Response to a critique of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity by William Lane Craig

·https://www.reasonablefaith.org/question-answer/P60/is-god-the-father-causally-prior-to-the-son

This is William Lane Craig on Reasonable Faith rejecting the eternal generation of the Son, on the basis that if the Father is causally prior to the Son, there is no way to distinguish this from the causal priority of God to creation- and moreover, that the doctrine of eternal generation is entirely unwarranted by scripture. This isn’t to take an opportunity to lambast Craig, but to address the idea of the Son’s eternal generation and its basis. Here, in a pretty extensive argument, is why Craig (and those who follow him in this, of which there are quite a few) are very badly wrong:

— Biblically, his case turns on the idea that monogenes is not directly related to the word for giving birth and instead signifies the idea of “uniqueness”- thus the distinction between “Only-Begotten Son” and “One and Only Son.” I think the lexical argument for this is seriously weak, and the contextual case against it and for the traditional reading is very powerful. John 1:1-18 is soaked though with language of birth and sonship. Indeed, inflections of “gennaw” are everywhere in John 1 and elsewhere. “All things were made through Him” is a form of gennaw. And while in Greek its literal meaning of “giving birth” is not always present (having become a generic word for “came to be”), in John I believe it is always at the forefront of his mind. We are “born again” from water and the Spirit and the water is “born into” wine. “All things were born through Him” after the paradigm of the Son’s eternal birth. We have these words pressing up against “monogenes” from all sides, and we’re supposed to believe that John saw no association there? I don’t buy it, at all.

—On top of that, John 1:18 states that the “monogenes theos” who was “at the Father’s side” has now made the Father known. So we have the language of dwelling at the bosom of the Father and “monogenes” has nothing to with Jesus’ being the “Son”? This kind of stuff is all over John. The etymological argument is not at all sufficient to overrule that. Even if one imagined that etymologically the two had very different origins and meanings, surely John, while writing in the Greek language, noticed that the two sounded almost identical and meant for their use in close quarters to indicate a literary relation?

—We can even say that the above is all wrong. We still are forced to affirm the eternal generation of the Son. The doctrine of the eternal generation is simply a way of stating that transcendently, necessarily, and apart from creation or any contingent reality, the First Person exists in a relationship of Paternity to the Second Person. They eternally exist as Father and Son. The phrase “eternal generation” refers to that by which the Second Person is produced as the Son. The biblical question, then, turns on whether Christ’s Sonship preexists the incarnation. The evidence is overwhelming, in my view. Ephesians 3 states this quite clearly: all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is derived from the Fatherhood of God in relation to His Son, Jesus Christ. This proves that the creaturely father-son relation is a created likeness of an eternally existing paradigm, not a purely creaturely relation then imitated in the incarnation. Galatians also strongly suggests this. In justification, we are adopted as sons of our Heavenly Father by the operation and gift of the Holy Spirit, who prays in and with us the prayer of the incarnate Son, “Abba, Father.”

Galatians 4 states that to realize our adoption as sons, God “sent His Son into the world.” The sending of the Son functions to conform us to the paradigm of His preincarnate relation to the Father. If sonship is something that the Logos takes on in the incarnation, then the sonship of Christ is posterior to our filial relation to God rather than prior.

-Craig sharply splits the “economic” and “ontological Trinity.” But we know nothing of God except by His divine economy. Even those truths apprehended as metaphysically necessary are apprehended only because of the capacities built into the human person through our creation in the image of God. We know, as far as we do, the eternal life of the triune God because He has disclosed it perfectly in the incarnation of the Son through whom the Spirit is given. The priority of the ontological Trinity and its revelation through the divine economy is indicated in John 17. Jesus prays that His people be one as Father and Son are one- praying that the Father will glorify them through very glory with which the Father glorified the Son before the world began. Clearly, the two aspects of trinitarian life are richly interrelated.

-Notice, while looking at John 17, that Jesus Christ, in His divine life prior to creation, already existed in a receptive relation with the Father. The Father glorified Him with glory. Now, one might declare that the three divine Persons glorify each other and it means nothing more than that. In the context of John 17, this falls on its face. It is evident that the life of Jesus Christ is being spoken of as the paradigm for the life of the faithful family of Christ.

