ONTOLOGY, BELIEF, AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY Leroy T. Howe *

In the Christian tradition, it is generally agreed that the doctrine of the Trinity represents Christianity's most carefully articulated conceptualization of divine being. As Paul Tillich has pointed out, trinitarian thinking is present in m a n y religious traditions, but there is nothing like a doctrine of the Trinity to be found except in Christianity. It is the thesis of this essay that, precisely as doctrine, trinitarianism represents a unique contribution to humankind's reflection about transcendent reality.

(1) I m m a n e n t and economic trinitarianism

The doctrine of the Trinity states clearly and precisely how the Christian community understands both the appearance and the being of God. It alleges an understanding not only of how GOd appears to h u m a n beings, what divinity is pro nobis; it also intends to express what is the case about GOd himself. Hence, trinitarian doctrine has an 'economic' side, clarifying God's phenomenal manifestations, and an 'immanent' side, asserting something about the very being of the God who appears. As Karl Barth rightly perceived, it is of utmost consequence for all Christian claims about God's revelation to be in a position to affirm also that God is as he is revealed. Trinitarian language itself is deceptively simple. Behind it lies centuries of reflection upon the kind of conceptual structure with which adequately to express the content of Christian faith in God, within a framework of thinking

*Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, U.S.A.

about reality which was increasingly dependent upon metaphysics. The doctrine is an impressive work of translation, exhibiting a movement of faith out of a story and into a mode of rationality which preoccupies itself with entities, beth of this world and the next; its conceptual rigour advances significantly the claims of Christian theology to truth, even though the trinitarian controversies of the third and fourth centuries also were influenced greatly by complex political conflicts. The result of the controversies, however, also represents a momentous intellectual achievement as well as sagacious legislative comp r o m i ~ . Properly understood, trinitarian doctrine contains within it nothing less t h e n a transformation of some of the fundamental categories of Western thinking itself. This dimension of trinitarian doctrine has been all too readily dismissed in modern theological discussions, for iustanee, by foeuming inordinate attention on the obvious fact the the doctrine is presented in scripture. References to Father, Son and Holy Spirit form the bas/s of the doctrine, but it is erroneous to suppose that in scripture there is anything like the concentrated and carefully worded formulation which emerged explicitly in the fourth century Nicene discussions. Modern-day Protestant theology had tended to understress the significance of the Trinity by following Schleiermacher's relegation of it to the status of an appendix to Christian doctrine. Though Schleiermacher's location of the doctrine at the end of The Christian Faith expressed his view also of its climactic significance for a system of doctrine, what was decisive for subsequent discussions was the fact that, for Schleiermacher, the doctrine itself must be shown to be an immediate inference from religious experience. Only dectrines which cluster around the theme of redemption, in Schleiermacher's view, can be said to have the status of immediate inferences from experience of God-consciousness i n lmity with sensible self-consciousness; the Trinity is not one of those. But even Schleiermacher recognized that the intellectual impressiveness of the doctrine of the Trinity is not to be dismissed merely because it cannot be inferred immediately from religious experience.

Romen Catholic theology has for centuries exalted the language of the Trinity as the language of incomprehensible mystery; the dogma of the Trinity is 'above reason'. It has become, as Tillich also observed, something to be placed upon the altar and adored, but not probed. While it may well be that there are aspects to the doctrine of the Trinity which are above reason, there is no good reason to dismiss the intellectual significance of these other aspects of the doctrine which are not. What the doctrine of the Trinity asserts foundationally is that the God who is worshipped in the Christian community appears, definitively and exhaustively, in three distinctive and irreducible forms. Each form has being in its own right and /s not other than the divine being. The trinitarian manifestations do not refer merely to forms in which God, who is in himself trascendent of the forms, appears to believers; each of these forms/s God, differentiated as each also is. Further, in each, the others also are present, even as they are differentiatable in their own distinctive modes of presence. Persona, then, is to be understood as denoting more than the 'role' or 'mask', behind which the true being sometimes is. Instead, it is equivalent to the Greek hypostas/s: concrete individuated being, as well as outward appearance.

