Hard-Boiled HeresyThe Trinity is not an egg. This mainstay of Trinity Sunday children’s sermons—or even adults’ sermons—intends orthodoxy, however ham-handedly. Look, kids! One single egg in three parts of shell, white, and yolk! Unfortunately for the sermonizer (though very fortunately for the cook) an egg yolk is not of the same substance as an eggshell, and neither is the same substance as an egg white. But if we’re talking Trinity, then shared substance is essential. Egg is disqualified. More sophisticated analogizers update from egg to H20, reasoning that it remains the same exact H20 at the molecular level, no matter if it takes the form of ice, liquid, or steam. Here the problem lies at the opposite extreme from the egg problem. The same substance persists throughout, sure, but those three forms are not in any way distinct, unique, and perduring realities. Each can be swapped for another just by applying heat or cold. The Father does not become the Son by melting (unless maybe you’re a Patripassianist), nor is the Son condensed Spirit (unless maybe you’re a Gnostic). And, apologies to the Irish, but the shamrock is the worst trinitarian analogy of all. It’s modalism sprouting from a little green stem. The problem with all three analogies is that they’re way too obsessed with the math—how can three be one, or one be three?—as if that were the core issue, the bedrock assertion of trinitarian faith. But you don’t start with the numbers problem. You don’t even start with the Bible. You start with experience. Are You (Trinitarianly) Experienced?Experience may well seem an even more implausible point of departure than an egg. But holy Scripture did not drop intact out of the sky. It’s the written record of human experience of and encounter with God. The experience came first. Then the Scripture. Then the questions. Then, at long last, the doctrine. So here, in very brief, is a sketch of the earliest Christians’ experience of the God that they would come to name and praise as the Holy Trinity. In the beginning, these believers were Jews who had long experience of God being one God and ultimately the only God. He alone occupied his category of Godness. His oneness and uniqueness had a further implication: he was Creator, and everything else was not—it was creation. Creator vs. creation was the one and only absolute difference within reality. Pagans may have presumed a slippery slide of divinity, admitting degrees of Godness and not-Godness, which is what in turn spawned their fecund polytheism. But not so for the children of Israel. Then these Jewish believers encountered Jesus. Experience of him posed no end of awkward questions, with answers almost too unsettling to contemplate. So unsettling, in fact, that it was preferable in the early days to approach them obliquely, because if you said outright what you were thinking, you’d probably be shut right down as having gone over to the pagan side. The evangelist Mark, for example, liked to relate provocative little stories that dared you to draw the correction conclusion. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (4:41). “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (10:18). “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things” (11:33). “And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’” (15:39). “Do you not yet understand?” (8:21). It was only a generation or so later that the evangelist John worked up the courage to let his Jesus state explicitly what Mark hinted at implicitly: “‘I and the Father are one’” (10:30). But here’s the thing. It’s not just a matter of adding divinity to Jesus, or nudging a little space in the God category for him to slip into, despite the obviously problematic flesh (and crucified flesh at that!) following in his wake. It’s that, if you allow the Son into Godness, then you irrevocably alter the category-of-God itself. Then God isn’t just God anymore. That One that you used to refer to simply as “God” has now “become” (?!) Father. You can’t talk anymore about “God” without also talking about “Father” and “Son.” They both live on the same Creator-side of the great divide in reality. Their coexistence and correlative names suggests that there is something the same, yet something different, within Godness on the Creator-side of reality. And then, as if that weren’t troubling enough, the earliest disciples had yet a third experience of God! There was an inkling of the third all along in Jesus’ ordinary fleshly days, to be sure. He talked about this third character, who showed up at his baptism, and any of Jesus’ disciples who studied Genesis or prayed the Psalms would have met up with #3 regularly, too. But it was only after Jesus was airlifted into heaven that this third figure came into its own. The Holy Spirit whooshed down on Jerusalem and next thing you knew was doing all kinds of crazy stuff: prompting tongues and inspiring repentance, forcing Jews and Gentiles into fellowship, warning about famine and directing mission traffic. There was no mistaking that this Spirit was, somehow or other, the Son’s Spirit, since everything it did was Christward. But if it was the Son’s Spirit, then inevitably it also had to be the Father’s Spirit. Now there were three distinct figures—or agents—or (eventually) hypostases—all manifesting Godness on the Creator-side of reality. This was the primal Christian experience. The disciples encountered and experienced these three, who were nevertheless united in doing the same thing, each in his own way, all for the same creating-saving-and-sanctifying purpose. The disciples realized that, when the Son prayed, he was not talking to himself, but to his Father. They knew that when the Son sent them his Spirit, he was not fobbing off a duplicate or copy of himself, but an other. As on earth so it is in heaven: there is both oneness and otherness in Godness. Wow. Weird. The Written Record
