I woke up Friday morning to a somewhat desperate message on Facebook asking “Have you read Leithart’s article?” With an accompanying link. I glimpsed at the article and added it to my OneNote folder to read later. I did my morning Bible reading and got ready for work.
Throughout the day, I got no fewer than 20 messages asking “Have you read Leithart’s article?” Having read it first last night, and then again this morning, I can see why people want me to weigh in.
Leithart is what is sometimes called a Divine Personalist, which is a position that stands in contradistinction with the position known as Classical Theism. Defining these terms would be a task for separate posts, but for now, a simple explanation will do.
Classical Theism —a position which I claim for myself— holds various specific propositions about God to be true. Germane to this discussion, we hold that God is simple (not composed of parts), infinite (there is no beginning or end, or constraints to anything that is God), Eternal (God is not subject to time, and thus there is no succession of moments for God) immutable (there is no potentiality for change in God, and thus no actuality of change in God), and impassible (Since there is no potentiality for change, God is not subject to passions or changing states of emotion). There is a, sometimes over, emphasis on the singular divine nature in Classical Theism as it tends to begin reasoning related to God with the divine nature and then work to the plurality of the divine persons. Also key to the position is the distinction between Archetypal knowledge (God’s perfect and complete knowledge of himself) and ectypal knowledge (Finite and created knowledge which God grants to creatures by means of self-disclosure) and the related doctrine of Divine Accommodation.
Divine Personalism, on the other hand, tends to begin its reasoning with the plurality of persons. It is related to and often combined with Theistic Mutalism, which affirms a type of change which the divine persons volitionally subject themselves to in relation to creatures. It also tends to affirm a form of equivocity between Archetypal knowledge and ectypal knowledge, which will become important later in this article.
There are several features in Leithart’s article that are concerning to me. Some are technical, others are theological, some may even be a little bit nit-picky… but all of them together paint a picture that I find objectionable.
I understand that this is not an academic article. I understand that this is a blog post, but never the less it is extremely frustrating when someone cites, quotes, or paraphrases someone else and does not provide proper citations. I don’t want to impute motives, but the effect that comes about is that Leithart makes it impossible to verify what is being said, observe the context of the quotes provided, or assess his summary of the position he is critiquing. He essentially leaves you to simply take his word for it that he is accurately representing their position.
The problem with that… he’s not.
This debate implicates longer-standing disputes about the meaning of person in Trinitarian theology. For some, a divine Person is, in the words of Stephen Holmes, professor of systematic theology at the University of St Andrews, an “instantiation of the divine nature.” To say that the triune Persons are “persons” doesn’t imply that they’re personal or have personality in anything like the common modern sense of the word. Holmes puts it starkly. For Augustine and the Cappadocian fathers of the Eastern church, “all that is truly ‘personal’ (knowledge, volition, action … ) [is located] in the ineffable divine nature, not severally in the [Persons].”
There are several things left out of the articulation of Classical Theism here that are significant to the discussion at hand. It may be the case that Holmes says that each person is an instantiation of the divine nature. However, it is impossible to know if that statement is intended to mean for Holmes that the word persons doesn’t imply that they’re personal or have personality. In fact, unless I have badly misread Holmes in the past, those are propositions he would deny on their face. Further, Leithart’s citation of the patristic witness here is an accurate citation, but it does not actually represent the implication he attributes to it.
For the Patristics, Holmes, and the Athanasian Creed… what is being communicated is that although each person is fully and truly the divine nature and thus is fully and truly all that God is (that is to say that they are fully and truly every divine attribute), it is not the case that the omnipotence of the Son is a separate or numerically plural omnipotence. For, if there were two omnipotences, there would necessarily be two Gods. Further, the concept of two omnipotences is incoherent since the presence of a plurality of omnipotences would constrain each other and thus no longer be considered omnipotence.
The Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Spirit is eternal.
And yet there are not three eternal beings; there is but one eternal being. So too there are not three uncreated or immeasurable beings; there is but one uncreated and immeasurable being.
Similarly, the Father is almighty, the Son is almighty, the Holy Spirit is almighty. Yet there are not three almighty beings; there is but one almighty being. – Athanasian Creed[ref]Cited from the UCRNA website[/ref]
Now, the English has been smoothed out a little bit, which actually obscures the meaning a little. What the Creed literally says in Latin is
The Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent. Yet there are not three omnipotents; there is but one omnipotent
What the creed is getting at is that everything that each of the persons is, is because they are a complete subsistence of the singular and indivisible divine nature. I might quibble with the language of “instantiation” used by Holmes… who knows since Leithart provides zero context or citation… but the point being made is solid. The Father’s attribute of “omnipotent” is one and the same as the Son’s attribute of “omnipotent.” The Son’s person is not separate from his essence, and neither is the Father’s… thus the Son’s essence is not separate from the Father’s essence, and vise versa. Logically this means that the Father’s person is not separate from the Son’s person, although we affirm they are distinct. Rather the Son is interior to the Father, and so also the Father is interior to the Son. This point is made well by Leithart late in the article… but he seemingly misses the theological importance of it.
To carry this to the alleged problem he is identifying though, he argues that to say that “all that is truly ‘personal’ (knowledge, volition, action … ) [is located] in the ineffable divine nature, not severally in the [Persons]” basically results in a form of unitarianism in which there is only one person. However, this simply is not the case.
Personal is an attribute, and like all of the other attributes of God, there is only one of it. To say that there are two attributes of “personal” is to say that there are two divine natures… which would be manifest tritheism. Augustine and the Cappadocians are simply speaking in the same way that the Athanasian Creed does[ref]Which makes sense since the Athanasian Creed is theological descended from Augustinian Triadology… not Athanasian Triadology[/ref]. Leithart seems to take exception to the idea that there is only one volition in the Trinity… which makes sense since the primary critique of EFS (which he appears to be at least obliquely defending in this article) is that there is a plurality of wills in the Trinity… and volition and will are synonyms.
