To follow up:
haven’t looked recently, but I’d be very surprised to learn that 13:14 wasn’t being used as a trinitarian prooftext long before English was a language.
A tiny bit of looking proved this right: Chrysostom used II Cor. 13:14 (along with Mt 28:19 and II cor. 12:4) to show the equality of the HS to the Father and Son in his commentary on I Cor. 8:5-6:
Explaining why Paul would omit mention of the HS in the passage being commented on, he writes:
it is plain, that to spare the weakness of the hearers he used this mode of explanation, and for this reason made no mention at all of the Spirit. For if it be not this, neither ought he to make mention of the Spirit elsewhere, nor to join Him with the Father and the Son. For if He be rejected from the Father and Son, much more ought He not to be put in the same rank with them in the matter of Baptism; where most especially the dignity of the Godhead appears and gifts are bestowed which pertain to God alone to afford. Thus then I have assigned the cause why in this place He is passed over in silence. Now do thou if this be not the true reason, tell me, why He is ranked with Them in Baptism? But you can not give any other reason but His being of equal honor. At any rate, when he has no such constraint upon him, he puts Him in the same rank, saying thus: 2 Corinthians 13:14 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with you all: and again, 2 Corinthians 12:4 There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit: and there are diversities of administrations, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of workings but the same God. But because now his speech was with Greeks and the weaker sort of the converts from among Greeks, for this reason he husbands it (ταμιεύεται) so far.
Or perhaps Paul did not include the HS in II Cor 8:5-6 because he had no conception yet of the HS as a separate distinct person? Chrysostom had the benefit of a couple centuries of Trinitarian speculation. My comment about English, which seemed clear enough, was to point out the convention among translators of turning every use of pneuma in the NT into a Proper Noun. This is Nicaeanism in retrospect.
My comment about English, which seemed clear enough, was to point out the convention among translators of turning every use of pneuma in the NT into a Proper Noun.
Here is the question you asked with leading context:
It does make a difference whether we refer to ‘the spirit of holiness’ rather than to the ‘Holy Spirit’. I hesitate to use grammatical arguments since I’m not an expert but it’s useful to remember that in Greek the word pneuma is grammatically neuter. I simply ask – a question not a claim – whether 13:14 would even be seen as a Trinitarian formulation to begin with without the oh so helpful efforts of English translators?
I understood your suggestion that we might only read this as a trinitarian passage because translators tendentiously render “hagion pneuma” as a proper noun. And my reply was very much to that point: Chrysostom was reading this in Greek, not in translation, and he saw it as a trinitarian passage.
I’m not saying adherents of Niceo-Constantinopolitan orthodoxy never misconstrue the meaning of passages or force harmonizing readings on the NT. I am saying that the doctrine of the trinity, at least its primitive outlines, finds its roots in Scripture itself. It was not solely motivated by independent philosophical considerations, but it was invented, principally, to make sense of perplexing passages of Scripture. There are some passages that suggest–even read in Greek by fluent Greek speakers–a trinitarian reading.
Saying the NT, read fairly, present the HS consistently and unambigiously as just some divine attribute present in the world, never as a person or divine agent in its own right, and that the only reason people would develop trinitarianism must be extrinsic to the NT, is simply too facile. Precisely what each NT author thought of the HS, I can’t say. But the Nicaean party certainly had serious scriptural reasons to develop and defend a trinitarian reading of Scripture.
I am saying that the doctrine of the trinity, at least its primitive outlines, finds its roots in Scripture itself.
I did say that actually. Certain NT passages were used as prooftexts and interpreted to support the developing doctrine of the Trinity which began quite early. My argument isn’t about that.
But the Nicaean party certainly had serious scriptural reasons to develop and defend a trinitarian reading of Scripture.
