PhilosoPhia Christi

Vol. 16, No. 1 © 2014

Aseity of Persons and the Oneness of GodA Review Essay of Brannon Ellis on Calvin’s Trinitarian Theology

NathaN d. shaNNoNWestminster Theological SeminarGlenside, Pennsylvanianshannon@wts.edu

Brannon Ellis’s Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son is a rigorous and informative exposition of the trinitarian debates in which Calvin was involved throughout his career, with special focus on the “autothean debates” and Calvin’s insistence on a distinction between essen-tial and relative ways of speaking of God.1 In tandem with the historical thrust of the text, Ellis pursues a positive theological program: to enlist Cal-vin’s help in defending the doctrine of the aseity of the Son and the proper trinitarian “grammar” for articulating it. If it is true that, as B. B. Warfield remarked, Calvin’s emphasis on the aseity of the Son brings the consubstan-tiality (ὁμοούσιον) of the Nicene Creed to its own, the underived deity of each of the three persons puts considerable pressure on the theo-monism of

aBstraCt: Brannon Ellis’s book Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son is a detailed historical theological study of Calvin’s defense of the doctrine of the self-existence of the person of the Son. The text emphasizes and endorses Calvin’s defense of the necessity and authority of special revelation and the biblical credentials of a distinction between two ways of speaking of God: nonrelatively as to the divine essence, and relatively as to the persons. With these commitments in mind, Calvin’s defense of the aseity of the Son brings the full authority of Trinitarian confession to bear on philosophical theology and implicates at a methodological level the rationalistic tendencies of Thomistic natural theology and perfect being theology.

1. Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 2012). All references to Ellis are from this source, unless otherwise speci-fied. As Ellis’s text recounts, these debates revolved around the aseity or the self-existence of the three persons in the Godhead, with special focus on the Son. That the Father possessed the divine essence underivatively, that he was God of himself, was affirmed by all parties. Whether the Son also possessed the divine essence of himself or rather derivatively of the Father was the specific point of contention, and it was generally understood that the manner of the Son’s possession of the divine essence would then also be the same for the Spirit. As Ellis explains, a major sticking point was the role of personal relations, specifically, the role of eternal gen-eration, and whether in the generation of the Son from the Father the Son received the divine essence, and so possessed deity derivatively—not of himself, but of the Father. According to Ellis, Calvin marched to a steady beat throughout the course of these debates: Scripture enjoins a distinction between relative or personal (the Son as over against the Father) and essential (the Son as God) ways of speaking, so that one may, indeed must, affirm that the Son is of the Father as to his person, but of himself as to deity.

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Thomistic simplicism and perfect being theology. If the simple, self-identical divine nature is possessed underivatively, it is always and only triune, and a natural theological notion of deity will always be an awkward fit. In ad-dition, Ellis lays heavy emphasis throughout—again, with Calvin—on the epistemological or alethic necessity and the ethico-doxological primacy of redemptive special revelation. In the seventh and final chapter, in which there are few references to Calvin, Ellis addresses the relationship between the church’s confession of the immanent triunity of God and her experience of divine triunity in the economy of salvation. In what follows, I provide a rather detailed summary of Ellis’s historical study. I then offer some reflec-tions on the implications of affirming the aseity of the Son for contemporary philosophical and systematic theology.

Throughout his career, in trinitarian debates with both orthodox theo-logians and antitrinitarians, “Calvin defended his views by appeal to the distinction between essential and relative ways of speaking about God in order fully to affirm both” (1). By this distinction, Ellis means predicating of the distinct persons or relative to the distinctness of the persons, on the one hand, and predicating of the singular nature or essence on the other. Calvin’s concern was to maintain the equal ultimacy of essential unity and personal distinctness within the Godhead, as he believed it was taught in scripture as a rule for thought and speech regarding the triune God. Calvin “studi-ously avoided,” Ellis says, “unbiblical speculation” (6). Calvin’s opponents for the most part shared his commitment to equal ultimacy. The question which divided them was whether it entailed or precluded affirmation of the self-existence of the Son.