-Craig entirely skirts the question of what it means for Jesus to be the “Logos” in the first place. He seems to imply that this, too, was taken on in the incarnation. But this makes no sense at all. “In the beginning was the Logos” means that the Logos was Logos on the first day of creation. Why do John and Paul speak of the Son as the one “through whom” things were made and the Father as “from whom” if there is no hierarchical relation between them before the incarnation? And the Logos, being the Word of God, comes from the mouth of the Father. This indicates that we are dealing with a relation of Giver and Gift. Origin and Originate. You might call it a relationship of Father and Son.

-On this note, Craig’s doctrine of creation is problematic. He speaks as if the creation is relatively unsuitable to reveal God as God is. So God must instead accomodate Himself to realities with which He has no natural likeness. But this is clearly false. Creation is fashioned in an intrinsically receptive relationship with God as God is. Creation is made in order that God might dwell in it and fill all things with His presence. The work of God in the world makes creation more itself, not less. And the human person, whose natural affinity to the created order provides him with the capacity to exercise dominion over it in shaping and molding it, is explicitly said to be made in the image of God. Who is that image? The Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 1. Jesus Christ is eternally the image of the invisible God through whom all things were made.

The tabernacle is a microcosmic representation of the world. Its instructions in Exodus 25-31 are provided in seven divine speeches thematically following the seven creation days. Moses gives Israel these instructions because of the “pattern” which he saw while on the mountain, dwelling inside the glory of God and beholding Him “face to face.” In Numbers this is called “beholding the Form of the Lord.” Note the important distinction. It is not that God has no form, but that Israel did not see God’s form, which was concealed in deep darkness. The form of God is the Logos. The Form of God is that quality which constitutes God as the supreme Good, and God pronounces creation “good” in Genesis 1 as it is illumined by His own glory-light (Genesis 1:2). A thing is called “good” according to its degree of likeness with the God whose form is Goodness. The Gospel of John, rooting itself textually in Deuteronomy, declares that in Jesus Christ, the Father has been made visible. “No one has ever seen God- God the Only Son, who is at the bosom of the Father, He has expressed Him.” “We have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”

Jesus Christ is the Form of the Lord because He is the Logos. A word denotes a concept which signifies a particular thing. A word makes manifest to our mind the rational idea which gives content and structure to the world in which we live. We exercise dominion over the world as images of the Logos, with the capacity to apprehend the inner ideas of created things and govern the world according to this apprehension. Because we know the nature of silicon and electrons, we are able to mold them in relation to each other to produce a computer chip. That’s not raw trial and error. That is the linguistic capacity to manipulate abstractions and realize those abstractions concretely. These ideas, these words, are the “forms.” God made the world through the Word because the world is “formed” (having been “formless and void”) according to the ideas present eternally in the mind of God and hypostatically manifested in the Eternal Son. The Son, in other words, is the divine Person to whom the Father eternally speaks. God has no subconscious. He is perfectly and comprehensively aware of the content of His nature. The logoi, operations, forms- all being largely the same thing- these are manifestations of what God is by nature.

Our particular natures are always realized in relation to other things. Our qualities refer to our activities. A person is loving if he acts in love. He is visible in the activity of making himself manifest to a person with the capacity to receive such a manifestation. This mutual interlocking of activity and receptivity (which itself is a kind of activity) are what make two persons known to each other. If one thing had no relation to anything else, it would not exist. This is why the word for “activity” and “actuality” is the same: energeia. There is no particular thing without a natural activity distinguishing it from merely potentially existent things. Here’s the rub: God is the root and ground of existence itself. Thus there can be no potential in Him in the sense that He could not acquire a new quality or deepen an existing quality, for He would then have to receive it from something else, entailing that He was not the ground of all being, and thus, not God.

God is fully actual. And we’ve established that these actualities, being activities and qualities, exist only in relation to receptive subjects. This is why God exists in and only in the Trinity. God’s nature is eternally actualized in His perfect and utter self-expression. God has no subconscious. He is perfectly aware of the content of His own nature, and perfectly makes it manifest in its entirety to the Son, who receives this perfect and comprehensive speech of God- then speaking back to Him. Having the same nature, the words are of the same content, yet are expressed in a way proper to the Son. Jesus is the Logos of Creation because He is the one through whom the Father speaks all words and thinks all thoughts. The logoi of creation, their forms, these are eternal paradigms or ideas existing in the relation of Father and Son, and they manifest one or another of God’s qualities.