The Nicaean party didn’t develop and defend a Trinitarian reading of Scripture. Arius was a Trinitarian! Nicaea was an innovation because it postulated a particular form of Trinitarianism where three distinct persons share the same substance. Greek philosophy was being used to support this notion. I cannot find any expression of this idea before the writings of Athanasius although I doubt it sprang out of thin air. Trinitarian Monarchical Subordinationism on the other hand had a venerable history going back to the NT. It was the dominant Christology of the second and most of the third century. Some Trinitarians thought the HS was personal and some did not. The writers of the NT certainly believed in the pneuma of God. None of them were Nicaean. So why do translators treat them as if they were?
@Stephen
**” Nicaea was an innovation because it postulated a particular form of Trinitarianism where three distinct persons share the same substance. Greek philosophy was being used to support this notion. I cannot find any expression of this idea before the writings of Athanasius although I doubt it sprang out of thin air.”**
Eusebius agrees that it didn’t spring out of thin air – “To which doctrine, explained in this way, it appeared right to assent, especially since we knew that some eminent bishops and learned writers among the ancients have used the term “homoousios” in their theological discourses concerning the nature of the Father and the Son.”
The real difference between Arius and the 99% of bishops at Nicaea is contained in the anathemas following the creed, “But those who say: There was a time when he was not; and He was not before he was made; and He was made out of nothing, or He is of another substance or essence, or The Son of God is created, or changeable, or alterable— they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.”
The dispute had nothing to do with a “Trinitarian Monarchical Subordinationism” being replaced with a “Trinitarianism where three distinct persons share the same substance.”
**”Some Trinitarians thought the HS was personal and some did not.”**
How could someone who did not believe the Holy Spirit to be a person be described as trinitarian? If they saw the spirit as only “a manifestation of God – or Jesus” or “an active spiritual principle that flows from the Son, his essence or presence”, then there who only be two persons in unity.
Brenmcg I weary.
Every point you mentioned I have addressed repeatedly. With all due respect you approach this subject from a prior faith position that makes it impossible for you to consider it historically or critically.
To sum up. None of this originated with me nor do I consider any of it in any way controversial.
The doctrines of the Church developed over time. Because the church fathers privileged apostolic testimony their speculations used passages from the NT available to them. Because the writers of the NT were not systematic theologians their pronouncements are sometimes ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations. This fact stimulated speculation. There are multiple views of the significance of Christ and the meaning of his death present in the NT. Consequently one generation’s orthodoxy was another generation’s heresy. Because the church fathers were educated in a Hellenistic environment they occasionally used greek philosophy to support their speculations.
Trinitarian speculation was largely driven by Christology. One’s view of the Trinity was derived in large part from one’s view of the relationship between The Father and The Son. The Holy Spirit was kind of brought along for the ride. The meaning of the Pneuma, a concept as fraught in its own way as the concept of the Logos , changed over time. It seems to have begun as a reflection of the view of the Hebrew Bible, as the active aspect of the transcendent God in the world, which eventually assumed a more or less independent existence, morphing eventually into the Third Person of the Nicene Trinity. The Nicene viewpoint dominates our discourse to the point where translators routinely treat Pneuma as a Proper Noun whether or not the NT passage actually supports such a reading.
@Stephen
**”Every point you mentioned I have addressed repeatedly.”**
Here’s some points you haven’t responded to yet.
1) There are different kinds of “subordinationism” (the Nicene creed is itself a type of subordinationism) – so simply pointing out that early church thinkers were “subordinationists” does not mean they agree with Arius over Nicene orthodoxy.
2) the terms “co-eternal” “co-equal” and “person” are not present in the Nicene creed. The meaning of the term ‘homoousios’ was discussed at Nicaea, where according to Eusebius it was explained that the phrase indicated that the Son is truly from the Father, but he is not a part of him. And suggests that the Son of God bears no resemblance to the creatures who came into being, but that he is in every way similar to his Father alone who begat him. So therefore no examples have yet been given of new ideas at Nicaea that weren’t present in the NT.
3) The Holy Spirit is described in the NT as a “testifier”, an “intercessor”, it “knows the mind of God” and “searches all things even the depths of God”. Terms which indicate personage, so the claim that “personhood” being given to the holy spirit is a later development would be a false one. When orthodoxy claims the holy spirit to be a person it is claiming nothing more than it does these types of actions separately to the father and son.