Ellis concludes his introduction with “A Brief Prolegomena” (15–19). “The emphasis here is on the grantedness of trustworthy knowledge of God in Christ (gracious self-revelation), according to his self-disclosure by the Spirit,” he writes (15), emphasizing “the ethical character of the trinitarian language and its grammar” (16). More grandly, “[a]ccuracy and self-consis-tency in theological exposition, then, are not simply linguistic virtues, but spiritual virtues—while the self-consistent trustworthiness of the God who reveals himself in grace and truth undergirds the very possibility of faithful-ness in thought and speech concerning him” (16).

Ellis thus allies himself with Calvin against (Thomistic) natural theol-ogy and against various forms of theological nonrealism of post-Kantian pedigree. “I think it is crucial,” he writes, “that ultimately theology is not about God-talk; it is talk about God” (17n33). And by virtue of his emphasis on the normativity of the canonical scriptures in speaking of God and the ethical cast which trustworthy, gracious (redemptive) self-disclosure gives to the task of doing theology, Ellis’s commitment to scripture as the sole rule for theological predication falls along classical Reformed lines.

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In the first chapter, we meet Calvin’s acute aversion to dichotomizing knowledge of the single essence and knowledge of the persons. The deep mystery of the Trinity is that the two are so intimately intertwined. Calvin argues that knowledge of the essence comes only by way of knowledge of the persons. To theologize about a simple, impersonal essence—the ‘one’ God of Thomistic natural theology—is to succeed in not talking about the Christian God. To emphasize, prioritize, or privilege either unity or plurality is to err both theologically and religiously. Ellis quotes Calvin: “Unless we grasp [the three persons], only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God” (23; quoting Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.13.2). So Ellis claims that “[i]f we confess God’s Unity apart from Trinity, we do not have incomplete or less precise knowledge of the true God (theism as such); we rather exclude revealed knowledge of the true God who is Father, Son, and Spirit in exchange for some imagined form of idolatry, whether of the pantheistic or the monotheistic variety” (24). More succinctly, “[t]he persons each and together are God; to know them is to know the one true God” (24).

In terms of the coherence of divine simplicity and personal distinctions, Ellis argues that “perichoretic unity strengthens confession of the essential unity of the persons while elaborating the character of the relation between Father, Son, and Spirit as both interpersonally dynamic and essentially sim-ple” (30). On this affirmation of perichoretic triune simplicity, and with a self-conscious philosophy of extrabiblical language in hand (26–7), Calvin proceeds to the defend the aseity of the Son as implied by the simplicity of a divine essence which should never be thought to subsist apart from the distinctness of the persons, and so must be predicated in its fullness, truly as to essence, of each person, even as this is revealed in the triune economy of creation and of salvation.

Chapter 2 widens the lens historically and places the foregoing mate-rial within the context of the trinitarian controversies in which Calvin was engaged for many years. Ellis shows that Calvin faced opposition from both sides: from traditionalists such as Pierre Caroli and from antitrinitarians such as Valentine Gentile. Characterizing Caroli as a traditionalist somewhat oversimplifies Caroli’s shifting theological associations. But Ellis’s point is not that Caroli was consistently orthodox, and he was not, but that his ob-jections to Calvin were of a hold-the-traditional-line sort. As is required for two men claiming to defend orthodoxy, they exchanged mutual accusations of blasphemy, heresy, and “atrocious calumny” (48–9, 51). The point of the second chapter is to fill out the analysis of Calvin’s thought and to clarify his language, and specifically to consider the essential/relative distinction to which Calvin held by exploring its function in polemical context.

Ellis puts Calvin’s relationship to classical trinitarian thought in terms of “complex solidarity.” The Trinitarians “equated Calvin’s claims [of the self-

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existence of the Son] with a denial of eternal generation.” Ellis argues that they made this connection “on the basis of an underlying ontology of genera-tion’s manner—the Son is the one who receives, from the Father who gives, that which they both are” (50). And as Ellis would have us expect, Calvin’s position pace his traditionalist opponents made use of repeated clarification of the essential/relative distinction, by which Calvin deemed rejection of eternal generation and rejection of essential self-existence equally unbiblical (46–7).

