Noted conservative theologians Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware have led the charge for what they call “the eternal functional subordination of the Son” (EFS). According to these writers, the subordination of the Son to the Father is the basis for that of wives to their husbands. In fact, Grudem sees the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit along the lines of father, wife, and child in a family.2 Whereas Moltmann and others appeal to a social Trinitarian model to defend a more egalitarian ideal, Grudem and Ware seem to adopt certain of its features with a more “subordinationist” interpretation for a complementarian (male headship) perspective. Ware pleads, “May God help us to see that Trinitarian roles and relationships are meant to be reflected in marriage as both husbands and wives manifest what is true eternally in the very triune nature of God” (147).3 Although Ware is obviously not a social Trinitarian, the phrase “society of Persons” nudges in that direction, along with the tendency to turn distinct roles in every work into distinct works of the Father that he often delegates to the other persons (21).

Unlike Moltmann, the author clearly affirms the equality of the persons on the basis of their unity of essence. Nevertheless, as I will argue, this affirmation is at least qualified, if not abrogated, by many of his formulations. In any case, conservative and liberal Protestants—in quite different ways—sometimes use their “return to the Bible” as a justification for dissenting from classic formulations, while insufficiently engaging (or in some cases, even misunderstanding) those historical arguments.

According to Ware, “The Father possesses the place of supreme authority.…This hierarchical structure of authority exists in the eternal Godhead” despite their being identical with respect to essence (21). Each person “possesses fully the identically same divine nature” (42). In fact, the Son and the Spirit “possess fully the attribute of omnipotence by possessing fully the undivided nature” (45). Here, however, we have a major point that needs clarification in how consubstantiality can be maintained if the Father alone

• is “supreme among the Persons of the Godhead” (46);

• “is the one who reigns over all” (48);

• “stands above the Son” (49);

• “gets top billing, as it were…as the highest in authority and the one deserving of ultimate praise” (51) with “the place of highest honor” (55);

• is “the one who is on top” (58) and “retains the position for which highest honor and glory is owed” (66; cf. 67: “the Father who rightly deserves ultimate honor and glory”).

The Son “is worshiped with the Father” (84), but is he worshiped equally with the Father? From Ephesians 3:14–19, Ware concludes:

Paul begins his prayer bowing his knees neither to the Son nor to the Spirit but to the Father, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” The Father, then, is the sovereign Ruler over heaven and earth, controlling even the very names that every creature is given. From this position of sovereign supremacy, it is the Father who has the authority to grant this prayer’s fulfillment, and so ultimately all glory and thanksgiving must go to him. (125)

We do have to be careful here. Paul does indeed begin with the Father, as indeed all prayer is directed to the Father, in the name of the Son, through the power of the Spirit. This does certainly indicate differing roles in the economy. But does it entail different ranks, particularly eternal ranks of superior and inferior, justifying the conclusion that the Father alone “is the sovereign Ruler of heaven and earth” and that “ultimately all glory and thanksgiving must go to him”?

There is an Arian way of reading the passages according to which the Son being granted by the Father authority over heaven and earth, “the name above every name,” and the right to have life in himself is seen as grounding his inferiority. Then there is the orthodox way of reading the same passages, according to which being “from the Father” means being exactly what the Father is, “Light from Light,” except that the Son is not the Father. In On the Trinity, Augustine was especially keen in his anti-Arian interpretation of these passages. “Light from Light” means that there can be no rank, diminution or subordination. The order (“from Light,” i.e., the Father) does not cancel the substance (“Light” from Light) (De trin. IV.27).

Luigi Gioia’s recent work, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate, offers a terrific exposition of this point. To be begotten is to be inferior, according to the Arian logic, while for the orthodox it is to be of the same essence as the begetter. According to the Athanasian Creed, “In this Trinity none is before nor after another; none is greater or less than another.” I am not at all suggesting that Ware, Grudem, or others are Arians! However, there is a way of reading the relevant passages as highlighting unity, and a way of reading that highlights the Son’s difference from the Father. On that score, it appears that some of Ware’s interpretations favor the latter.