Note here that if the classical metaphysical tradition had not existed, the Church Fathers would have had to invent it. The idea that the particular things of creation are crafted according to patterns inhering in the life of God is entirely biblical, rooted very firmly in the Pentateuch and the prophets. The mathematical and geometric features of the tabernacle only reinforce this point, that the creation is fashioned according to mental ideas- a kind of divine idealism.

To return to the reason I began writing this bullet point, the creation is naturally suited to revealing God as far as He can possibly be revealed precisely because it is realized in the “space” created by the eternal dialogue of Father and Son. The concept of there being such a thing as “otherness” is unintelligible on a Unitarian view. The creation is the receptacle of God’s perfect self-gift on the eternal paradigm of the Father-Son relation. “All things were made through Him” and all things will be gathered up into Him, as the Apostle Paul says.

This is why Craig’s statement that the Father-Son relationship as reflected in the Gospels “does not reflect” anything of God’s ontological life but is a “loving condescension” cannot be true. The creation was made for the specific purpose of making God known. God is not a guest in His own home.

—Craig finds an objection to the apparent subordination of the Son to the Father that comes from the Son’s being eternally generated from the Father. But this is no issue. The goal of our hermeneutic is not to exclude a priori any sense in which the Son is subordinate to the Father, but to worship God in Spirit and in Truth, according to the pattern He has made known in the incarnation of His Son and through the inspiration of the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit. The Church Fathers interpreted the Lord’s words “The Father is greater than I” with reference to His eternal generation from the Father. The entire context of the passage suggests this- Jesus is explaining the dynamic of His whole relation to the Father, beginning from His being sent from the Father as the Son. He is sent from the Father and returns to Him. This is inexplicable apart from some kind of hierarchical relationship before and independent of creation.

-Still, we can assuage some of his fears. The Father confers the entirety of His nature on the Son through generation, and since we worship God on account of His divine nature, the Son is to be honored just as the Father is. Moreover, there is no possible world in which the Father exists without the Son. God the Father is indeed alone autotheos- but He is autotheos precisely as God the Father, and there is no Father without a Son- I’ve treated the issue of the Spirit’s relationship to this dynamic elsewhere, but it is outside the scope of this discussion.

-This comment by Craig was initiated by an astute questioner who noted that God, being in Himself outside of time, is causally rather than temporally prior to the creation. He then noted that in Nicene Christian doctrine, the Father is causally prior to the Son since the latter is caused by generation from the Father. This, too, is outside of time. The questioner then asked how the two could be distinguished. Why is the creation not also divine? Here, Orthodox metaphysics provides us a helping hand.

In Palamite metaphysics, God’s nature is not absolutely simple in the sense that there are only notional distinctions among His attributes. God’s qualities, while necessarily existing together in a single “web” of interrelated operations, are distinct. The wisdom of God is not quite identical to the love of God. The openness to more than notional distinction in God means that His will and creative act are not to be entirely identified/reduced-to His being God. For Palamite metaphysics, the divine operations are that which manifest God’s nature as actually existent. As I described above, God is eternally fully actual in virtue of His being existence itself and the paradigm of being. Thus He must possess all possible qualities to the highest degree. Moreover, given the ontological status of these energies as activities, God is only truly God in the communion of three divine Persons. So the Holy Trinity is self-existent of necessity (given the notion of autotheos above).

These operations are also referred, according to a distinct aspect of their ontology, as powers or capacities- dunamis in Greek. A power (also referred to as a “second potency”) is that aspect of an energeia whereby its operation can realize a contingent possibility without the need for an external efficient cause. The most obvious example is the creation of the world. God, in virtue of His qualities (which are, under a different aspectual shape, His powers), is able of His own will to fashion our created existence without any assistance whatsoever. He could have fashioned all sorts of different possible worlds, illustrating the contingency associated with the exercise of capacities. At a more mundane level, the love which a husband ought to show his wife from day to day is the same operation, but its particular manifestation is contingent on the free exercise of the will. The same love can be exercised in empathy, in forgiveness, in gifts, and so on.

Thus the creation is causally posterior to God in a fundamentally different way than the Son is causally posterior to the Father. The former is contingent and comes to be through the free exercise of those capacities which Father, Son, and Spirit coequally possess. The latter is a necessary unfolding of the Father’s being God the Father. The creator-creature distinction- the absolute qualitative wall bridged by no chain of being- is thus preserved on Orthodox metaphysics.

