divine persons and their ‘reduction’ to relations: a plea for conceptual clarity

Divine Persons and Their ‘Reduction’ toRelations: A Plea for Conceptual Clarityijst_602 148..160

WESLEY HILL*

Abstract: Contemporary trinitarian ‘revisionist’ theologians frequently accuse‘classical’ or ‘Western’ (e.g. Augustinian, Thomistic) trinitarian theologies of‘reducing’ the divine Persons to their relations with and to one another. Inresponse, many defenders of the Western tradition of trinitarian theology suggestthat the alternative accounts of contemporary revisionists, likewise, ‘reduce’the Persons to relations. Thus, the same charge (the reduction of Persons torelations) is employed in two opposing viewpoints as a way of critiquingthe other. This article aims to note this (apparently hitherto unremarked)phenomenon and to explore the theological rationale for its development. Inconclusion, the article suggests how a new conceptual clarity may be achievedin light of this semantic confusion and points toward the possibility of a reneweddialogue between classical forms of trinitarian theology and their contemporarycritics.

One of the chief difficulties facing those who engage contemporary trinitariantheologies is how to come to grips with the bewildering array of mutually exclusiveclaims whose semantic formulations may so closely resemble one another as toimply agreement where little exists. Apparently identical formulations may oftenmask an underlying incompatibility, to such a degree that one is tempted to echo thefrustration of St Basil: ‘We fall into a matter difficult to understand and become dizzywhen we face the conflict of the different propositions.’1 The would-be interpreter ofcontemporary trinitarian theologies is thus faced with (at least) a twofold task: first,unearthing different material claims from where they lie hidden beneath closelysimilar verbal descriptions; and second, discerning whether, or how far, the newlyclarified claims actually conflict with one another, or whether the disagreement isonly superficial. The necessity and urgency of this interpretative effort is nowhere

* Theology and Religion, Durham University, Abbey House, Palace Green, Durham DH13RS, UK.

1 Saint Basil: The Letters I, Loeb Classical Library, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), pp. 216–17.

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 14 Number 2 April 2012doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00602.x

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

more evident than in discussion of the trinitarian ‘Persons’ and their mutual‘relations’ – whether these Persons are to be understood as in relations or as relations.In much recent theological work, there is confusion as to where exactly the semanticand material problems with ‘Persons’ and ‘relations’ lie and how these problems maybe remedied.

In light of this, what follows is a plea and a proposal for analytic clarity withregard to the matter of trinitarian ‘relations’.2 My discussion will proceed in threestages. First, I will describe some of the conceptual confusion in current discussionof ‘Persons’ and ‘relations’. Second, I will attempt to move beyond the semanticobfuscation and shed some light on what the various competing claims actuallyamount to in terms of their material content. Finally, I will offer some suggestionsfor lessening or removing confusion by proposing a way of coordinating theterminology employed by the various parties.

I

As is well known, twentieth-century theologians regularly claimed to haverediscovered the significance and richness of the doctrine of the Trinity downwind ofRahner and Barth.3 Among the numerous and varied emphases of this ‘revival’ or‘renewal’4 in trinitarian theology, one frequently encounters an insistence that thedivine Persons ought not to be reduced to their relations with and to one another. Itis this insistence that will provide the delimiting focus for the present inquiry.

Before asking what this claim might mean, however, let us sample some of theways it has been expressed. Thus, Jürgen Moltmann writes:

It is impossible to say: person is relation; the relation constitutes the person. Itis true that the Father is defined by his fatherhood to the Son, but this does notconstitute his existence; it presupposes it . . . Person and relation therefore have

2 I am grateful to Francis Watson, Michael Allen, Richard Briggs, Daniel Treier andJonathan Linebaugh for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

3 See Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. J. Donceel, 2nd edn (New York: Crossroad, 1997[1967]) and Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 1956–75) (hereafter CD). For a useful summary as well as penetrating critique ofthis trinitarian revival or ‘renewal’, pointing out its similarities to other, pre-Rahner/Barth‘renewals’ and questioning the appropriateness of its historical self-understanding, seeBruce D. Marshall, ‘Trinity’, in The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed.Gareth Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 183–203. Cf. also, more fully, Ted Peters,God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993); Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity inContemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).