Ellis diagnoses Gentile’s theological weirdness in methodological terms, specifically with reference to the grammatical distinction in view. And the evidence is on his side: says Gentile, “Anyone who distinguishes the one God into three properties or persons, either fabricates illusions for himself, or necessarily divides and tears in pieces the substance of the one God” (56). Calvin’s response focuses on the misconception that “everything said of God must be said with respect to his essence or nature itself in order to be spoken truly” (56). This leads to Gentile’s antitrinitarianism because it leaves “no place for abiding and intrinsic relative predication of God” (56). That is, it is equivalent to denying personal distinctions within the Godhead.

Ellis claims that in both debates, Calvin argued self-consciously in terms of the essential/relative distinction which he believed was clear in scripture. Relatively, we may speak of an order between the persons in which the Son is of the Father. Essentially (with reference to the essence and nonrelatively), Calvin maintains, nothing may be withheld from the persons; it is the very substance of trinitarianism to affirm that the Son is of himself as to deity (di-vine essence), inasmuch as he is God, and inasmuch as he is God in a mode distinct from that by which he is Son. To say that the Son is of the Father as to deity is in Calvin’s view a contradiction: “Put simply, to be God is inap-propriately said to be given” (171).

Calvin was accused of denying, if implicitly, eternal generation. From Calvin’s point of view, this was precisely the problem: generation is not a property of the one divine essence but rather a relative notion predicated of the Son as to his person. In the third chapter, Ellis demonstrates consistency from the fathers through to Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas in terms of this: “an essentially communicative understanding of the nature of eternal generation,” which held that the Son in his generation from the Father re-ceived the divine essence (69). Calvin’s rejection of a communicative view of eternal generation set him at odds with the traditional interpretation of the Nicene Deum de Deo (33–4), and even with the Reformed majority who would come to embrace along with him the aseity of Son. But in Ellis’s view, as argued by B. B. Warfield a century ago, by holding steadfast to the essential/relative distinction with regard to eternal generation, Calvin at once arrived at the full and consistent development of the Nicene homoousion and

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exposed a rationalistic tendency in traditional trinitarian thought to blur the distinction and speak essentially as to divine processions.

Though tradition had long brought them together, communication of es-sence is more than the doctrine of eternal generation can bear. Note that in every respect the role of eternal generation is to provide a way of talking about the Son relative to and in distinction from the Father—with the single, awkward exception of essential communication: “[H]ere the doctrine of eter-nal generation oversteps the boundaries of the language of ‘irreducible three-ness’ to which it belongs” and “at just this point—the ineffable manner of divine generation is explained” (99). Thus in chapter 3, Ellis pins the “com-plexity” of Calvin’s relationship with classical trinitarianism at precisely this point, where an essentially communicative notion of eternal generation rep-resents “deep-seated internal tension” in the tradition itself (68).

The fourth chapter surveys the approaches of several players in the au-tothean controversies, distinguishing them in terms of various conceptions (implicit or explicit) of the relationship between the two modes (essential and relative) of speaking of God. Robert Bellarmine’s distinction between in re and in verbis offers another angle on the disputes and helps taxonomize various orthodox positions. Bellarmine and others recognized the value of Calvin’s defense, contra Gentile, of the deity of the Son, but were uneasy about his manner of articulating it, which in light of the traditional commu-nicative doctrine of eternal generation appeared to flirt with essential distinc-tion.

Chapter 5 focuses on classical and majority Reformed approaches to the autothean question, laudable in Ellis’s view for holding to a strict distinc-tion between essential and relative language, but internally inconsistent in maintaining the classical essentially communicative view of eternal genera-tion. Roman Catholic opposition was of either extreme: vociferous or largely sympathetic. As Ellis points out, the theological soldiers of Rome had a great deal invested in the specific formulations of ecclesial tradition, and this com-mitment rendered it a risky affair for those sympathetic to Calvin. Ellis’s discussion of Bellarmine’s role in the debates shows the Jesuit counterre-former stretched between classical formulations, Rome, and Thomas on the one hand, and on the other his sincere appreciation for Calvin’s headstrong defense of the full deity of the Son.