of Trinitarian ExperienceNow we can get back to the Bible. (Spoiler alert: it won’t solve all the problems.) Of course, what we know of earliest Christian experience we know at all because they committed it to writing. The earliest believers jotted down and passed around their concatenated memories of Jesus. They also wrote down their discussions (often heated) between and within churches and apostles. And when they did that, they couldn’t help but talk of God as they experienced him—as if there were three facets or personalities or agents at work. In fact, they couldn’t help but pray and worship as if there were three facts or personalities or agents at work within the one thing called God. So, for example, Paul began his Second Epistle to the Corinthians with the reminder, “It is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (1:21–22), and concluded the same letter with, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (13:14). But wait, you object, Paul says “God” and not “Father”! A good point, and one that will be important later in distinguishing “Unbegotten” (Father/God) from “Begotten” (Son/God) from “Proceeding” (Spirit/God). But that Paul had permanently revised his identification of God with Fatherness is clear from his confident assertion in Galatians 4:6 that “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” And Paul can’t summarize the gospel of the crucified Christ at all without appeal to God-the-Father or, for that matter, the Holy Spirit: Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle,
set apart for the gospel of God,
which he promised beforehand
through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,
concerning his Son,
who was descended from David according to the flesh
and was declared to be the Son of God in power
according to the Spirit of holiness
by his resurrection from the dead,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
through whom we have received grace and apostleship
to bring about the obedience of faith
for the sake of his name among all the nations,
including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,
To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:
Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s easy to get inured to the biblical language by its sheer overfamiliarity, as if Paul (or any other New Testament author) were just tossing out nice religious phraseology because it sounded good. But none of it is there by accident. Excavating all these turns of phrase, these titles and names and images and interrelationships, and figuring out what they collectively did—or didn’t—imply about God became the task of the church as it moved on through time and space. Interpreted Experience
and Interpreted ScriptureCultured despisers like to insinuate—or outright accuse—the scheming leaders of the early church of imposing their weird, irrelevant, and hyper-philosophical scheme of trinitarian dogma on the innocent and passive faithful. Obviously, cultured despisers have never been leaders of a church, or they would know better than to impute innocent passivity to church folk. But that is a separate issue. The salient point is that what ends up being the dogmatic conclusion of Christian orthodoxy arises from the soil of lived experience, attentive scriptural reading, and the questions that follow on both. You can trace your way through the earliest post-biblical church fathers—like, say, Ignatius, Irenaeus,
and Athanasius—and see how they insisted that there was only one God, and he was on the Creator-side of the divide, and yet how they spoke with equal ease and frequency about the Father and about the Son and about the Holy Spirit in distinct and distinctive ways, each one doing his own thing, yet all three doing everything together. Now add one more complication to this reflection and refinement process. The ground of the church shifted away from being comprised predominantly of Jews, whom you could trust to know, if nothing else, that God was God and no one else. Before long the church was overrun with a whole panoply of ex-pagans, whom you could trust to know, if nothing else, that divinity ranged from absolute zero to Planck temperature and everything in between. So, go ahead and try having Christian spiritual experience and reading Scripture in the company of ex-pagans. Suddenly you’ve got one heck of a big problem on your hands. Either you go all-in on the One-God part, and conclude that One-God means One-Agent or -Actor or -Figure… thereby disqualifying Son and Spirit from Godness and removing the “Father” part from the One-God’s true nature. Or you go all-in one the Three-Agents or -Actors or -Figures part, and conclude that the only way to explain the Threeness is with multiple gods… thereby disqualifying the Hebrew conviction that there is One-God and One-God only, and flirting with pagan polytheism. And to make matters worse: everyone defends their views on the grounds of Scripture. By the time we hit the famous church councils of Nicea and Constantinople in the fourth century, the canon is pretty much agreed upon. Everyone is using the same biblical data. Everyone is using the same liturgical data, too—from prayers to sacraments to hymns. To complicate matters further, admired figures of the recent Christian past had made good-faith arguments to advance the conversation about what God is and isn’t, but it turned out that their acute insights could be highjacked for questionable contemporary purposes. Origen, for example, was a formative influence on Nicene defenders, but even they had to admit that Origen had been so eager to defend the Oneness of God against polytheism that the anti-Nicene Subordinationists found him a good ally in demoting Son and Spirit. And they all used Scripture to defend Subordinationism, too. So here’s the upshot of the fourth-century realization. Yes, you start from lived experience of and with God. But it matters how you interpret it. Experience on its own is ambiguous. It can be pushed and pulled and manipulated and shaped in all different directions. You have to interpret it. You will interpret it, regardless. And, it turns out, the same applies to the Bible. Scripture certainly communicates a lot of things we would not otherwise have known about God. It offers images of God and titles for God, metaphors and similes and songs. It even offers commentary on itself. But it is a bounded book, and anything with limits