Going Beyond What is Written

Ryan Hedrich has continued his attack on the Trinity, but thankfully in doing so he now correctly identifies his present opponents as “Clarkians.”  In a recent blog post where he further explores his new found belief in the ontological subordination of the Son, he writes:

Several Reformed theologians hold to the position that the “person” of the Son is generated whereas the “essence” of the Son is not.

… I imagine that these Clarkians who argue that the Son’s essence is not generated mean that the divine nature or set of attributes of the Son is not generated. In other words, the Father doesn’t “communicate” the [or a] divine nature to the Son if such implies the divinity of the Son is in some sense derived from the Father; rather, Clark (and probably these Clarkians) thinks “communicate” merely suggests that the Son has the [or a] divine nature “in common” with the Father. This would suggest that the Son may well communicate the [or a] the divine nature to the Father…

As strange as these things may sound to Ryan, had he been more of a “Clarkian,” or even a better theologian (armchair or otherwise), he would have realized that the idea of communication in Nicene orthodoxy is not a transfer of something from one person to another, much less from a superior to an inferior, rather it carries the idea of sharing something in common.  As difficult as it may be for Ryan,  this is why the communication of essence in one sense is perfectly acceptable, and, in another, the more common or colloquial sense, the one Ryan prefers,  it is not acceptable at all.  In Clark’s discussion of Hodge in his chapter on the Eternal Generation he notes that “Hodge complains that the Nicene fathers went too far when they derived the essence of the Son from that of the Father.”  Clark called this “an historical mistake” and explains:

The common English usage of communication has lost the meaning of the Greek koinonia. To communicate does not mean the Father hands over or gives certain things to the Son. To communicated means to have something in common. The Father and the Son hold in common the essential characteristics of the Godhead. The English word share would be a better translation.

Of course, Hodge clearly asserts the generation of the Son, and correctly rejects the generation of the essence.  His theology is impeccable.  It is an historical question here, and so far as any criticism of Hodge is concerned, not a theological issue.  It is therefore a matter of Hodge’s misunderstanding of the Greek term communicate. He writes:  “That the essential idea [of paternity] is assumed to be the communication of the essence of the parent to his child; and therefore it is maintained the there must be a communication of the essence of the Godhead from the Father to the Son.”  Note the words from and to. This suggests that the Father gives the essence to the Son. But such is not what the Greek fathers meant.  Communication means that there is a quality common to the Father and the Son.  (The Trinity, 113,114)

Even Wikipedia has this right and states; “Koinonia is the anglicisation of a Greek word (κοινωνία) that means communion by intimate participation …The essential meaning of the koinonia embraces concepts conveyed in the English terms community, communion, joint participation, sharing and intimacy.”

My objection to Ryan in his dogmatic rejection that the Son is autotheos, along with his insistence that if self-existence can only be predicated on the Father who then communicates His existence to the Son, is that he ends up with the from/to relationship that Hodge rightly rejects and Clark said was never intended by the Nicene fathers.  While thinking he is being faithful to Nicene orthodoxy he rejects it.  As Kevin Giles explains in his book, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology:

The begetting of the Son by the Father, the creed goes  on to assert, means that the Son is “God of [ek] God, Light of Light, true God of true God.”  In other words, whatever the Father is, so too is the Son.  Then comes the climactic statement, the Son of the basis of his begetting is “one in being [homoousios] with the Father.”  T.F. Torrance says that “an absolutely fundamental step” was made in the Christian understanding of God when the words, “one in being with the Father” (homoousios to parti) were included in this creed . . . These words clearly assert that on the basis of the Son’s eternal begetting “there is no division between the being of the Son and the being of the Father, but also that there is no division between the acts of the Son and the acts of the Father.”  They are one in being and power.  Similarly, Carl Beckwith says that when the bishops of Nicaea included the term homoousios they not only “assert” that “the Father and Son are of the same essence” but also, “Whatever we predicated of the Father’s being or essence, so too we predicate of the Son.  This means when we say the Father is almighty, we also say the Son is almighty.  When we say the Father is all-powerful, good, wise and holy, we also say the Son is all-powerful, good, wise and holy.