Moreover, chapter 5 substantiates in well documented detail and careful argumentation Ellis’s historical thesis that the Reformed majority, represent-ed by Zanchi, Voetius, De Moor (one each from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries), happily joined Calvin in opposing antitrinitari-anism by affirming the aseity of the Son, but by holding steadfast to the traditional view of eternal generation—even taking it as necessary for con-substantiality—they failed to employ properly the essential/relative distinc-tion at the core of Calvin’s concern (though certainly the Reformed appreci-

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ated the distinction; it was wielded against Arminius (175)). Ellis diagnoses this oversight, if particularly in Zanchi’s case, as “the univocal core of the analogy between creaturely and divine generation” (163). In other words, a category confusion at the heart of the widely held essentially communica-tive view of eternal generation represented a vestige of rationalism which Calvin’s appreciation of the revelational credentials of the essential/relative distinction was poised to undo (160–5, 170–1). In sum, chapter 5 demon-strates broad and even ecumenical sympathy for Calvin’s emphasis on the aseity and full divinity of the Son, with this single distinction: “on all sides, except for the Calvinian minority report, personal procession was held to stand or fall with essential communication” (168). Even “Beza defended an attribution of divine aseity to the Son through maintaining the essentially communicative manner of his generation” (170).

Chapter 6 comprises the hinge from historical to constructive systematic ends on Ellis’s part. Here he explores the “Calvinian minority report,” the view most consistent with Calvin’s own which enjoyed the able advocacy of only a courageous few, by examining the relevant contributions of Trelca-tius, Keckermann, and Maccovius.

Ellis observes that Trelcatius grounded his differences with the tradition in trinitarian categories of which the most basic was his affirmation of a posi-tive, trinitarian notion of aseity, in self-conscious distinction from Thomistic theologies which prioritize a negative notion of simplicity. In Trelcatius’s view, “[a]ffirmative knowledge of God according to his self-disclosure is simultaneously ‘essential’ and ‘relative’” (178–9). From this triune starting point emerged Trelcatius’ view of trinitarian persons and his rejection of es-sential communication. He concluded that “the Son does not receive his un-originate essence from that Father, but possesses it fully and in common in and with him” (181).

In line with Ellis’s methodological concerns and his focus on the prima-cy of revelatory authority, he says of Trelcatius’ position, “[t]his is a concert-ed effort to affirm that God is this Three-in-One; it is also a concerted effort to avoid understanding this in any way that tends to explain the language of oneness or threeness in terms of the other” (181). Trelcatius thus weds El-lis’s methodological and constructive theological goals. On Ellis’s account, Trelcatius resists by heeding scriptural norms the temptation to rationalize or reconcile unity and plurality in God, and he is thereby able to affirm the full deity of the Son as to essence, the Son’s distinction from the Father as to person, and unity in difference in God’s manner of working.

Likewise, Ellis enjoys Keckermann’s defense of the incomprehensibil-ity of the manner of generation as a bulwark upstream from the traditional sympathy for essential communication. He was “firm in his insistence that all thinking and speaking about the processions must be appropriate to the

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triunity of God” (187). And for Keckermann, essential communication en-dangered both divine simplicity and the Son’s aseity.2

The gripping historical turn which summons Ellis’s constructive ambi-tions in the final chapter of the text is the “eclipse” of this minority rejection of essential communication. Ellis’s hypothesis is that the untimely deaths of Trelcatius and Keckermann, the “ambivalence of Maccovius’ reputation,” misinterpretation of Calvin, and a widespread assumption of guilt by as-sociation (with H. A. Röell), served to stall the development of the minority and properly Calvinist view, relegating it to historical obscurity.