can’t, by definition, anticipate and argue with every conceivable question or challenge that might arise. The sheer ability of words to contain multiple meanings and shades of meanings within themselves means you always have to clarify, qualify, and, yes, interpret the Bible. You have to interpret it. You will interpret it, regardless. A Chiffonade of BasilThere are lots of heroes on the way to the doctrine of the Trinity; it certainly wasn’t a solo endeavor. And, in retrospect, it looks like the villains were just as necessary in reaching the goal, since their exploration of dead-ends got the church to back up and strike off in a more promising direction once again. But, for the purposes of Theology & a Recipe, we’ll give pride of place to the one trinitarian theologian who managed to have the same name as a culinary herb: Basil. Basil of Caesarea, later nicknamed “the Great” (330–379), lived through multiple Roman emperors and between two great church councils. His Christianity was legal but not yet mandatory. That meant, among other things, that the battle had definitively shifted from outside to inside the church. As a result, Basil was involved in no small amount of intrigue to get the right bishops in and keep the wrong ones out. This won him no friends, including among his own friends: neither brother Gregory (of Nyssa) nor friend Gregory (of Nazianzus) ever forgave him for their episcopal consecrations. They did, however, soften up considerably after he had the decency to die, and compensated for their coldness by eulogizing him into being one of the first non-martyred saints ever to be venerated. And this was because, for all Basil’s faults, he did a world of good. He introduced the chanting of the Psalms in his local Christian liturgy, initiated a public works effort to feed the starving during a famine, and reintegrated the Greek classics into Christian education for the sake of building up an educated ecclesia. As bishop of Caesarea, he built a house of prayer, a hospital, a hostel, and a ptōchotropheion for feeding the poor (you can see why that particular Greek word never made it into English). Above all, Basil advanced the conversation about God the One and God the Three—advanced it so greatly that the two Gregories could pick up where he left off and pave the way from Nicea (325) to Constantinople (381) and the trinitarian doctrine confessed by the whole church to this day. The problem Basil and his later admirers had to tackle was this: experience, Scripture, liturgy, and baptism all signaled that whenever Christians talked about “God,” they invariably talked about a “Father”—immaterial and unbegotten—as well as a “Son”—incarnate and begotten in heaven long before his incarnation—and a “Spirit”—distinctly and repletively holy but neither begotten nor unbegotten. How to draw all these strands together into one coherent whole? Why even try? What was at stake? Basil said: salvation was at stake. Salvation was at stake because baptism was at stake. Baptism was at stake because the very words “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” were at stake. This is the name of the God into which we’re baptized, the name by which we’re saved. Get this wrong, and the very substance of salvation vanishes into the mist. But now we’re back at the interpretation problem, because there’s more than one way to read the name in which we baptize. Basil’s rival Eunomius, for example, figured it was a rank-ordered list: Father at the top, Son taking second place, Spirit coming in for the bronze. That’s because Eunomius took the popular honorific applied to the Father, “the Unbegotten” (in contrast to the Begotten Son), and equated it with Godness plain and simple. If Unbegotten = God, then Begotten = Not-God, and “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” thus refers to the CEO of Divine Compassion Inc. plus his vice-president and secretary. Eunomius at least recognized that Father, Son, and Spirit were distinct; he didn’t blend them into one, or cause one to morph into the other. But his three figures were so distinct that there was no shared substance among them. Basil saw the problem and thought through it. He needed a way to express the shared sameness and the distinct otherness at the same time. That, he knew, was the critical insight of the Council of Nicea to which he was devoted. And it meant that theology was not enough. He also needed oeconomics. Home OeconomicsNowadays “theology” is the broad term for all investigations by Christians into God, church, and everything else from the perspective of faith. But back in Basil’s day, it had a more technical meaning. The “study of God” meant the study of that one substance shared absolutely and undividedly by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But, Basil insisted, if you want to zero in on one of these three, then you have to employ a different tool of investigation: oeconomics. (It’s exactly the same as the English word “economics,” both deriving from Greek, but so you don’t come away with the idea that the Trinity is a fungible portfolio of stocks, bonds, and cash, I’ll keep the original Greek omicron out in front of the term.) Theology talks about the eternal Son of God, begotten of the Father. Oeconomics talks about the incarnate Son of God, still begotten of the Father but also conceived by the Virgin Mary, who lived, died, and rose again within a bounded stretch of historical time. It’s the same Jesus Christ, Son of God, in both theology and oeconomics. But you have to distinguish which tool you’re using when you talk about him to make sense of and do justice to experience, Scripture, liturgy, and baptism. Take, for example, this line from I Corinthians 8:6: “There is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” You could read this in a “theological” way to imply an absolute distinction between God = Father and Lord = Jesus, as if it’s about not just two figures, but two entirely different kinds of beings. Basil disagrees. He interprets and explains the passage “oeconomically”: These are the words of a writer not laying down a rule,
but carefully distinguishing the hypostases.