… The Nicene bishops also in this creed confess that while the Son is fully God in all might, majesty and power “for our salvation [he] came down [from heaven] and was incarnate and became man and suffered.” The Lord of glory stooped to save.  These two affirmations in this christological clause affirm both the eternal and unqualified deity of the Son and his temporal subordination for our salvation, reflecting the teaching of Philippians 2:4-11.” (119,120)

Unitarians, Arians, and assorted subordinationists are of a different opinion and think a from/to relationship is precisely what is meant and therefore affirm the ontological subordination of the Son to the Father.  The problem with their interpretation is that they end up losing the Son while thinking they still have the Father when in fact they end up with neither.  That’s why Unitarianism is heresy.  Unitarians are going to hell.  There is really no other way to say it.  

However,  and in spite of the overwhelming evidence against him, Ryan maintains:

Generation implies some sort of derivation (though not, in this case, temporal).  If it is merely that the second person of the Trinity derives His property of Sonship from the Father, then it’s rather misleading to say the “second person” qua “second person” is eternally “generated.”

And, on his blog Ryan protests:

If the Son is autotheos, how is it that His “person” can be generated? What does that mean? Generation is a word which implies logical, if not temporal, derivation. But if the “second person” of the Trinity is self-existent and autotheos, He cannot be said to be eternally generated; that is, the second person wasn’t “generated” per se, since the second person qua second person is allegedly underived, self-existent, and God-of-Himself . . . I cannot see how eternal generation is compatible with the view that the persons of the Trinity are each autotheos and self-existent.

According to Clark the idea of generation was used “as a contrast with the term creation, as well as a contrast with eminationism, to preserve the New Testament teaching on the doctrine of the Second Person.”  The word “eternal” was to address the heresy of Arius.  He is also notes that “Terminological difficulties abound in every line.  Modern theologians could have avoided some, if they had a greater knowledge of pagan Greek philosophy.”  I think that is an understatement given the many ancient and modern controversies surrounding the doctrine of Eternal Generation of the Son.  After all, if John Calvin can be accused of being a heretic over this issue (and he was), and more recently Robert Reymond has taken some heat too even to the point of having to revise the second edition of his systematic theology, I think Clark’s warning suggests that we need to tread very lightly before trying to draw rigid implications from the ancient creeds especially while reading our own definitions of key terms back into them.  Of course, Ryan’s mentor, Drake Shelton, thinks all the Reformed are heretics and have rejected the correct and historic understanding of Nicene orthodoxy and that he, along with Unitarian Samuel Clarke and other like minded anti-trinitarians, have discovered the creed’s true meaning that was intentionally perverted by the “Latin West.” Actually, Drake goes even further and in a truly bizarre video argues that Trinitarianism is a Roman Catholic conspiracy designed to justify the papacy.  Besides, Drake laments, think about all the Muslims and Jehovah Witnesses that might become “Christians” who are currently repulsed by what he calls the “Trinitarian monad.”

Interestingly, just as Ryan can’t “see how eternal generation is compatible with the view that the persons of the Trinity are each autotheos and self-existent,” some modern Evangelicals agree with Ryan and want to modify or even abandon the creed on that account.  But, as Kevin Giles observes:

… for the Nicene fathers, the words “God from God, light from light, true God from true God” indicate their belief that the Son is as much God as the Father, with whom he is homoousios (“one in being”). These words were included in the creed not to indicate the subordination of the Son but the exact opposite. Claims that the Nicene Creed (let alone the Athanasian Creed) allows or implies the eternal subordination of the Son do not bear critical scrutiny. The primary goal of the Nicene fathers was to exclude the idea that in the eternal life of God the divine three are hierarchically ordered in being or power.

…David Cunningham, a well-informed trinitarian theologian, is even more emphatic. He says the Council of Nicaea intentionally excluded all expressions of subordinationism known at that time. In order to rule out Arianism and other forms of subordinationism, the Nicene Council rejected a whole variety of attempts to place the three in hierarchical order-logical, causal, temporal or otherwise. The Council’s clarity on this point is especially visible in the Nicene anathemas, which claim that there was no time when the Word was not. And to make it clear that the begetting of the Son need not imply temporal order, the Creed states that this begetting takes place eternally. Nor is there any logical hierarchy among the Three; they all imply one another and are dependent on one another, so that no one of them can be understood in a position of primacy over the others.  These “perverse”… interpretations of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son not only disclose a profound ignorance of doctrinal history but also a profound misunderstanding of what theology is and how all theological language works.