Ellis argues that triunity—unity in trinity—is, biblically speaking, the most basic rule for Christian theology. That is to say, the biblically given distinction between essential and relative ways of speaking of God distinctly affirms for us the basic triunty of orthodox, doxologically normative theol-ogy. Consequently, says Ellis, the doctrines of aseity and simplicity are both properly triune in their theological warrant and content. This is in contrast to the tendency to view aseity correlatively. Ellis borrows John Webster’s observation of the irony of affirming self-existence in relative or derivative terms, even if negatively (uncaused, underived, and so forth). And with tri-unity as primary, God’s simple unity entails affirmation of the Son’s (and the Spirit’s) aseity and a rejection of the immanent communication of essence by virtue of the processions. Thus on the authority of a theological methodol-ogy given in scripture, Ellis says, “[m]y point is that an a priori metaphysics of divine homogeneity or stasis (or actuality) is not what drives theological language. . . . Divine simplicity is rooted not in perfect being philosophy or similar monist ontologies—casting God as supremely undifferentiable—but in a consistent confession of the relentlessly concrete uniqueness and plenary self-sufficiency of the Trinity” (204–5).

Ellis devotes significant portions of the final chapter to articulating the relationship between what we affirm of the immanent triunity of God and the epistemological grounds upon which those affirmations rest. Specifically with reference to the essential/relative distinction, or with reference to unity and trinity, the creature’s participation in the triune economy of salvation, as this is revealed in scripture, involves intimate knowledge of both the distinct activities of the Father, Son, and Spirit in both creation and redemption, and the unity of this work as the work of the self-same God (214–22). This cul-minates in brief reflections on the doctrine of the pactum salutis, in which the Reformed tradition has recognized full expression of immanent triunity in God’s attending in timeless simplicity to the triune economy of redemption to be unfolded through and for the church. Even here, the essential/relative distinction is in force, so that “it is a breach of canonically ruled trinitarian

2. Maccovius studied under Keckermann at Gdansk and was, says Ellis, deeply influenced by him. Ellis examines Maccovius’ thorny and somewhat confused exchange with Arminius and with Socinianism. Maccovius dubbed confusion of theological modes “equivocation—that is, creating false paradoxes by folding twofold trinitarian speech into essential predication” (194).

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grammar to say that God the Son is obedient to the Father as God. . . . In the willing of God, God the Father wills nothing except through the Son, and God the Son wills all things from the Father” (225).

Ellis’s text offers a riveting historical narrative rich with theological in-trigue. I register no complaints with the quality of Ellis’s historical work or the presentation of the historical narrative he focuses on, and his theological and methodological emphases are most welcome. Ellis argues persistently, with Calvin, that exegesis of the biblical text, with the aid of extrabibli-cal terms and concepts where helpful, is the proper method of Christian theology. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to note that, this book plays into a growing tendency, particularly in Reformed confessional contexts, to take historical theology as authoritative.3 In this book, Calvin comes through as a theological John McClane. Now he may very well have been a lone theo-logical cowboy, never swaying from the true and the good, even when facing overwhelming odds; but that does not make Calvin himself worth dying for, theologically speaking. Certainly, Calvin is a theological hero of mine, but his writing holds so much instructive value only insofar as it offers clear and faithful exegesis, systematization, and application of the inspired text of the Bible. Calvin is for Calvinists an honored but normed norm, where scripture is the norming norm, to put it one way. It is a subtle but significant error to substitute the authority of man for the authority of God. Complementary but cut from the same methodological clothe are the habits in philosophical the-ology of treating every theological question as though it is only as developed as the last few journal issues and of favoring sophistical display over analysis of biblical texts.

Relative to contemporary theology and Christian philosophy, the signifi-cance of (re)affirming the aseity of the Son may be viewed in terms of the tra-ditional language of the unity of singularity and the unity of simplicity. Often taken benignly as a rejection of polytheism, the unity of singularity packs a rich bit of ambiguity. When understood as the affirmation of the singularity of the divine essence, and when taken with the aseity of each triune person, we face the depth of triune mystery, that the singular, self-identical divine essence subsists in three persons, and that it never subsists as an unnamed,

