Is God A Person?

Jenson on the Father as Trinity

Wherein, asks Robert Jenson (Systematic Theology, volume 1), “is the triune God one?” Roughly speaking, East and West have answered differently: “The East has located the oneness of God in the Father’s monarchy, interpreting the oneness of God’s being as constituted by the Father’s sheer givenness as a person.” Meanwhile, the West roots God’s unity in “the utter simplicity of the divine ousia” (115-6). The East easily explains Jesus’ and our address to God as simply “Father,” but risks Arianism; the West doesn’t hesitate to say “the Trinity is the one God” but can distort the biblical narrative and slip into a quasi-modalist quadrinity, where the ousia is the real God hidden behind the Three.

Jenson focuses the question by asking, Is the Trinity personal? If not, it must be impersonal, an impossible conclusion. If the Trinity is personal, how is it so? Jenson’s solution makes a twofold distinction, first between “person” and “identity” (his term for hypostasis or “way of having being”); second, between two different ways of being personal.

The first distinction is classic Jenson. A person is a being with whom others can converse, whom we can address in expectation of a response in kind (117). An identity, by contrast, is “something that can be counted and to which characteristics can be attributed” (117). In Scripture, the three identities of God are personal; each is a “social persona” (following Tertullian) “constituted by a particular set of social relations of address and response” (119). They are personae dramatis dei, and their relations of origin (as the Cappadocians called them) are “relations of address and response, of mutual converse”:

The Father’s speaking his word, the act in which the Son is constituted, is in itself a call for response, thereby constituting the Son as himself a speaking being like the Father. The Father’s breathing the Spirit, the act in which the Spirit is constituted, is in itself the Father’s entry into the communal freedom that the Spirit gives, to constitute the Spirit a personal agent over against the Father (119).

Personality isn’t theatrical role-playing, but ontological. Each divine Person is what He is by His mutual relations of address and response with the others.

The three Persons are identities, identified by personal relations. But “identity” and “person” aren’t synonymous; there’s a “certain looseness” between the terms. In general, some hypostases qualify as persons, some don’t. I can count stones; I don’t address stones with expectation of a response. That looseness is crucial. The Trinity is not an identity – not a hypostasis; if the Trinity were an hypostasis, the trio of Persons would expand to a quartet. But the fact that the Trinity isn’t an identity doesn’t mean the Trinity isn’t personal, or even “a person” (119).

How is that possible? Our inherited, modern assumptions about personality get in our way. Unlike a Lockean person, the Spirit isn’t an autonomous being, but “inherently someone’s spirit”; unlike the Kantian subject, the Spirit’s “I” is outside Himself (121). So too the Son’s and Father’s. We can’t say the Trinity (or any of the Three) is a Person in a modern sense.

To formulate a more suitable conception of personhood, Jenson borrows from Jonathan Edwards, who insists (following Augustine) that Scripture treats Christ and the church as a single person. Thus, “there may be more than one way to be personal” (120). Recognizing various modes of personality opens the possibility of addressing the Trinity “as community” (122).

In worship and prayer, we address the Father as distinct identity, as the Begetter of the Son and Out-Breather of the Spirit. We may also address Him with the Son and in the Spirit, as the “unity of equal Father, Son, and Spirit.” We thus address the Father in two ways, and in one of these ways we address Him as Trinity: “the Trinity is not thereby posited as another identity than the Father, and yet the Father as Trinity is otherwise personal than he is hypostastically” (120).

Were the Father not Father of the Son, He would be “a sheerly timeless event of awareness, very much in the style of Aristotle’s God.” When we address the Father as Trinity, we acknowledge the Father who would not be Father except as the arche of the Son and Spirit. Indeed, the Father knows His own “I” precisely in His relation the other Persons, and so “as the oneness of the one Trinity” (122-3).

Jenson endorses Augustine’s psychological analogies: The Trinity is a person, with “Father, Son, and Spirit as the poles of the inner life that makes him personal.” Jenson’s solution leans East rather than West, insofar as the personality of the Trinity is one perspective on the personality of the Father (123).

Jenson recognizes a kind of circularity in his argument: He sets up the problem by asking how the Father can be God of Israel and also one identity of the God of Israel. The solution is a restatement of the problem. Jenson doesn’t isn’t daunted: “This is sometimes the way of theology: to take a plain phenomenon of the gospel’s narrative that causes difficulty in certain conceptual connections and remove the difficulties by adjusting not the narrative but the connections” (124). Yes and Amen to that!