Ware is correct to remind us of the distinctness of the persons, over against an implicit modalism or tendency to confuse them. At the same time, I wonder whether Ware is over-correcting at certain points. For example, while it is wholly salutary to say that each person contributes uniquely to every external work of the Godhead, expressions such as “distinct tasks and activities” (20) appear to threaten the important maxim that the external works of the Trinity are undivided. The emphasis on the Father’s authority threatens to divide the work of the Godhead. “It is not as though the Father is unable to work unilaterally, but rather, he chooses to involve the Son and the Spirit” (57). In fact, there are several places where the works of the Father are distinguished from those of the Son and the Spirit, and unhelpful expressions (e.g., that the Father often [!] works through them, though he could do it himself). “Yet though the Father is supreme, he does much of his work through the Son and the Spirit” (59; italics added).

As the earlier expressions raise the question about the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father in terms of omnipotence, this statement seems to call into question their shared aseity (i.e., self-existence) with the Father. Although they are persons from the Father, what they are from the Father is exactly what the Father is with respect to these attributes. It is both true and important to affirm that each person contributes differently, but it is impossible that the Father could operate apart from the Son and the Spirit any more than he could exist apart from them. Ware even goes so far as to add, “In many ways, what we see here of the Father choosing not to work unilaterally but to accomplish his work through the Son, or through the Spirit, extends into his relationship to us” (57). Here is another example of an apparent blurring of the line between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity (which ultimately threatens the Creator-creature distinction).

While it is correct to observe that God freely chooses to work through creatures even though he could work unilaterally, it is dangerous to say that this is just as true of the Father in relation to the Son and the Spirit. “Marvel at how the Father delegates his work to others” (64; italics added). The unity of the persons in every work hardly accommodates this picture of a boss delegating his work to others. According to Scripture, interpreted by classical formulations, everything done by the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit is God’s work—that is, the work of the three persons in unison. Ware writes:

When others participate, it becomes “our work” even if all was designed and “empowered” by one person. And this principle is most astonishing when seen as carried out by none other than God the Father—the one who can do anything he wants, by himself and without any assistance, but who instead determines to do so much of his work through another. (64; italics added)

Ware reminds us that the intent is practical (“The lessons here are manifold”): to encourage men in authority to allow others to join them in their tasks. “While those in authority need to be more like the Father…those under authority need to be more like the Son” (67; italics added). But to emphasize (repeatedly) that it is properly the Father’s work and he allows the Son and the Spirit to help him, though he could do it himself, calls into question the essential unity Ware clearly affirms elsewhere.

It is as if the Father says, “Shine the spotlight on my Son, and praise and honor his name.” How many of us in positions of authority have a heart to put the spotlight on our subordinates and say, for example, “Look at the work of our youth minister!” (65; italics added)

But the Father is not merely manifesting his magnanimity, choosing to spotlight his Son. He is calling everyone everywhere to honor the Son just as they honor him because he is equally God. He deserves the same worship as the Father, because he is not a subordinate person of the Godhead.

The subordination extends to the Third Person, according to Ware: “Jesus has authority over the Spirit” (87; italics original). “As a man, Jesus submitted fully to the Spirit, even though in terms of rank, within the Trinity, Jesus has authority over the Spirit” (91; italics original). Introducing the idea of rank in the Godhead is to move in an Arian or at least ontological- subordinationist direction. And it is due in large part to Ware’s collapsing of the immanent Trinity (i.e., eternal processions) into the economic Trinity (historical missions). “By this, the Son is shown to be under the Father but over the Spirit,” he adds, since “the Spirit is the ‘Spirit of Jesus’ (Acts 16:7)” (97). However, orthodox theology has always taught that such identification of the Spirit with the incarnate Son pertains to their work in the economy of grace, not to the eternal processions and status of the persons. It is difficult to reconcile such language as Ware’s with the confession that the persons are of the same essence. Indeed, Ware states that in Christ’s submission to the Spirit, the Spirit “recognizes that, even here, he is third” (129). And yet again, the lesson for us is of paramount concern: “Can marriages be like this?” And churches? “What a beautiful case study in humility the Spirit is”—namely, of one who is content “to accept the behind-the scenes place…all for the glory of another” (130). If one might question the practical application to husbands or pastors, then surely it is a controversial claim to make concerning the persons of the Trinity.