3. This growing tendency is particularly worthy of mention because it is so much the identity of Reformed thought as such to understand historical theology as purely descriptive, and ex-egetically grounded systematic theology as binding insofar as it sets itself to organizing the clear teaching of scripture and that which scripture teaches by “good and necessary consequence” (Westminster Confession 1.6). Despite tremendous admiration for historical figures—Augus-tine, Calvin, Owen, Turretin, whoever else—and their contributions, for the Reformed as such, Calvin believed that P (or a given confession affirms that P), therefore P is true and binding is as a matter of methodological imperative invalid. The implicit premise that makes one self-consciously Reformed is: Calvin faithfully represents scripture as to P. My point here is that in some circles this implicit premise has succumbed to the fate of a long-distance girlfriend: out of sight, out of mind, and the dogmatic method that results obscures the uniqueness of scripture and assumes the ostentation of Rome.

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impersonal “one.” When we say “God,” if we speak properly, we refer either to Father, Son, or Spirit, or to the tri-personal Godhead, but not to singular, unidentified godness. The Thomistic, natural theological approach to divine simplicity, which conceives of God, of deity itself, as the negation of crea-turely models of composition, is a fine and sophisticated example of groping in the univocal dark. Theorizing about unnamed, noncreatureliness is not biblically warranted talk about God. So Ellis: aseity “is a primarily positive and materially rich conception rooted in and inseparable from the trinitar-ian character of God, rather than a privative or formal ‘non-contingency’ correlative to derivative creaturely existence” (199). If scripture reveals an exhaustively personal, thrice-subsistent God, the usefulness, even the propri-ety, of theologizing about a faceless noncreature should come under scrutiny.

Furthermore, the unity of singularity, in terms of a denial of polytheism, never appears in scripture innocuously. We never read merely that God is nu-merically one. We read rather that God is jealous; that he will share his glory with no one; that no ‘other gods’ are like him; that his people are to honor none beside him. Deuteronomy 6:4 identifies God as one, and emphatically as the covenanting God: “Hear O Israel, the lord [I AM] your God.” The book of Deuteronomy itself is not a theological treatise, but a divinely in-spired exposition of the Mosaic law, the covenantal legislation constitutive of the formal covenant at that time in redemptive-history. So the uniqueness of God is richly personal in its content—the self-contained, three-person God—and in the manner of its biblical affirmation—polemical, “jealous,” and religiously constitutive (covenantal).

The unity of simplicity is implied in this dual notion of singularity. The triune God is who and what he is by virtue of nothing outside himself. God does not depend upon anything that is not God in order to be God. And since, properly speaking, this divine “unity of singularity” is predicated of personal triunity, God’s free actions express and reveal the simplicity of his nature. (Though pace Barthian actualism, divine action does not constitute the divine nature.) The humiliation and subsequent exaltation of the eternal Son of God in Christ, as it involves the full triune economy of salvation and even the contingency of Jesus’s obedience unto death, reveals to us the mys-tery of a triune, simple God. As the Son becomes incarnate in history, in all that he is and undergoes, and as he returns to sit at the Father’s right hand, the fullness of his deity and the simple unity of the triune Godhead are not forfeited or confused, but confirmed and revealed. Though the Son and not the Father dies on the cross, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). God is one; and yet the Son, and not the Father, stood upon the earth and said, “I can do nothing on my own” (John 5:30).

If the Son of God, two natures unconfused in one person, is the full radi-ance of the glory of God, in whom all the fullness of God dwells, then God

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thus condescended emerges as an epistemological primary confession. There is no knowledge of God apart from the voluntary assumption of creaturely knowables, by virtue of which God reveals himself to be apprehended (truly known) though not comprehended (known exhaustively in any aspect of his being). In terms then of theological predication and the knowledge of God: (1) only the God who has condescended can be known; (2) God can only be known by virtue of his condescension. All that is to say, again, that the theo-monism of Thomistic simplicism and of perfect being theology begins to appear suspiciously beyond the contours of divinely initiated theology. And this being a point of methodology, the subjective aspect—whether the theologizer believes he is speaking about the Christian God—is irrelevant. The outstanding question then, which Ellis’s text presents for philosophical theology, is as to the relation of abstract theologizing to essential and per-sonal triunity, and to the role of special revelation in speaking truly of God.