The object of the apostle in thus writing was
not to introduce differences in their natures,
but to exhibit the notion of Father and of Son
as not conflated one with the other.
That the phrases are not opposed to one another
and do not, like squadrons in war marshalled one against another,
bring the natures to which they are applied into mutual conflict,
is perfectly plain from the passage in question.
(On the Holy Spirit V.7) Note here the famous trinitarian term “hypostases.” It refers to the agents/figures/actors/persons within God, who for all their distinctness still share a common nature (“ousia,” the other famous trinitarian term). Basil’s point here is that Paul’s point here is not to estrange Father from Son as regards nature, but to speak of their distinct agential roles in the common divine work of creation. Why does it matter to make this kind of distinction at all? For Basil, finally, it’s the only approach that accounts adequately for the full range of Christian encounter with God. It’s what allows both for the total and complete Godness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet for the distinct and distinguished characteristics and actions of the equally divine Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This tool of thought and speech helps the church interpret Scripture and sacraments aright, and therefore helps us dig more deeply into the meaning of our salvation. As Basil explains: The distinction between ousia and hypostasis
is the same as that between the general and the particular;
as, for instance, between the category of humanity
and the particular human.
Which is why, in the case of the Godhead,
we confess one essence or substance
so as not to give each
a different definition of their existence,
but we confess a particular hypostasis,
in order that our conception of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively
may be without confusion and clear.
If we have no distinct perception
of the separate characteristics—
namely, Fatherhood, Sonship, and Sanctification—
but form our conception of God
from the general idea of existence,
we cannot possibly give a sound account of our faith.
We must, therefore, confess our faith
by adding the particular to the common.
(Epistle 236.6) It didn’t take Basil long to realize that this explanation had its own problems. All human beings share a common humanity—a common nature, existence, or substance—but the billions of us in our concrete individuality cannot possibly be one in the same way we confess and experience God to be one. This analogy has definite limits: it’s only meant to show that the notion of both a common nature and particular individuals is not illogical or impossible. Just don’t take it too far. In addition to not being an egg or a shamrock, the Trinity is also not identical triplets. Basil didn’t invent the ousia/hypostasis distinction, but he took it up, championed it, advanced it, and explored it. And after a not inconsiderable number of setbacks, he won the day. Unbegotten and Begotten alike were both confessed as true God, as Light from Light, as sharing the same substance while retaining their distinct personhood. It looked like Nicea was secured for the church. Except that there was one little problem with Nicea, a problem that increasingly weighed on Basil’s mind, not to mention his opponents’: Nicea said nothing about the third person, except: “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” That’s it. Some took this to mean that whatever the Spirit was, it wasn’t the same as what the Father and the Son were. Basil had a different take on the matter: “The doctrine of the Spirit, however, is merely mentioned, as needing no elaboration, because at the time of the Council no question was mooted, and the opinion on this subject in the hearts of the faithful was exposed to no attack” (Epistle 125.3). Which may well have been true. But the Godness of the Spirit in Basil’s day was definitely under attack. Basil remained a staunch Nicene defender, but taking up the contemporary challenge meant going beyond Nicea—saying something more. Adding more to the dogmatic confession of the council, he knew, could spawn problems of its own. But in the end, there was no choice. It had to be done. Basil had to announce, defend, and explore the divinity of the Holy Spirit—or else the very source of Christian faith and holiness would vanish, and salvation right along with it. “The Imaginations of Drunken Delusion