I’m struggling to make sense of a couple aspects of what you are holding, Stephen.
The first thing I can’t sort out is that, on the one hand, you want to hold that the original theology was subordinationist monarchism, on the other, you want to say that the original theology did not regard the HS as a distinct person. I can’t quite square these two points.
Subordinationist monarchianism is basically Arianism: the Father alone is the one true God, he alone is the one source and fully divine; the Son/Logos and the HS are lesser beings (though perhaps “divine” in some manner of speaking), they are essentially subordinated to the one monarch, as creatures to creator. A pressing point for our purposes is that this makes the subordinate “divine” persons truly distinct from the monarch.
There was another early sort of monarchinan theology that held that the three persons are merely aspects or modes of the one God (Modalism, Sabellianism, patripassianism); these deny that the HS is really another person (in the mature, trinitarian sense of “person”–we must bear in mind that part of the problem is determining just what words like “persona” or “hupostasis” or “prosopon” really signify), but they are not subordinationists: The Holy Spirit isn’t subordinated to the Father because he just is the same individual that the Father is.
Part of the problem of reconstructing this history is that it is full of obscure figures making obscure points by using language in obscure ways. Perhaps you know of figures (or interpretations of figures) I don’t.
My second confusion is that you want to say that that early subordinationist monarchian theology was trinitarian, but as those classifications are usually employed, they are taken as opposed. E.g., Wikipedia defines monarchianism as “a doctrine that emphasizes God as one indivisible being, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism . . .”
So what do you mean by “trinitarian”?
Porphyry, very early on the figures of the Father, the Son and the Spirit were identified and discussed. The question then became, what was their relationship? As Christ’s status became more and more exalted, the problem of monotheism arose. Don’t we have two Gods? The problem as I see it is that colloquially, the word Trinitarianism has come to be considered synonymous with the Nicene viewpoint which, with tweaks, became the orthodox view. There were ante-Nicene views of the relationship between these three figures. When scholars use the word Trinitarian they mean any view that posits some special relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which as I pointed out before, began very early on. If someone wants to call pre-Nicene views “proto-Trinitarianism” to distinguish it, fine. Not really my main point.
I would point out however that the first figure to actually use the word “Trinity” was Tertullian who clearly was not a Nicaean. Tertullian, in distinction to Arius but in common with Justin, believed that the Son and the Spirit were created out of the substance of the Father. There was a time when they were not, to put it in Nicene terms. (Arius believed the Son was created but not out of the substance of the Father.)
The development of the figures of the Son and the Spirit took differing trajectories. Christ began at least in some sense (depending on whom you asked) as a human who was exalted higher and higher. The Spirit began as an active manifestation of God and became more and more independent. When I say the Spirit was not a distinct person I mean the stage of thinking where Pneuma was still considered as an active manifestation of God the Father’s activity in the world. One of the aspects of Second Temple Judaism, as God the Father became more and more transcendent, was the appearance of intermediary figures. This idea, influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, played a strong role in Jewish and Christian speculation.
Once again my main points are these:
The doctrines of the Church developed over time.
It is mistaken to try to retrofit Nicene views into the New Testament.
How legitimate are the claims of a Babylonian Trinity influencing the Christian doctrine?
Sorry Brad I missed your post.
By “Babylonian Trinity” I assume you mean the figures of Nimrod, Tammuz and Semiramis about whom the claim is made that they somehow prefigured the Christian Trinity. This viewpoint is problematic because it seems to be pretty much an attempt to retrofit a later Christian Trinitarian conception back into an earlier mythological formulation not nearly so cut and dried.
Nimrod seems to have been a human ruler who was divinized and then later associated with the god Marduk. Tammuz was associated with fertility and consort of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Semiramis was a legendary Assyrian queen. There was some speculation that Semiramis was the mother of Nimrod and through an incestuous relationship with Nimrod they produced Tammuz but this is pure 19th century occultism and has nothing to do with actual ancient near eastern mythology. The scholar Jonathon Z Smith has written quite a bit on the hazards of comparative religion.