The irony in the historical analysis of Giles and Cunningham is that the creedal language was designed specifically to guard against the type of ontological subordinationism, along with the subordination of authority, Ryan and Drake believe is central to a correct understanding of Nicene orthodoxy.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop Ryan, much less give him pause,  as he continues to press his objection to the historic and orthodox understanding of the creed as he speculates:

. . . why must the second person have “derived” His property from the first if each of the persons of the Trinity are autotheos, ontologically co-equal in every respect . . . I cannot see how eternal generation is compatible with the view that the persons of the Trinity are each autotheos and self-existent.

You see, Ryan wants to invest the word “generation” with a metaphysical meaning that runs completely counter to the underlying metaphysical reality that the creed intended to protect; “that the Son is as much God as the Father, with whom he is homoousios (“one in being”).”  Ryan pushes the meaning of these words beyond their intended purpose and ends up on the other side of orthodoxy (which is a nice way of saying heterodoxy).   As Gordon Clark explains:

Though we must apply to the Son some sense of the term “generation,” let it be admitted that the sense is not completely clear. Christ is indeed Son of God, and the relationship is filiation.  But since this relationship is eternal, and there was no time before the Son was Son, and though there was not time before the Father was Father, and though to be Biblical we must call the first Person Father and the second Person Son, it has please God not to have revealed much further as to the nature of this relationship. At least no theologian has succeeded in extending the implications of Scripture very far. Perhaps the best we can do is to suggest that the three Persons are identical with the exception of their personal differences. (122)

I also very much agree with Reymond who similarly argues:

. . . I do not intend to deny that the three Persons of the Godhead do have distinguishing, incommunicable properties which are real, eternal, and necessary: Indeed, without them there would be no Trinity. The distinguishing property of the Father is paternity (paternitas) from which flow “economical” activities in which the Son and Spirit do not share; the Son’s is filiation (filiatio) from which flow “economical” activities in which the Father and Spirit do not share; and the Holy Spirit’s is spiration (spiratio) from which flow “economical” activities in which the Father and the Son do not share, all descriptions which can be justified by Scripture.

We must be extremely cautious, however, in asserting what these distinguishing properties mean lest we go beyond Scripture.  There can be no question that in his paternity the Father is the Father of the Son. But we must not attempt to define, beyond the fact of the clearly implied order, a modal “how” of the Father’s paternity.  And there can be no question that the Son is the Son of the Father. We know that his Sonship means that he is equal with the Father with respect to deity (John 5:18; 10:33-36), and we also know that as the Son he is to be distinguished from the Father with respect to his personal property of filiation (John 1:1-3, 18). We know also that his Sonship implies an order of relational (not essential) subordination to the Father which is doubtless what dictated the divisions of labor in the eternal Covenant of Redemption in that it is unthinkable that the Son would have sent the Father to do his will). But beyond this we dare not go. We must not attempt to define, beyond the fact of the clearly implied order, a modal “how” of the Son’s filiation.  It is enough to know that the Scriptures affirm that the titles “Father” and “Son” speak of a personal, differentiating manifoldness (that is, “subjective conscious selves”) within the depth of the divine Being. Finally, there can be no question that the Holy Spirit is a divine Person who is the Spirit of God and of Christ (Rom. 8:9), and that he “proceeded” or “came forth from” the Father and the Son (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7; 20:22) at Pentecost on his salvific mission. But we must not attempt to define, beyond the fact of the clearly implied order, a modal “how” of the Spirit’s spiration. It is enough to know that the Scriptures affirm that this title distinguishes a third subjective conscious self in the depth of the divine Being.” (A New Systematic Theology, 336).

I realize that neither Clark’s nor Reymond’s warning not to push the creedal terms too far “lest we go beyond Scripture” will do much to calm the itching ears of some, but it is precisely the sort of speculations coming from Ryan and his mentor Drake Shelton that we need to reject.

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