Trinitarian speech about the divine personae, then, is not merely approximated utterance, attempted out of a faithengendered desire to say something, however imperfect, rather than nothing. Nor is it about three ways in which God accomodates himself to the structures of h u m a n experience, as if what he really is might be quite different. The three appearances are of God and each /s God. This means that God's own inner being exhibits internal relations, that there is a complexity about God's own being as well as about his outward manifestations (contra the theological tradition which exalts the divine simplicity). But in each of these forms, the fullness of God's being is present. Though the concrete individuations (viz., Father, Son and Holy Spirit) are differentiatable, they also share a common essence - - ousia, substantia. Though there is an internal diversity within God, God nevertheless remains 7

always identical with himself in and through that complexity and diversity. (2) Oneness or unity? The fundamental point is that God is to be understood as a unity in diversity. God is the diversity, God is the unity, and God is the unity of and in that diverstiy. Each concrete individuation is wholly divine and wholly descriptive of the divine, and in these concrete individuations. God remains identical with himself as divine. The genuine conceptual problems with the doctrine of the Trinity have never reduced to that of how three things can be one thing. Rather, they have arisen out of the far more profound perplexity of how a unity in diversity can retain self-identity? This question is Anslogous to that of how one retains identity as a self in and through its mRny roles, both adopted and suppressed. How do all the outward appearances, and all that is repressed, pervade a - n i t a r y self with identity? This is a particularly acute problem for h u m a n beings, who do not easily retain identity. From the hu~_~n perspective, the real difficulty is to understand why the problem is not a problem forGed. Whether or not, of course, it is any longer meaningful to speak about things divine within the structure of discourse about entities must represent the most basic question of all in any interpretation and assessment of theological thinking about God. It may need to be said, finally, that henceforth, lang,_rage about God functions more according to grammatical rules governing the telling of stories than according to grAmmstical rules governing the descriptions of things. And even ff such an outlook should be conceded to be reductionistic on all sides, theologiRnR still would need to make the case for supposing that casting religions speech about God into the latter mode yields an enhancement of that understanding which can indeed, and does, become fully functioning in the life of faith through the former. What is of permanent significance about the doctrine of the Trinity, however, is not that it claims to speak about

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what God is in himself. Rather, the significance is to be found in what it intends to say about that God: its conceptual structure. Specifically, it is as a concept of God, expressed in the terms of unity and diversity that the Trinity makes its intellectually significant contribution. Prior to the emergence of trinitarian thinking, the Western philosophical tradition had grappled with the problem of identity and difference, without notable success. A n early conviction was that all the different things which are in the world somehow come from something which underlies the plurality and which itself does not have the complexity or manifoldness of the plurality about it. This underlying something-or-other, 'stuff' from which all of the m a n y things emerge, was conceived to be single, indivisible: the One. From this One came the m a n y things which constitute the diversity and the plurality of the phenomenal world. But how could the One remain identical with itself, when from it come m a n y things? H o w can the One remain inviolately what it is, and at the same time differentiate itself into the m a n y things? For example, how can air remain air and also become all the other things in the world (Anaximenes)? The ~problem of the One and the many' arises from the notion that there is something underlying, undivided, undivisible, and simple, from which the many things of the world come. Those who took the problem seriously seemed to have been haunted by the possibility that there may be no longer any One, undivided, simple ground for everything because that One lost its identity as a One in becoming the many. Nothing any longer underlies: the One died, that the many could be. Greek philosophical thinking began to point to a peculiar resolution of this dilemma: that the diversity of the world must be a diversity which is no longer grounded in reference to anything other than the diverse things themselves. The cosmos is not a grounded plurality at all; all the diverse things together constitute the only grounding that there is. The Greek Atomists finally drew the conclusion that all the 'dense bodies' which make up the cosmos constitute the ultimate foundation of things; there is nothing which further underlies these.

What was presupposed throughout this discussion was a particular w a y of conceptualizing primal reality: as a oneness in a numerical sense. And the history of Greek philosophy shows that there can be no solution to the problem of the One and the many from such a vantage point. Nothing can remain numerically one and numerically many, in the same sense. There can only be a denial of the terms of the problem itself. In the light of this consideration, the doctrine of the Trinity can be understood as a significant alternative conceptualization of primal reality itself. What it suggests is a w a y of conceiving such reality not as undifferentiated oneness, b u t as a unity with an internal complexity requiring differentiation from the outset in order to be w h a t it is at all. To be sure, so difficult was the notion to grasp that it was quickly lost sight of, even Rmong the greatest theologians of the first centuries. For exmmple, it vsnishes completely from St. Augustine's classical treatment, De Trinitate. There, Augustine finally treats the Trinity as a mystery because it has to imply a complexity about God w h o m he 'knows' to be simple. However, what the doctrine of the Trinity really says is not that God is not one, but that God is a unity, and that what is differentiated in God is what God requires to be God. The internal complexity requires differentiation from the outset in order that its bearer be w h a t it is at all. Or: the internal complexity and differentiation is w h a t expresses divine reality; it does not annul it. In the whole of the classical philosophical tradition, not only neo-Platonism came close to such a conceptualization, with its idea of the cosmos as progressive emanations out of the One. B u t Plotinus nevertheless went on to insist that the One finally is beyond the emanations (epikeina tes ousias), thus restoring the ancient p r o b l e m a t i c mode of reflection all o v e r again.