Ware rightly points to the Spirit’s focus on Christ. In my view, however, the way in which he argues this point is by downgrading the Spirit’s significance in the history of revelation. If the Father is “on the top,” supreme, sovereign, and worthy of ultimate worship, and the Son is eternally inferior in rank or role, then the Spirit occupies “what might be called ‘the background position’ in the Trinity. . . . The Holy Spirit embraces eternally the backstage position in relation to the Father and the Son” (104). “Finally, in the age to come, the Spirit will take the backseat to the Son and the Father” (125). Ware bases this on Revelation 5, where worship is given to the Father and to the Lamb (125–27). “And while the Spirit is represented in this passage [Rev. 5:9] in a veiled and subtle way, it is the Son and the one on the throne, his Father, who receive primacy in worship” (127).

What then does this mean for the confession that the Spirit is also “the Lord” and “with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified”? Further, the author concludes that “all worship of the Son, in and of itself, is penultimate…. The ultimate object of our honor, glory, praise, and worship is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who himself alone is over all” (154). But if the Son and the Spirit are God in the fullest sense, then there is no rank. They are worshiped and glorified not only with the Father, but with the Father equally.

The Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father. The Father is the “origin” of the persons, orthodox theology teaches. Nevertheless, this has never meant that the Son and the Spirit have less authority—or less of anything else that belongs to the one essence they all share—than the Father. As I mentioned above, “Light from Light” means that precisely; because the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father, they are “Light” in exactly the same sense as the Father. Ware even quotes Augustine on this very point, although it goes against his entire argument:

Not because one is greater and the other less, but because one is the Father and the other the Son; one is the begetter, the other begotten…. For he was not sent in virtue of some disparity of power or substance or anything in him that was not equal to the Father, but in virtue of the Son being from the Father, not the Father being from the Son. (80; italics original)

It is striking that Ware italicizes the very phrases I would appeal to against his conclusion at this point. Has he not argued repeatedly that the Father is greater in some sense, solely deserving of ultimate worship and glory? Has he not asserted that the Son was in fact “sent in virtue of some disparity of power” or something “in him that was not equal to the Father”? He might put this “something” down to different roles rather than ontological inferiority, but the predicates to which he refers belong to the essence. This seems to me to be the key point of confusion in Ware’s argument.

“For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself,” Jesus says in John 5:26. To read this in an Arian way is to conclude that the Father is properly “God” because he possesses life intrinsically, essentially, eternally, and necessarily, and then he freely decides to grant this to the Son as a creature. To read it in an orthodox way is to conclude that the Son is as properly “God” as the Father because he receives from the Father eternally all of the attributes of the Father himself, including aseity.

There is, however, a more fundamental problem. In a footnote Ware writes,

The conceptions of both the “eternal begetting of the Son” and “eternal procession of the Spirit” seem to me highly speculative and not grounded in biblical teaching. Both the Son as only-begotten and the Spirit as proceeding from the Father (and the Son) refer, in my judgment, to the historical realities of the incarnation and Pentecost, respectively. (162n3)

This notion of “incarnational sonship” assumes that “Son of God” is a title that accrues to the Second Person at his incarnation. While the three persons existed eternally, according to this view, the Father became “father” and the Son a “son” with Jesus’ conception. I do not use the term lightly: this is a heretical concept. It was held by J. Oliver Buswell, Walter Martin, and others, while John MacArthur recanted this position in 2000. The assimilation of the immanent Trinity to the economy here reaches its apex. Yet the orthodox formulations of taxis presuppose these eternal processions; there is no taxis apart from them.

While Ware in the recent debate has rejected claims that he and others are developing a Trinitarian model to undergird a complementarian perspective, his repeated applications suggest otherwise. He is eager to draw specific applications from his model, such as that a woman “should not teach a mixed male-female adult Sunday school class” (149). At the same time, he states that “men must realize that their position as heads of homes in no way indicates their supposed superiority over their wives, in particular, or over women, in general” (143). But is not this superiority of the Father over the Son and of the Son over the Spirit precisely what he has been defending?