4 From here on, I will refer to recent theologians who self-consciously identify with thetwentieth-century trinitarian ‘renewal’ as the ‘revisionists’. Instead of employing the termrevivalists (or some such), I intend revisionists as a neutral, value-free designation, sincea revision can be either positive or negative.

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to be understood in a reciprocal relationship. Here there are no persons withoutrelations; but there are no relations without persons either.5

Dumitru Staniloae concurs: ‘[There exists an] eternal perfect love between a numberof divine persons. This love does not produce the divine persons . . . but presupposesthem.’6 Likewise Colin Gunton argues: ‘The persons are . . . not relations, butconcrete particulars in relation to one another’.7 In Gunton’s view, Augustine erredby ‘prepar[ing] the way for the later, and fateful, definition of the person as arelation’.8 Similarly, Miroslav Volf asserts: ‘Persons cannot be translated fully intorelations. A person is always already outside of the relations in which he or she isimmersed.’9 Or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘Pure relations . . . can no more act insalvation history than they can be petitioned in prayer or praised in worship’.10 Again,in the same vein, the evangelical Presbyterian theologian John Frame writes:‘Aquinas’s concept of a “subsistent relation” is most odd . . . The persons . . . are notreducible to their relations; they are not mere relations.’11 And Vladimir Lossky,characterizing the view of Aquinas, with which he later goes on to contrast his ownposition, states:

The hypostatic characteristics (paternity, generation, procession) find themselvesmore or less swallowed up in the nature or essence which, differentiatedby relationships – to the Son as Father, to the Holy Spirit as Father and Son –becomes the principle of unity within the Trinity. The relationships, instead ofbeing characteristics of the hypostases, are identified with them.12

5 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis:Fortress Press, 1993), p. 172. Compare the closely similar wording in Alistair I.McFadyen, The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in SocialRelationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 27: ‘The Father, Sonand Spirit are neither simply modes of relation nor absolutely discrete and independentindividuals, but Persons in relation and Persons only through relation.’

6 Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 1, trans.and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press,1994), p. 245.

7 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 1997; 1st edn, 1991), p. 39. The chapter cited here was originally published asan influential article, ‘Augustine, the Trinity, and the Theological Crisis of the West’,Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1994), pp. 33–58.

8 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 40. Emphasis original.9 Miroslav Volf, ‘ “The Trinity is Our Social Program”: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the

Shape of Social Engagement’, Modern Theology 14 (1998), p. 410. Volf is obviouslytalking about human persons here, but in context, it is clear that he means his commentsto reflect his views of the trinitarian Persons and their relations as well.

10 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 204–5.

11 John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2002), pp. 702,703.

12 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke,1957), p. 57.


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What each of these formulations is designed to oppose is the classic Western orThomistic account of the trinitarian Persons as ‘subsistent relations’.13 As I willexplore more fully below, each of the interpreters quoted here aims to subvert theThomistic account precisely at the point of its claim that the Persons are to beidentified with their relations. For these thinkers, on the contrary, Persons ought notto be reduced to relations or defined as relations in such a way.

It is here that I wish to note an irony, hitherto not fully observed or remarkedupon. Lately, a growing number of interpreters14 have sought to reclaim elementsof the ‘classical tradition’ – the fourth-century trinitarian theologians,15 Augustine,Thomas, the Reformed Scholastics, to pick out a few of the objects of renewedattention – from their alleged misinterpretation at the hands of trinitarian‘revisionists’ like Moltmann, Gunton and the others just quoted above. Part of theagenda of these interpreters, in addition to questioning the revisionists’ readingsof historical figures, is to critique the constructive formulations of the trinitarian‘revisionists’. One of these constructive formulations they dispute is the revisionists’‘relational ontology’. Confusingly, however, in their critique they accuse therevisionists of reducing the Persons to relations – which is precisely the thingthe revisionists accuse the tradition of doing. Before going further, it is necessary tohave some of these statements in front of us. First, Sarah Coakley:

[S]ystematic theologians16 have been at work debunking . . . ‘modern’ notions ofindividualism that they perceive to have distorted Christian anthropology since

13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby and T.C. O’Brien, Blackfriars(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–73), I, q. 29, a. 4.Many of the revisionists draw strong links between Thomas’s trinitarian theology andAugustine’s, though at the point of ‘subsistent relations’, Thomas’s account differs tosome degree from Augustine’s; see Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. ThomasAquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 115.

