Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART I THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF THE DIVINE BEING
- PART II THE BIBLICAL SOURCES OF TRINITARIAN THOUGHT
- PART III THE TRINITY, IMMANENT AND ECONOMIC
- PART IV THE SOCIAL TRINITY
- PART V THE COSMIC TRINITY
- 36 The Doctrine of Perichoresis
- 37 The Convergence of Social and One-Consciousness Models of the Trinity
- 38 Life-Streams and Persons
- 39 Modalism and Necessity
- 40 The Cosmic Trinity
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Name Index
38 - Life-Streams and Persons
from PART V - THE COSMIC TRINITY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART I THE THREEFOLD NATURE OF THE DIVINE BEING
- PART II THE BIBLICAL SOURCES OF TRINITARIAN THOUGHT
- PART III THE TRINITY, IMMANENT AND ECONOMIC
- PART IV THE SOCIAL TRINITY
- PART V THE COSMIC TRINITY
- 36 The Doctrine of Perichoresis
- 37 The Convergence of Social and One-Consciousness Models of the Trinity
- 38 Life-Streams and Persons
- 39 Modalism and Necessity
- 40 The Cosmic Trinity
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
These problems are stated strongly by the philosopher David Wiggins (Wiggins, 1980), who argued that the doctrine of the Trinity was incoherent because it held that the Father is the same God as the Son but not the same person as the Son. Indeed, the Athanasian Creed states that ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God’. But, Wiggins argued, if two things are identical, then they must be identical with one another in every respect. However, this charge can be evaded if one says that no person, or aspect, of the Trinity is strictly identical with God. Each person is identical with an aspect of God, and so in a sense one could say, with the Athanasian Creed that ‘each person is God’. But the ‘is’ here is not the ‘is’ of strict identity. It is an ‘is’ of inclusion, like saying that ‘each person is divine, or has the nature of God’. The Father is not, however, strictly identical with God in Wiggin's sense of possessing every property that God has. Nor is the Son, and nor is the Spirit. So the Father is not ‘the same God as the Son’. The Father and the Son are not gods at all. They have the nature of God. But the one God is an inseparable composite of Father, Son, and Spirit, as we clearly discern when we see that the Trinity always acts as a whole in relation to created things. It is never the case that the Father, Son, or Spirit acts on its own. That is why we can correctly say that God dies on the cross, not just that Jesus dies on the cross. Yet it is true that it is Jesus who goes to the cross and who suffers the pains of his body. In other words, it is Jesus as God united to a human person who suffers on the cross and who contributes suffering to the experience of God. This is also why, if we are concerned for technical correctness, it may be better not to say that Jesus is identical with God just like that.
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- Christ and the CosmosA Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine, pp. 239 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015