Morphemics

Nature of Persons

Clifton responds to my charge that his view of Gods' personhood is irrational by claiming that my God "happily conforms and confines himself to logical categories." If he means, as he tesitifies of his own view in the following paragraph, that God is "the font of all truth, and as such does not actually commit logical fallacies or contradictions, nor can such be truthfuly predicated of him," then yes, God is very happy to thus conform and confine himself. But, as Clifton is critiquing my view, I doubt that he means to imply that it is the same as what he has just affirmed. Rather, he wants the reader to infer that, in my view, God can be fully comprehend; which is altogether unlike anything I have ever implied. I do not contend that God can be fully grasped by reason alone. There are aspects of God, most of them I would venture to say, that we will never know simply by virtue of our finitude. My contention is not that God can be fully understood, but that what can be understood of him, due to its having been revealed to us, can only be predicated of God in rational and logical categories. Clifton's assertions of a God whose Person exists beyond his nature are an attempt at non-rational predication.

Clifton has stated that part of the difficulty is that we come from two different traditions. Understated at best. However, I would locate the divergence of traditin at a later time than he has chosen. I am currently unaware of any fundamental disagreement between Augustine and the Cappadocians. Clifton goes on to describe his views of the Trinity as taken from Oration XXIX by Gregory of Nazianzus. I have no real disagreent with this Oration and am left wondering what it has to do with this discussion.. That is, until I remember that Clifton is accusing me of subsuming personhood into essence. But this is not the case. I suspect Clifton believes that it is because, in his own view, Person is prior to essence. I argue that neither is the case but that both are equally ultimate- which is not to say that they are absolutely identical.

Let's examine some of Clifton's reflections on the Trinity. He writes that "the Godhead receives its essence, its divinity, from the Person of the Father." The Father begets the Son and sends forth the Spirit. [The filioque is irrelevant to the point since both sides agree that the Spirit proceeds from the Father.] But this implies more than what Clifton has asserted. Not just the essence of the Godhead, but the other two persons find their origin in the Father. Or should we imagine featureless person stuff that gets filled with divine essence and then drawn into the Godhead? No, persons and essence cannot be separated. When God begets the Son, he does so both as to his person and as to his divine nature. The one cannot exist without the other. And even if we see the Father, who is a Person, as the cause of the Godhead, he is not a Person who exists apart from his own nature. The Father does not exist prior to the divine essence, but begetting and procession are eternal. It is the nature of the Persons of the Trinity to be one God in which the relationships between the persons are expressed in terms of begetting and procession. Even though he is unbegotten and unproceeding, we cannot abstract the Person of the Father from the divine essence and claim that "Personhood exceeds the divine essence." The question is not one of "a God whose fundamental nature is one of essence." It is that the Persons of the Trinity all have the same divine nature, which, being coextensive with themselves, makes of them one God. This is not a matter of priority.

I, too, would be suspicious of anyone who can know anything of God's nature a priori. But it isn't like Scripture doesn't reveal anything about God's nature. God is revealed both as to his persons and as to his divine nature. It is not an either/or proposition. To say anything that goes beyond the nature of God is to say things about his Persons that go beyond what has been revealed about them. Clifton writes, "But if the Godhead is a Trinity of Persons, nothing we can predicate of God will be able to be limited to rational categories." This does not follow. We might say that the Godhead as a Trinity of Persons implies that there are many things that cannot be predicated of God, bu this is not the same thing as saying that that which can be predicated must go beyond rational categories.

Contrary to Clifton's claim, I do not resist the principle that God is beyond human comprehension. I only insist that what has been revealed must be predicated of God according to the dictates of truth. There can be no contradictions. At this point, Clifton takes me to task for claiming that his assertions "God is all-good" and "God is not all-good" are contradictory. He says that the only way these phrases "are contradictory is, in fact, we a) comprehensively understand what it means to speak of God's "all goodness" and that in so understanding b) we predicate the same meaning in both sentences." While b) follows, since a contradiction involves an affirmative and a negative statement about the same thing at the same time and in the same relationship, a) does not. The ability to recognize a contradiction need not involve any such understanding of what the terms mean. If it is the case that, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe," then I can rest assured that, at the same time and in the same relationship, it is not the case that it wasn't brillig or that slithy toves were not gyring or gimbling in the wabe. Of course, it is also possible that b) is not the case, in which event there is no contradiction. But, once we have recognized that this is so, then it is a matter of further refining our language. It is not the case that "if we can never fully know what it means to predicate of God that he is "all-good," then we can never logically contradict ourself in claiming that God is not "all-good" since we can never know whether or not such terms as "all-good" have been used equivocally." We might be confused by someone else's use of the terms; however, when we say for ourselves that God is all-good, we should know what we mean as far as we do understand the concept. If there is a sense in which God is not all-good, then the person saying this should have some idea of what he means by it. No one needs to have full comprehension in order to know whether or not he himself is using a term univocally or equivically. In the same way, whenever we do run across seeming contradictions in Scripture, then we must assume that the same meaning cannot be predicated in both cases.

Clifton proceeds to make my case for me, saying that though God is beyond our comprehension, we "must speak meaningfully and truthfully of God. The Scriptures, the Ecumenical Councils, the Divine Liturgy, the writings of the Fathers are all testimony to the need for careful articulation of what we can know, in our limited way, of God." I have never implied anything to the contrary, only that Clifton, when he speaks of Personhood exceeding nature, does not follow his own advice. Furthermore, my own articulatation of the Persons and nature of God is not based, as Clifton claims, upon any need to preserve God's sovereignty. It is, rather, within the context of the larger discussion, based upon the need to preserve the reality of his Persons. Recall that my contention that God wills according to his nature is in keeping with the contention that all persons will according to their natures. Whether or not this is true is not immediately at issue; however, if I predicate this of all persons but deny it of God, then I have denied his personhood. It is not a matter of subsuming the Godhead into nature but of preserving any meaningful understanding of his Persons.