14 I have in mind here the (widely varying) work of Lewis Ayres, Michel René Barnes,Sarah Coakley, Gilles Emery, Fergus Kerr, Matthew Levering, D. Stephen Long, RichardMuller, Janet Martin Soskice, Lucian Turcescu, Kevin Vanhoozer, John Webster andRowan Williams, among others.

15 Of course, the interpreters to whom I am referring as the ‘revisionists’ also claimfourth-century streams of trinitarian theology as their allies; indeed, much of their projectdepends on rescuing ‘Eastern’ or ‘Cappadocian’ models from their alleged neglect or(willful?) misconstrual in ‘Western’ or ‘Latin’ trinitarian theologies (see, e.g., John D.Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY:St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985)). In a sense, then, much of the debate that providesthe impetus for this article could be redescribed as a debate over who appropriates the‘East’ and the ‘Cappadocians’ more faithfully: those who view the Eastern legacy asbeing eclipsed by the ‘West’ or those who see that legacy as fundamentally compatible(if not finally identifiable) with Augustinian and Thomistic traditions. See André deHalleux, ‘Personnalisme ou Essentialisme Trinitaire chez Les Pères Cappadociens?’,Revue Théologique de Louvain 17 (1986), pp. 129–55, 265–92; Michel René Barnes, ‘DeRégnon Reconsidered’, Augustinian Studies 26 (1995), pp. 51–79.

16 In context, her reference is to contemporary trinitarian thinkers such as Colin Gunton andElizabeth Johnson.



the Enlightenment and to have undermined trinitarian conceptuality altogether.For them, construing ‘persons’ as ‘relations’ (whatever this means exactly) hasbecome a theological watchword.17

In the paragraph following the one from which this quotation was lifted, Coakleycritiques Elizabeth Johnson’s trinitarian theology thus: ‘Johnson prefers to construe“persons” in terms of “relationships” ’.18 ‘Current theology’, Coakley warns, ‘maybe in no better shape [than current analytic philosophy] . . . if it seeks to reduce“personhood” to “relationality” ’.19 Similarly, in his recent criticism of what he calls‘the new kenotic-perichoretic relational ontotheology’, Kevin J. Vanhoozer findsfault with the trinitarian revisionists on account of the fact that they construe ‘divinepersonhood . . . as relations “all the way down” ’.20 ‘[A]re persons nothing butrelations?’ he asks.21 Likewise, Harriet A. Harris, writing directly about theologicalanthropology but casting an indirect glance at trinitarian personhood, states: ‘Wecannot jump from recognising the relationality involved in being a personto affirming that persons are relational entities. Persons are ontologically prior torelations.’22 Edward Russell also questions, albeit more cautiously, whether ‘persons[can] be adequately defined in terms of their relationships’.23

The irony here – to reiterate – is as follows. First, a criticism is made of the‘classical’ (i.e., ‘Latin’/‘Western’, Augustinian-Thomistic) trinitarian tradition that itreduces the divine Persons to relations. This is a claim found throughout the literatureof the twentieth-century trinitarian revisionists. Second, a group of interpreters ariseswhose aim is to undermine some of what has been said under the revisionist banner.This latter group of interpreters claims (among other things) that the revisionistsreduce the divine Persons to relations. What this means is that the critics of thetrinitarian revisionists are accusing the revisionists of the same thing of whichthe revisionists are accusing the tradition. The revisionists say, ‘The tradition ofWestern trinitarian reflection reduces the Persons to relations.’ And the revisionists’

17 Sarah Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity: Current AnalyticDiscussion and “Cappadocian” Theology’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality,Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 111. Emphasis original.

18 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 111. Emphasis original.19 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 113. Emphasis original.20 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 141. In this context, Vanhoozerquotes Hendrick Hart approvingly: ‘Relationship is everywhere but has no separatebeing. Everywhere, relationships have the character of the relating realities. Withoutthose elements between or among which relations exist, there would be no relations’(Understanding our World: An Integral Ontology (Lanham, MD: University Press ofAmerica, 1984), pp. 209–10).