This thread seemed to have run out of gas but just this week I stumbled upon a recent debate between my favorite hardcore Calvinist apologist James White and unitarian Dale Tuggy over whether Jesus is Yahweh. Of course what they’re arguing about is the reality of the doctrine of the Trinity and whether or not it is the teaching of the Bible. Both men identify as Christians so this is an internecine quarrel although I’m pretty sure White would not regard Unitarians as “real” Christians.
** you do not have permission to see this link ** is the debate. If you’re interested watch as much as you can stand. The opening statements give you some idea of their positions. White and Tuggy have debated several times before so a lot is taken for granted in their presentations.
Both men, opposed otherwise, are operating on a shared assumption.
Being divine means being God. For White when the writers of the NT portray Jesus as divine it is evidence that they thought he was God. Tuggy must argue that the NT never portrays Jesus as divine. Neither appears to understand that the ancient concept of divinity was different than ours where God is divine and nothing else is. The ancients believed that there was a continuum between humans and the gods. And there were points all along this continuum. One can be divine and not be the Supreme God. And it was possible to move along this continuum in both directions. We think in discrete categories unknown to the ancients.
The ancients believed that there was a continuum between humans and the gods. And there were points all along this continuum. One can be divine and not be the Supreme God. And it was possible to move along this continuum in both directions. We think in discrete categories unknown to the ancients.
I think you are absolutely right on this.
If you think in terms of angels its not hard to think of half-divine things. I used to struggle to go the other way, to try to conceptualize the idea of men becoming divine: who could seriously think that an emperor becomes a god when the senate says so?
Once I started thinking in terms of “the divine” or “divinity”–a nebulous quality that can be shared in degrees, it stopped seeming so strange. And why should it be strange? Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition we get Gen 1:26. The idea that there is something divine in each of us–reason, a capacity for heroism–, and that there might be more of the divine in the greater-souled of us is not a crazy idea. Consider that there is a journal of Thomistic philosophy and theology called simply, “Divus Thomas”–the title “divus,” here being used as a synonym for “Saint,” means “divine” or “godlike,” and it is the same title that was given to deified persons by the Romans–consider the temple of divus Augustus. Perhaps more familiar to Protestant sensibilities, it is hardly strange to call a good man, “godly”.
And if you accept that there is a soul that survives bodily death (e.g., Seneca: “That day, which you fear as being the end of all things, is the birthday of your eternity. Lay aside your burden – why delay?”) then you’ve arrived. If you are thinking like that, it seems perfectly natural that a great emperor like Augustus might be worshiped as a god.
The idea that there is something divine in each of us–reason, a capacity for heroism–, and that there might be more of the divine in the greater-souled of us is not a crazy idea.
Good points. The Stoics believed that the human body/person also existed on such a continuum. There is the sarx, the fleshy part, of course, but also the psyche and the pneuma, all made of progressively finer “stuff”. Not discrete “parts” but a single continuous flow. As several scholars have pointed out it’s real hard to imagine that Paul was ignorant of this view when he describes the Resurrection body in I Cor 15. Of course by Paul’s day Second Temple Judaism was thoroughly Hellenized. Another point lost on White and Tuggy.
So we’re agreed that the NT writers thought Jesus was divine.
Can we agree that they thought there was only one god?
And that at least John and Paul thought Jesus to be Lord of Heaven and Earth, existed before, and was a participant in the creation of, the entire cosmos?
In what sense then would could God the Father be said to be of a higher ontological status than the creator of the cosmos in John and Paul’s theology?
It has to be the case that the writer of that corinthian 15 passage understands hypostatis and ousia as one and the same thing otherwise it leaves open the posibility that hypostatis of the father is subject to the ousia which doesnt sound right.
“it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him”
In short, the father is identical to “the God” in 1 cor 15
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