(3) Trinitarian thinking and belief in God Trinitarian thinking about God, then, contributes to Western intellectual history a bold conceptualization of

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primal reality as a unity in diversity. But does this have anything to do with the faith of the Christian community? Granted that the doctrine remains impressive philosophically, of what necessity is it for faith? Primarily, it would seem, to enable the church, then and now, to overcome various misunderstandings of its Gospel which from the beginning seem to have been pervasive, almost as if proceeding from spontaneous tendencies of the mind. W h e n applied to conceptualizing divine reality, these tendencies have generated two kinds of religious philosophy: dualism and monism, with classical and contemporary expressions. From the beginning, trinitarian thinking has constituted an alternative conceptualization of God to several attractive conceptualizations of divine reality which, in the judgement of Christian believers, function only to impede people's hearing the Christian message. This point can be made in different language, governed by different grammatical restrictions.As the Christian message is transmitted, it is heard by people who already tend to construe any stories about divine reality in certain ways. And as the great Christian missionaries found, those prior expectations of what such stories could mean often made it impossible to hear the Christian story. That part of the Christian message to which the Trinitarian conceptuality is especially germane can be expressed in the following way: The source of all being is present in human experience as the bestower of a significant future, who made of himself an instance of the kind of future he intends for all human beings. In Jesus, believed to be Christ, the source of all being has become present to humanity as humanity's future, and his own power is made available to human beings for the realization of that future. God's power at work within men and women leads them toward the holiness of Christlikeness, in which is the fulfillment of every human potentiality and the actualization of every significant possiblity for the human future. Two kinds of conceptualizing in the Roman world prevented many people from coming fully to terms with such an account of the human situation. The first sort was

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dualism, according to which TrRnscendent Reality is utterly other than mundane reality, wholly uninvolved in the wretchedness of corporeal existence, except as merciful designer of a plan of salvation. The transcendent GOd has not left h u m a n beings utterly bereft; there is salvation offered, but to a domain utterly appart, into which h u m a n beings are rescued. In one popular version of such thinking, Marcionitism, the high God has sent into his world an emissary to disclose the way out, merely appearing in corporeal guise along the way. Docetism and Gnosticism represent patterns of thinking which fixed upon the unqualified transcendence of God so completely that no significant human future possibly could emerge from the redemptive acts of that transcendent God. In the final analysis, salvation is salvation from humanity; it is not salvation in and for humanity. By contrast, Christian theo1ogiAnR insisted upon nothing less than a God wholly invested in the range of h u m a n possiblities. The second person of the Trinity, thus, because homoousian to patri; can be the h u m a n future, the full range of existential possibilities given by a gracious God. In addition to being of one substance with the Father, the Son also is the definition of what is most truly human: homoousian hemin. This kind of thinking, moving toward conceptualizing God as a unity in diversity, made it possible to say that God retains self-identity even in his instancing, from the depths of his own being (kenos/s), a definitive h u m a n possiblity. Dualism precludes such an affirmation; it can preserve God's identity only by insisting upon his Transcendent Oneness. One reason, therefore, why the doctrine of the Trinity became necessary was to communicate Christian belief in God to people who were tending to misconstrue the Christian story as a result of prior dualistic tendencies in their thinking. There was a second tendency of thought manifest in conceptions of divine reality, monism (in Christian discussion, 'monarchianism') which also prevents full comprehension of the Christian story. In monistic thinking, though God is conceived to appear in a variety of ways, all the appearances are merely outward manifestations of an underlying identity which must, of necessity, be other than what appears. Central to monism is the injunction that the 12