21 Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 140. Emphasis original.22 Harriet A. Harris, ‘Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?’ Scottish Journal of

Theology 51 (1998), pp. 226–7.23 Edward Russell, ‘Reconsidering Relational Anthropology: A Critical Assessment of John

Zizioulas’s Theological Anthropology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5(2003), p. 182.


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critics say, ‘In their attempt to improve upon the Western tradition of trinitarianreflection, the trinitarian revisionists reduce the Persons to relations.’ At the veryleast, this contributes to conceptual confusion, and, at worst, given the anti-revisionists’ aim of defending the Western tradition from its detractors, may indicatethat this project of defence lacks needed clarity at one of its most crucial points.

II

Moving beyond this impasse requires attending more closely to the claims of bothgroups. Why do the trinitarian revisionists accuse the tradition of reducing thePersons to relations? Let us examine their critique in the fuller context in which theylodge it.

In Moltmann’s reading, the Western tradition from Augustine to Barth failed tograsp the Cappadocian insight that the trinitarian Persons are not merely ‘modes ofbeing’24 of the one God but rather each Person is ‘the individual existence of aparticular nature’.25 They are ‘individual, unique, non-interchangeable subjects ofthe one, common divine substance, with consciousness and will’.26 Becauseof this irreducible individuality, the divine Persons must not be identified withtheir relations without remainder, since this would undercut their ability to beconceived as separate centres of consciousness and volition.27 Moltmann grants that‘fatherhood’ is a relation. But to describe God by means of this relation should mean,in contrast to the Latin West, that there is a concrete Person who not only subsists inthe mode of being father but exists prior (logically, not temporally) to it: ‘Person and

24 This is, famously, Barth’s preferred designation; see CD I/1, pp. 355–68, esp. p. 359.Moltmann finds this allegedly modalist interpretation to be genetically linked with theSabellianism made possible by the Latin term persona originally denoting ‘mask’. Onthis point, I cannot resist quoting Lewis Ayres: ‘It is . . . worth noting clearly that the ideaof persona as a term in Latin theology leading always towards a certain modalismbecause of its root meaning of “mask” is nonsense. In the Christian era the term did notcarry this connotation. Prestige [in God in Patristic Thought (London: Heineman 1936)]in 1936 could describe this reading as “a legend”, but for some reason the legendcontinues!’ Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),p. 74 n. 33.

25 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 171. For a similar line of argument, seeRobert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1982), pp. 103–59.

26 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 171.27 The revisionists’ concern not to define the Persons as relations without remainder is thus

paired with a rejection of the classical tradition’s understanding of ‘appropriation’, whichis ‘the name for the theological procedure in which a feature belonging to the nature ofGod, common to all three persons, is specially ascribed to one of the divine persons’. Forthe classical tradition, ‘appropriation’ aims ‘to make a thorough disclosure of the personalplurality in God’ (Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, pp. 312, 327).For Moltmann and others, however, this is an insufficiently robust way of describing thePersons as separate, distinct centres of consciousness.



relation therefore have to be understood in a reciprocal relationship. Here there areno persons without relations; but there are no relations without persons either.’28 ForMoltmann, the Thomistic notion that the Persons are to be identified as subsistentrelations leads one dangerously close to modalism because it seems to define eachPerson as the self-relation of a divine monad: God relates to himself triply. If thePersons are not identifiable as concrete particulars, ‘then God in three Persons wouldbe thrice himself, and the Persons would be nothing more than the triple self-repetition of God’.29

Gunton’s concern is similar to Moltmann’s, though instead of highlightingperceived problems in Thomistic formulations, he focuses his critique onAugustine’s de Trinitate. In his failure to grasp the Cappadocian distinction betweenthe one ousia and the three hypostases of God, Augustine ‘prepared the way for thelater, and fateful, definition of the persons as a relation’.30 In Gunton’s reading, whatAugustine failed to learn from the Cappadocians was that ‘the three persons arewhat they are in their relations, and therefore the relations qualify them ontologically,in terms of what they are’.31 Had he grasped this, Augustine would have been able tospeak of ‘the being of the particular persons’, but as it stands in his account, thePersons ‘because they lack distinguishable identity tend to disappear into the all-embracing oneness of God’.32 The being or ‘essence’ of God, rather than beingconstituted by the mutual relations of the three, becomes a shadowy ‘fourth’ entitysupporting, in some unknown way, the three.33 And thus the door is opened tocontemplate the Persons as the one monistic essence of God relating to itself inthreefold repetition, which is where the Western tradition finally tends in Augustine’swake.