and Phrensied Insanity”So Basil characterized the demoters of the Spirit’s divinity. Phrenzied, drunk, or otherwise, these opponents and their arguments seem especially strange today. If you can grant divinity to a crucified man, what’s so hard about extending it to an immaterial Spirit, and a holy one, at that? Well, for one thing, the relationship of Spirit to Father and Son is not nearly as obvious as the relationship between Father and Son. You can’t speak of a father without his offspring, or a son without his parent, but at least in ordinary speech it’s pretty easy to talk about either without a spirit, holy or otherwise. Moreover, the Spirit is not unbegotten, nor is it begotten—but what else is there? The ultimate language to be adopted was “proceeding,” which, let’s admit, doesn’t clarify matters much. It serves chiefly to distinguish the kind of relationship the Spirit has to the Father from the kind of relationship the Son has to the Father. Opponents of the Spirit’s divinity could mount a better argument than that, though. They observed that the Spirit is said to be sent, by Father and Son alike. To be sent is to be subservient, obedient, and therefore inferior. On top of that, opponents said, the Spirit borrows or receives its “holy” quality, and only carts it along to dump on the saints. The Spirit doesn’t generate holiness, nor is the Spirit’s scope of action creation-wide, only saint-wide. It’s like a messenger boy, maybe a supreme angel—but hardly worthy of inclusion in Godness itself. Basil counters this with another oeconomic argument. Just like Father and Son, Spirit has a distinctive domain of activities that require distinguishing from that of the other two—but this in no way implies a lesser Godness. In fact, a closer look at the oeconomic activities of the Spirit compels a confession of the theological status of Spirit as truly God. For example, Basil asserts an unbroken chain of belief that starts with the Spirit, extends to the Son, and culminates in the Father. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit,” as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 12:3. But how can the Spirit lead us to Jesus’ Lordship without possessing its own divine knowledge of Jesus’ Lordship? Moreover, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18). But how can the Son lead us to the Father without possessing his own divine knowledge of the Father’s Godness? This demonstrates, not a step up the divinity chain in either case (sorry, pagans), but the mutual knowledge of Father, Son, and Spirit in their eternal life, which we merely glimpse in the oeconomy. Basil concludes, “It is impossible to worship the Son, save by the Holy Ghost; impossible to call upon the Father, save by the Spirit of adoption” (On the Holy Spirit XI.27). And beyond that, Scripture shows that yes, the Spirit is passively sent—but the Spirit is also an active agent, time and again. Basil reels off a list of these activities, showing that Father and Son don’t (and possibly can’t) do their own thing without the Spirit doing its own thing, too: Are we talking Christ’s advent? The Spirit is forerunner.
Are we talking incarnation? The Spirit is inseparable.
Working of miracles and gifts of healing are through the Holy Spirit.
Demons were driven out by the Spirit of God.
The devil was brought to nothing by the presence of the Spirit.
Remission of sins was by the gift of the Spirit,
for “you were washed, you were sanctified…
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and in the Holy Spirit of our God.”
There is a close relationship with God through the Spirit,
for “God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts,
crying ‘Abba, Father.’”
The resurrection from the dead is effected
by the operation of the Spirit,
for “You send forth your spirit, and they are created;
and you renew the face of the earth.”
(On the Holy Spirit XIX.49) If anything, the Spirit i crucial to the saving operation of Father and Son. Nothing is accomplished without the Spirit. If Father and Son can’t do without the Spirit, it can only be because the Spirit is the same thing-stuff-essence-ousia as they are. Which leads to Basil’s final point: the Holy Spirit is holiness itself, and by nature, not derivatively. Even the best of human saints borrow their saintliness. Not so the Spirit. That distinctive quality of Godness is the Spirit’s domain. The Spirit is holiness, so profoundly and infinitely that no amount of giving away of holiness can deplete it. And that is finally why you can’t conceptualize the holy God at all without the Holy Spirit. Sunny-Side UpBy now, Basil should have disabused us of the notion that we can proffer any created item as an adequate analogy of the Trinity. But the gain far outstrips the loss! For Basil shows us that “Trinity” is shortest possible way to summarize salvation. And that baptism is the business of being claimed by the Trinity. And that the Trinity guides our right reading of Scripture. And that the Trinity is our experience of God. It’s not an esoteric math puzzle for one Sunday of the year, but a living reality to be worshiped every Sunday and encountered every day of the week. Follow Basil’s trail, and the Trinity will manifest everywhere you look. There is still so much to be said. The church’s encounter with the Trinity is far from over. And happily, the Trinity doesn’t mean that you have to eject eggs from your diet. It just means that they’re much better suited to illustrating heresy than orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, the recipes that follow are really the only format in which heresy should ever be consumed.
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