appearances are not to be confused in any w a y with the underlying identity. God in essence is one; all of the m a n y appearances are merely so many ways in which that one God shows himself while remaining one God in some radically different sense. The third century figure Sabellius employed an interesting analogy to express the point: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are aspects of the one God j u s t as roundness, brightness and warmth are aspects of the one sun. The difference, of course, resides in the fact t h a t God's oneness is not apparent in the ways that the sun's identity among its attributes remains apparent. Monism evidently is a more subtle conceptuality than is dualism. To Christian theologians, it seemed more alluring from the outset than did dualism, perhaps because it was so uncompromisingly monotheistic in its implications for thinking about God. B u t its import can only be that any divine appearance (revelation) is but one significant instancing, among many, of the h u m a n possibility and future. Within such thinking there is no good reason to suppose that any one aspect of the divine appearance is any more definitive or final than any other. Once the Son is subordinated to the Father, to put the point in trinitarian terms, there can be no finality about the possibility and the future which Christ brings. And if there are any number of possible appearances of the one God, within the condition of h u m a n being-in-the-world, there really can be no determinateness about the future which God intends to bestow. Can h u m a n beings then be said to have any particular future at all? This is what Athanasius perceived so clearly in the controversy with the Arians, that in order for humankind truly to be redeemed from all that forecloses h u m a n possibility, God himself must enter wholly the limiting conditions of h u m a n existence, and must himself bring to expression the new possibility within those boundaries. Someone who is merely one among many subordinates to God cannot enter deeply enough into the h u m a n situation to accomplish the task of exemplifying a final, determinate future for h u m a n beings. Later, theologians will see also that God must remain present in power in order to enable h u m a n beings to retrieve the future possibility which he offers; thus, there must be the third manifestation of God himself, as Holy Spirit.

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These paragraphs have attempted to show the theological as well as the philosophical significance of Nicene doctrine, e.g., the consequences for the understanding of faith which this new particular doctrine bears. The heart of the matter seems to be that a new conceptualization of God was constructed at the frontiers of the Christian mission, to expedite the fullest possible response to the Christian message. Similar impediments function in contemporary Christian life as well, making the Trinitarian doctrine cogent in this century as fully as it was in the fourth. For exsmple, there continues to be widespread dualistic t h i n k i n g , evidenced especially in theologies of apocalypse, whose only possibilities envisioned for h u m a n beings are those beyond the judgement upon this world. Further, and contrary to appearance, dualistic thinking is also present in modem-day theologies of consciousness-expRn~ion. Such an assertion may seem strange, since the literature of the movement is filled with quasi-monistic images, but in the consciousnessexpansion movement, baptized by many well-intentioned ChristianR, there persists also a fundamental dualism between the True Self which is ultimate reality and the apparent self which is bound up with the world of ordinary consciousness. Salvation begins with enlightenment about the distinction, and though it may come to fulfillment deep within the psyche instead of beyond the world, it removes the recipient from mundane reality just as surely as Gnostic dualism sought to do in the second century. One can be removed from within as completely as one can be removed to a beyond. Neither setting permits significant engagement with, and affirmation of, a created order in its totality. One interesting recent example of monistic or monarchian thinking is process theology: e.g. God is to the world as mind is to body. Another is the comparative religion approach to h u m a n religiosity, which tends to credit God with numberless manifestations in every religion. Whether in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or whatever, the conviction is that God will not fail to be present. This approach +inclines toward an eclecticism within which any single, normative concept of the h u m a n future is evacuated of all meaning. If all of the religions of the world proffer significant h u m a n possibilities, if all of them can articulate the bestowal of a 14

future, can the very words 'possibility'and Tuture' have any meaning anymore? If so m a n y things are possible, can there be any serious thinking at all about possibilities? To be sure, these are very broad generalizations about several important trends in the contemporary religious situation. Their purpose is to suggest, simply, that in the long and taxing process of reflection which resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity, there was contributed both to philosophy and theology an achievement which is worthy of recapitulation in every generation, because those tendencies in h u m a n understanding which can block both conceptualization of ultimate reality, and the hearing of the Christian story, can persist as blocks in every generation.

(4) Conclusion Every generation of believers has the task of reestablishing a conceptual framework within which the Christian story can be heard, and responded to. And every inquirer after truth has the task of wresting from restrictive patterns of thinking, so easily observed in every culture, bold alternatives which are capable of generating new creative efforts. Such work is never finished, but neither is the impressiveness of past struggles.

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