Versions of this same basic argument appear elsewhere. Gunton’s concern thatthe essence of God overtakes and, in effect, smothers the three in Westerntrinitarianism is echoed in Lossky, already quoted above:

The hypostatic characteristics (paternity, generation, procession) find themselvesmore or less swallowed up in the nature or essence which, differentiatedby relationships – to the Son as Father, to the Holy Spirit as Father and Son –becomes the principle of unity within the Trinity. The relationships, instead ofbeing characteristics of the hypostases, are identified with them.34

28 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 172. Cf. Volf’s designation of Persons andcommunity as ‘equiprimal’ in the Trinity (‘ “The Trinity is Our Social Program” ’,p. 409).

29 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 173. Here Moltmann likely has in viewBarth’s characterization of the Son as God’s being God ‘a second time in a very differentway’ (CD I/1, p. 316).

30 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 40.31 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 41.32 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 42. Emphasis original.33 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 43.34 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 57.


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For most who make this criticism, it seems the primary concern is that bycharacterizing the Persons as relations, the Western tradition flirts with a latent, orovert, modalism. For the West, allegedly, ‘God first is God (His substance or nature,His being), and then exists as Trinity, that is, as persons’35 – and this is problematicprecisely because it permits consideration of a divine essence untethered to themutuality of the three Persons.36 As Bruce Marshall notes, this criticism appearsacross the board in contemporary discussions. Recent interpreters ‘suggest thattrinitarian theology ought to exhibit a robustly “personalist” character, in contrast to“essentialist” approaches which take knowledge of the one divine essence (howeverattained) as the basis for assertions about the distinctions and relations among thepersons and with us’. Furthermore, ‘[t]he unity of the three should be conceivedprimarily as intimate interpersonal “communion,” rather than supposing that whatmakes the three one God is chiefly their common possession of (numerically) thesame essence’.37

All of this raises the question of what we are to make of those who are critical ofcontemporary trinitarian theology. As noted above, a vocal minority of recentinterpreters rejects what it sees as a caricature of Western trinitarianism at the hands ofMoltmann, Gunton, Lossky and others. Not only are they critical of the contemporaryrevisionists’ historical work, however. In addition, they have called into question theconceptual coherence of the new ‘relational ontology’ put forward by the revisionistsas a suitable replacement for allegedly modalist Western conceptualities. As we sawabove, they accuse this newer ‘relational’ trinitarianism of (among other things)reducing the Persons to relations. What lies behind their criticism?

For Sarah Coakley, the revisionists have allowed an inherently contemporarypreoccupation – the urgency of combating Enlightenment individualism – to leadthem towards a reformulation of the idea of Persons (human and divine) thatwill not hold up to analytic scrutiny. In their rush to avoid destructive notionsof autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency and promulgate better habits ofrelationality, mutual regard and communal life, the trinitarian revisionists haveco-opted the notion of what it means to be a person and invested it with newrelational freight it was not designed to bear. In response to the revisionists’mistaken construal of persons as relations, then, Coakley proposes a rereading ofGregory of Nyssa’s trinitarian theology, which she argues ‘is not “social” in thesense often ascribed to that term today; it does not “start” with the three andproceed to the one’.38 Marked by a notably apophatic sensibility, Gregory’stheology evinces ‘a unified flow of divine will and love, catching us up reflexively

35 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 40.36 Cf. Rowan Williams, ‘Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate’, in

Collectanea Augustiana, vol. 1, ed. B. Bruning (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990),p. 325, for whom it is best to conceive of the divine essence as constituted by the caritasbetween the hypostases.

