The objection
Three persons are normally three distinct beings with their own consciousness and will. If this is supposed to be different with God, does “person” not lose its real meaning?
1. The objection makes a human property a law
Three humans are three mutually separate living beings. Each has their own limited knowledge, their own power and their own enactment of life. It does not follow, however, that every conceivable personal distinction must be constituted exactly this way. The inference transfers a property of created humans to the uncreated God.
Scripture proceeds in the opposite direction: Humanity is God's image. God is no enlarged human. We understand God's personhood from his Word and subordinate our comparisons to that Word.
2. The Son acts personally but never independently
John 5,19 is particularly revealing here. Jesus first says that the Son can do nothing of himself. Anyone stopping here hears only dependence. The sentence continues, however: Whatever the Father does, the Son does in the same manner. This concerns all the Father's works, not individual tasks a weaker helper might undertake.
The context unfolds this in raising the dead and the honor due to the Son (John 5,21–23). The Son is no independently acting second god. Nor, however, is he an instrument outside divine activity. Unity of action and his personal distinction from the Father stand within the same line of thought.
3. Distinctness needs no deficiency
The Father knows no less than the Son; the Son possesses no additional divine power lacking in the Father. What distinguishes them is no more or less deity. The Father is Father of the Son, the Son Son of the Father. These relationships are not interchangeable. They establish real distinctness without dividing God's being.[1]
We therefore do not speak of three mutually isolated divine centers of will that would have to agree on a shared plan. In classical Trinitarian doctrine the divine will belongs to the one divine being. The persons are no competing bearers of power. Jesus' human will concerns a different question: the Son's incarnation.[2]
4. A person is no role
The alternative is not: either three independent gods or three masks of a single I. John 17,24 describes the Father's love for the Son before the foundation of the world. This relationship is older than every historical revelatory role. John 14,16 additionally distinguishes the Son, Father and coming Advocate.
Thomas therefore calls a divine person a “subsistent relation”: a real personal relationship that does not attach as an additional attribute to a previously impersonal God.[1] The technical term can simply be summarized thus: The Father is not first God and afterward becomes Father. He is eternally God as Father of the eternal Son. The doctrine thereby preserves both the personal counterpart and God's undivided reality.
Biblical texts in context
Sources and further study
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiaeI, q. 28, a. 2–3; q. 29, a. 4: real relationship and personal distinction.
- Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Trinity and God the CreatorCh. II, pp. 128–129: one divine knowledge, one will and one being; distinction of relations.