Scriptura Meum versus Sola Scriptura

Repeatedly, I have said that I do not regard the authors I have cited as Arians. Rather, I humbly suggest that they are confused. That is entirely understandable—we are dealing here with the greatest of all divine mysteries, and we must have more reflection at our disposal than our own. This is the danger of “biblicism”—that is, marginalizing the history of doctrine in favor of explicit biblical statements, when at least among orthodox Christians the history of doctrine is the history of biblical exegesis. There is no Bible verse for the distinction between processions and missions, for example, and yet it is an essential biblical truth.

Church historian Robert Godfrey often says, “We always want to reinvent the wheel…and it’s never round.” Biblicism keeps us from taking seriously the objections and the solutions that remain relatively unchanged since the fourth century. We can even return to the creeds with a “biblicistic” method, quoting a line here or there to justify our orthodoxy. But confession is not only of the letter but of the spirit—that is, the intention of the creed, which can be understood properly only by knowing something about the context and the process leading up to it. In addition to Ayres’s work, the following are superb places to start for this background: Arius: Heresy and Tradition by Rowan Williams, Retrieving Nicaea by Khaled Anatolios, The Trinity by Gilles Emery, and the recently released The Triune God by Fred Sanders.

We must always return to Scripture, the only judge in doctrinal controversies. Nothing may be added or subtracted from this canon as the magisterial authority for faith and practice. But biblicism isn’t biblical.

First, at the end of the day, biblicism merely substitutes my reading of the Bible for our reading of the Bible. In other words, in the name of basing everything on Scripture rather than on merely human wisdom, biblicism imagines that one may take a shortcut, circumventing centuries of complicated debates, and arrive at the immediately obvious meaning of Scripture.

Second, biblicism reduces the scope of biblical teaching to what is said explicitly in so many words. The Westminster Confession expresses well the classic rule:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture. (1.6)

Notice the high bar for such deductions: They must be not only good but necessary consequences of scriptural teaching. All parties in the current controversy can agree that Scripture teaches the doctrine of the Trinity at least in its basic rule: “One in essence, three in person.”

Despite the fact that the word Trinity cannot be found in any concordance, Scripture clearly and explicitly teaches that God is one and that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. The dogma of the Trinity is a good and necessary inference from a host of biblical passages. But this was not realized by each theologian or believer anew who came to the biblical text. Serious objections from teachers and pastors who were just as concerned with scriptural fidelity forced the church to wrestle with what it means when it baptizes people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

From Praise to Practice

The fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea wrote that none of the persons executes any work apart from the others, “but every operation which extends from God to the Creation…has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.”6 The Genevan Reformer John Calvin frequently repeats these Cappadocian formulas, as when he expresses it in his own words:

To the Father is attributed the beginning of action, the fountain and source of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and arrangement in action, while the energy and efficacy of action is assigned to the Spirit.7

This has no small impact on his entire theology. These are great and important rules for us to bear in mind. But it is in the pulpit, at the font, and in the pew where the rubber meets the road. We do not formulate our doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of what we think about ideal or even biblical patterns of human life. But our doctrine of the Trinity will inform and shape our worship, lives, and witness.

Luke reminds us that the early Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Anyone reared in the synagogue would have known what “the prayers” meant. Like a trellis, the formal prayers (said and sung) were a way of not only directing public worship but of also shaping informal worship in the family and alone. Basil of Caesarea, who revised the liturgy to more intentionally inculcate a full Trinitarianism, called pastors “to keep the Spirit undivided from the Father and the Son, preserving, both in confession of faith and in the doxology, the doctrine taught them at their baptism” (italics added).8 The Holy Spirit works through his word, and insofar as our liturgies convey that word, they convey nothing less than Christ with all of his benefits. Learning not only from our forebears’ successes but also from their failures helps us today to direct our hearts—and those of our fellow believers—to sing,

Michael S. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.