37 Marshall, ‘Trinity’, p. 189.38 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 112.



towards the light of the “Father”, and allowing to the “persons” only the minimallydistinctive features of their different internal causal relations’.39 For Coakley, thisstands in contrast to theologies such as Moltmann’s that view the Persons as threecentres of consciousness, as well as Elizabeth Johnson’s that attempt to prioritizesome notion of ‘relationality’ left unspecified in any careful way.40 Since ‘thematrix of human transformation’ is the ‘Trinity’s very point of intersection with ourlives’,41 ‘the “persons” of the Trinity are always being reconfigured and reconstruedas the soul advances to more dizzying intimacy with the divine’.42 On Coakley’sinterpretation, Gregory does distinguish the trinitarian hypostases – and thus, ‘areduction of “persons” to “relationality” is not what he intends’43 – but it isa distinguishing accomplished by a continual multiplication of various images andmetaphors, all of which hinder the human subject from fixating on any oneconceptuality to the downplaying of the others.

Vanhoozer’s concerns are slightly more straightforward. As a ‘modifiedclassical theist’, Vanhoozer is troubled by the ‘relational turn’ in trinitariantheology.44 If the Persons are relations ‘all the way down’, then we lose the ability todifferentiate between the one and the three in God, and thus goes our way ofmaintaining monotheism as well as the full equality of the three Persons:

The point is that relationality alone does not exhaust what we want to say eitherabout God’s being or about God’s triune personhood. It is unnecessarilyreductionist to collapse God’s essence or deity into his interpersonalcommunion or onto-relationality. If God’s being is communion, then divineunity becomes conceptually indistinguishable from divine threeness, and itconsequently becomes difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the full divinity ofeach person in himself.45

39 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 123.40 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 123.41 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 112.42 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 129.43 Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’, p. 129.44 Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 140.45 Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 143. Vanhoozer’s appeal to anthropologists in

order to make his points about the divine Persons (e.g., ‘Persons are not . . . relationsall the way down: “One cannot give what one does not have . . . We can enter intointerpersonal relations with others only because we are already something substantialas persons” ’ [Remythologizing Theology, p. 143, quoting Joseph Torchia, ExploringPersonhood: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Nature (Lanham, MD andPlymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 249]) may be read as an effort to meet therevisionists on their playing field. The nature of human relations may be of littleassistance in our attempt to grasp the meaning of divine Personhood, and to argueotherwise may be to fall prey to the temptation of projection, as Vanhoozer’s sustainedpolemic against Feuerbach indicates. But since the revisionists appeal to humananthropology (see n. 9 above), part of Vanhoozer’s critique of their project is to showthat this effort fails on its own terms, despite the fact that his own methodological


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Vanhoozer’s proposed correction of the new ‘relational ontology’is to suggest that thedivine Persons qua Persons – what the Persons are – are not to be defined as relations,but instead, their distinct personal identities – who the Persons are – are to beunderstood as constituted by and from their relations: ‘The relations that distinguish,for example, the Father from the Son and the Spirit are constitutive of the Father’sdistinct personal identity rather than the Father’s personhood simpliciter.’46 Thus, eachPerson’s personhood – the whatness or substance of the Person – is ontologically priorto their relations. But the Person’s distinct hypostatic identity – Father qua Father, forexample – is constituted by and in their relation to the other hypostases.

Taking Coakley and Vanhoozer as representative, we may ask why they wish tokeep the divine Persons from being reduced to relations. If a concern to avoidmonism (a single undifferentiated divine essence) and modalism (a single essencerelating to itself in three ways) animates the revisionists, what is at stake,theologically, for the revisionists’ critics? At base, it seems to be a concern topreserve the conceptual distinction between divine oneness and threeness. If thedivine being, or essence, is intrinsically relational – that is, if the oneness of God isconstituted by the Persons in communion with one another, as the revisionistssuggest – then tritheism looms as a viable threat.47 When interpreters like Vanhoozerinveigh against the reduction of Persons to (mere) relations, they seem to be afraidthat the divine essence might be transformed into a club or collective, a kind ofsanctified committee – or, to adopt a very different metaphor, a triple helix48 – andthereby conflated with the divine threeness. Thus, in place of that prospect, they aimto resurrect traditional ways of speaking of the Persons as ‘subsistent relations’,Persons whose identities depend on the other Persons but whose existence as Personsis not exhausted by their personal identities. In this way, they argue, the unity oroneness of God may be kept logically distinct from the divine threeness.