If we were to take the attribute of Personal and map it to the logic and language of the Athanasian Creed we would have a statement like the following
The Father is personal, the Son is personal, the Holy Spirit is personal. Yet there are not three personals; there is but one personal.
Simply put, there is a single divine nature and any subsistence of that divine nature bears the attribute of personal, which is one and the same shared attribute that the other subsistences bear via the single divine nature.
Does Leithart really want to advocate that there is a plurality of attributes? Does he really want to say in contrast to the Nicene Creed that there is more than one Lord since the Lordship of the Father is separate from the Lordship of the Son is separate from the Lordship of the Spirit?
Another issue I want to point out is the implicit passibility and confusion regarding the incarnation which Leithart demonstrates toward the end of the article.
As is common among Personalists / Theistic Mutualists, there is an implicit (or often explicit) denial of divine immutability and impassibility which comes to pass. Leithart waxes poetic, but this denial is clear as day if you know how to look for it.
He poses the question:
Do all of Jesus’ actions and doings show the Father? It doesn’t seem so. Jesus’ weakness doesn’t seem very Godlike. He gets hungry and thirsty: Does the Father? He sleeps: Do we see the Father when we catch Jesus napping? Jesus bleeds: Does the Father have veins and arteries?
He seems to answer the question in a way that a classical theist would… but undercuts his statement by calling it into question in the next breath.
Augustine distinguished “form of a servant” statements (what is true of Jesus in his humanity) from statements about the “form of God” (what is true of Jesus as eternal Son). It’s a serviceable distinction, though even here we should pause to consider what kind of almighty, needless, un-sleeping God is capable of entering so fully into our frailty.
However, he continues and asks a series of similar questions:
Not all questions about Jesus and his Father are so absurdly easy to answer. Jesus mourns (John 11:35); does the Father? He gets angry (Mark 3:5); does God really get angry? Out of compassion, Jesus heals (Matt. 9:36; 4:14); does the Father experience compassion (whatever divine “experience” might be)? Does the Father respond to human misery? Do we see the Father when we see Jesus dying on a Roman cross?
What Leithart is doing here, is calling into question the distinction between Christ’s human and divine nature. No longer are we to see that Christ takes on the form of a servant in order that he might subject himself to our common infirmities. Instead, he takes on the form of a servant in order that he might somehow express divine realities in creaturely ways. Christ’s weeping is a reflection of some kind of divine weeping. Christ’s anger is a creaturely version of the Father’s divine anger. Christ’s misery and suffering on the cross is a human version of… what?[ref]Much more could be said about Leithart’s misunderstanding of the communicatio idiomatum in the Hypostatic Union, but this article is already far longer than it should be.[/ref]
Lest anyone think I am reading into Leithart’s words here, he goes on to make it explicit.
We might think that sorrow, anger, compassion, and responsiveness to injustice and misery belong on the “form of a servant” side of Augustine’s ledger. Jesus experiences those things because he’s human. But that can’t be right. If Jesus sorrows, grieves, shows anger, and feels compassion, and yet the Father does nothing like that, if Jesus’ character is nothing like the Father’s, then we wonder what Jesus means when he says, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”
Now, I don’t want to turn this blog article into a dissertation… but again Leithart misses a critical component of Classical Theism.
No classical theist would say that the language of emotion, grief, wrath, suffering, etc… which is frequently applied to God in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms, is simply empty words which find no reality in God. However, we would argue, which the majority witness of the Church, that these words are applied analogically. Meaning that there is a point of contact between what we mean when we say God is angry, and what we mean when we say a human is angry. However, that point of contact is finite and God is infinite. Thus, with Aquinas and others, we affirm that whatever similarity there is, there is an infinite dissimilarity. That is simply to say that whatever finite true thing we can say about God when we use the language of emotion… there are infinitely more true things about God in relation to that concept that we can never know or speak.
Leithart goes on to say “Much of what we might think is the ‘form of a servant’ actually shows Jesus in the ‘form of God.'” He continues by saying:
If we see the Father (not the ineffable divine nature) when we see Jesus, then the Father must be the kind of being for whom we could draw up a character sketch, with likes and dislikes, the kind of God who responds with outrage at injustice, pity at suffering, and saving action for the distressed. If we see the Father when we see Jesus, the Father is a person in the personalist sense of the word.
This functional denial of the Archetypal / ectypal distinction in Leithart leaves us with a God who responds with outrage… pity… saving action. He is a God who can be moved by us and thus changed by us. This is part and parcel of the theistic mutualist movement, and combined with the plurality of will that Leithart seems to introduce by his denial of the unity of will above… we are left with three divine persons who have three distinct wills… and who are moved by their creatures… if you take what he says about the Father being seen in the suffering of Jesus on the cross and extend that logic here… we also have three suffering gods… this is starting to look more like a Percy Jackson book than the Holy Scriptures.
Now, I would be remiss to ignore that Leithart appears to reject some of these implications later in the article. He seems to want to maintain the Archetypal / ectypal distinction between divine “pity, anger, compassion and sorry” and creaturely passions, and instead treat them as some kind of divine passions. He also explicitly affirms that the Father, Son, and Spirit are homoousios the same substance.
However, I will simply close my post by repeating his words.
These are internal contradictions, perhaps, albeit happy ones.
I commend to my readers All That Is in God by James Dolezal for a popular analysis of Theistic Mutalism and related errors.