III

In this final section, I wish to suggest some ways that the discussion between thetrinitarian revisionists and their critics might be aided by coordinating conceptual

approach would differ considerably. Yet confusion remains, since, e.g., Volf’s appeal toanthropology to make his point (persons may not be reduced to relations) is virtually thesame, semantically, as Vanhoozer’s.

46 Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 144. Cf. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood,p. 28: ‘The Persons share the divine nature, but their Particular personal natures aredetermined only in relation to one another’.

47 Coakley worries about tritheism among the analytic philosophers of religion, over againstwhom she sets her reading of Gregory (‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity’,pp. 113–17). Vanhoozer is concerned to preserve our ability to speak meaningfully of ‘whatis common to all three persons’, i.e., ‘substance’ (Remythologizing Theology, p. 146).

48 Proposed by Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in FeministTheological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992).



definitions so that terms are employed more consistently on both sides. My proposalis a simple one, but it will need some defence: Both the revisionists and their criticsshould simply drop the charge that the other side reduces the divine Persons torelations and should find other ways to articulate their disagreements.

On the revisionists’ side, their accusation that the ‘Western’ or ‘Latin’ orAugustinian/Thomistic tradition(s) reduce the Persons to relations fails to grapplewith the conceptual rigor and subtlety of the tradition, as well as the ways in whichterms like ‘Person’ and ‘relation’ are not used univocally of both God and creatures.49

In order to grasp how or whether the Western tradition envisions the Persons beingconstituted by their relations, one must grapple with the way in which the traditionemploys a twofold way of speaking of God. Augustine, for example, is able to write:‘[E]very being that is called something by way of relationship is also somethingbesides the relationship’.50 Likewise, for Aquinas, to speak of the Persons as‘subsistent relations’ entails two things: First, because the relation ‘subsists’, it isa relation ‘in’ God, which implies that one must inquire of the Person underconsideration what that Person shares in common with the other Persons. Second,not in contradistinction to the first aspect but in coordination with it, one must askhow one Person is distinguished from the other Persons.51 In this way, Aquinasneither posits three separate essences (and thus monotheism is upheld) nor does heposit Persons related to the singular essence rather than to one another (and thusgenuine triunity is upheld). In Aquinas’s words, ‘relation . . . when compared tothe essence does not differ really, but only conceptually; when compared to itsco-relation it is distinct really in virtue of their oppositeness. Therefore essenceremains one and the persons are three.’52 The Persons are therefore relations onlyin the sense that it is by their relations – the Father begets the Son, the Son isbegotten, the Father and Son breathe the Spirit, the Spirit is spirated – that thePersons are differentiated from one another at all. They are not distinguished by anyinequality of status, essence, attributes or power; only their ‘outgoing’ or ‘existencetowards’ one another differentiates them as separate Persons.53 But nor, on thisaccount, is there room to conceive of, say, the Father as related to an amorphous,hidden divine essence lurking somewhere behind the hypostases. The divine essence

49 Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of TrinitarianTheology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 225.

50 Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991),p. 219 (= de Trinitate VII.2).

51 Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, p. 216.52 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q.39, a.2: ‘Relatio autem ad essentiam comparata non

differt re, sed ratione tantum; comparata autem ad oppositam relationem habet virtuteoppositionis realem distinctionem. Et sic remanet una essentia et tres personae.’

53 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q.40, a.1: ‘ad aliquid’. A fuller account would need alsoto take into account the issue, noted above, of ‘appropriation’. Some features or actions,common to the all the Persons, are nonetheless particularly ascribed to only one of thePersons, thereby disclosing the identities of the Persons more fully.


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only exists in the Persons, nowhere else: that is what Aquinas means when he positsthe notion of ‘subsistent relations’.54

But if the Western tradition should not be accused of reducing the Persons torelations, then neither, I suggest, should the revisionists. The revisionists’ criticscharge them with making personhood essentially relational and thus blurring theontological distinction between persons and relations. But this critique is misguided.If anything, the danger the revisionists’ theology faces is that of veering too far in theopposite direction, towards tritheism. As David Cunningham notes,

the emphasis on ‘relationality’ in the work of many contemporary trinitariantheologians still conjures up an image of three individuals, even if very closelyrelated ones. This helps to explain the popularity of the tag-line ‘persons incommunion,’ which (I suspect) is most frequently read as implying that, first,there are (relatively independent) persons, who (then) come into communion (ascontrasted with persons who are not in communion).55

This is not quite right, since Moltmann, Volf and others prefer to speak of thePersons and relations as ‘equiprimal’56 or as ‘genetically connected’ or ‘two sides ofthe same thing’.57 But if there is any truth to it, as I believe may be demonstrated, itshows the fallacy of lodging a charge against the revisionists that they conceive thePersons as nothing but relations. The real story is rather the reverse. By describingthe Persons as separate centres of consciousness and the divine essence as constitutedby these Persons’ communion with one another, the revisionists come dangerouslyclose to being unable to offer a satisfying explanation for the concept of divineoneness at all. One wonders whether, if both the revisionists and their critics wouldstop accusing one another of doing the same thing conceptually (reducing thePersons to relations), the real unresolved differences in their underlying materialclaims would more readily rise to the fore and thus be able to be discussed morefruitfully.

Were both sides to declare a moratorium on making this one charge,the possibility might emerge of considering with more analytical care what the‘equiprimality’ of Persons and relations might mean (as opposed to merely assertingit). Each side’s abandonment of the accusation that the other side reduces the Personsto relations might enable, for example, an interesting discussion of whether some ofthe conceptualities of classical trinitarian theology – ‘subsistent relations’, say –might be creatively restated not by a wholesale rejection of the contemporary

54 On this whole question, see the excellent essay by Gilles Emery, ‘Essentialism orPersonalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?’, The Thomist 64 (2000),pp. 521–63, and now, more fully, Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. ThomasAquinas, pp. 78–127.

55 David S. Cunningham, ‘Participation as a Trinitarian Virtue: Challenging the RelationalConsensus’, Toronto Journal of Theology 14 (1998), p. 8.

56 Volf, ‘ “The Trinity is Our Social Program” ’, p. 409.57 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 173.



‘revival’ but through a dialectical engagement with its concerns.58 On the other hand,an ‘actualistic’59 understanding of Persons and relations – that the Persons have theirbeing in the act of relating,60 that the Persons and relations are not to be construed asthough a focus on one might eclipse the other – might allow both sides to explorethe possibility that the classical tradition, both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, may becreatively reappropriated in contemporary trinitarian discourse, instead of merelycritiqued as a foil for a novel paradigm.61

58 According to Russell Friedman:

Aquinas, taking his point of departure in the view that an act can proceed only froma distinct individual, consistently places the constitution of the persons prior(conceptually speaking) to the active emanation of one person from another. ForAquinas, the relations take on an existence of their own ‘prior’ to the emanationsof the persons. The persons are established as really distinct in God only by theopposition of relations, the personal acts follow only ‘after’ the persons are madedistinct. (Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 25)

Barth’s ‘actualism’, that God’s being is a being-in-act, may provide a way to avoid thedilemma, highlighted by Friedman, of whether to prioritize the persons or the relation-constituting personal acts; see George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape ofHis Theology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 30. For furtherexploration of this suggestion, though not in explicit dependence on Barth, see Frame,The Doctrine of God, pp. 702–4, as well as the stimulating attempt in Fergus Kerr, AfterAquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 198–206, to think throughAquinas’s concept of the identity of the divine essence and activity through the lens ofBarth’s (and Robert Jenson’s) theology. (I owe the stimulus for this paragraph to PeterLeithart.)

59 See n. 58 above.60 Kerr, After Aquinas, p. 199: ‘To speak of the Father . . . is to speak of the relation which

is the act of fathering’.61 See Marshall, ‘Trinity’, p. 200; Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 198.


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divine persons and their ‘reduction’ to relations: a plea for conceptual clarity

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