—Other serious metaphysical problems with Craig’s view present themselves. On Craig’s view, the hierarchical relationship among Father, Son, and Spirit is purely the consequence of the incarnation and this condescension to created existence. But then, since the three persons share identical nature, in what sense can one intelligibly distinguish them as three persons? Even if I had an identical clone sharing identical thoughts and memories, our distinct existence would still be intelligible in virtue of our spatial relation to each other, since we cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But since God is not extended in space, how are the divine Persons eternally distinct? Creation and redemption is contingent while the Threeness of God is necessary, so it cannot be in relation to creation that they are distinct. In the end, one would simply end up with three utterly indistinct persons, each of them being perfectly identical to each other in absolutely every way with no way of accounting intelligibly for what it means for them to be Three. Multiplicity is made intelligible in the structure of relationships. Here, there is no discernible structure.

—Moreover, what is the ground of the unity of God on Craig’s view? Since none of the divine Persons exist causally prior to the others, one seems to end up with three necessarily existent and distinct beings, which is not metaphysically coherent for reasons I won’t get into at the moment. Apart from its lack of metaphysical coherence, the incapacity to affirm God’s real oneness is in direct conflict with the revelation of Holy Scripture. Craig would likely reply that the unity of God is rooted in the three Persons having an identical nature. But human persons also share an identical nature, all of them possessing that which constitutes the particular persons as human. Surely God’s unity exists at a deeper level than the unity of the human family.

It might be that Craig denies any such thing as a human nature. But if this is so (and presumably he would deny it to other instances of realism concerning nature), then what does he mean by “nature” when it comes to God?

In the end, the classical Christian doctrine concerning the unity and diversity of God- that the Three exist in and only in mutual relationships by which their common nature is communicated- is the only way to make Christian monotheism remotely plausible.

——

In this piece, I have sought to make four points.

First, I have attempted to demonstrate that the Nicene doctrine that Jesus Christ is the Eternal Son of the Father is warranted from scripture. Craig’s arguments are both unsound in their particulars and too narrow in their scope. Instead of examining the large-scale structure of biblical revelation and the doctrine of creation (where the ontological priority of eternal Sonship becomes clearly necessary as a paradigm for created reality), Craig mentions only particular instances where the doctrine is thought to be taught. They are indeed taught there, but the doctrine is warranted at a far more profound level.

Second, I have attempted to show that the philosophical critique of the doctrine fails on the grounds that it does not consider what I take to be the classical Christian doctrine of God, faithfully articulated and expounded by St. Gregory Palamas and his disciples on the bedrock which is the Christology of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. The distinction between essence, hypostasis, and energy allows one to distinguish between different causal relations and tease out their metaphysical and religious significance. In this case, God is causally prior to creation through His freely willed and contingent realization of a power intrinsic to His character. The Father is causally prior to the Son in a relation of generation whereby the Father’s essence is communicated in the production of a second eternal Hypostasis, whose generation is necessary for God to be God. Thus, the creator-creature distinction is preserved coherently.

Third, I have attempted to show that Craig’s articulation of trinitarian doctrine is itself philosophically problematic. Since those characteristics by which we denote the three divine Persons as distinct from one another are, on Craig’s view, all consequences of God’s condescension towards creation, there is absolutely nothing which transcendently and eternally distinguishes the three divine Persons from one another. Having nothing to distinguish them, it is difficult to coherently affirm their Threeness. On the flipside, however, the reality that none of the three Persons are in a causal relation to each other wherein the divine nature is communicated raises problems with God’s oneness. Indeed, it seems as if the Three possess the same divine nature in a way which is ontologically independent of the other Two, raising the specter of tritheism rather than Trinitarianism. In the end, while attempting to resolve a philosophical question concerning the nature of the Father’s generation of the Son, Craig ends with a doctrine that is incoherent both with God’s oneness and with His threeness.

Fourth and finally, this exercise serves as an object lesson about the tradition. Given the nature of sola scriptura, Craig and other Protestants, however much they claim to respect tradition, have no warrant in believing that tradition is correct when they legitimately are unable to understand how it is concordant with scripture. Thus, they are warranted in seeking an alternative solution. Practically, this seems to me to manifest in the multiplication of basic and serious errors originally dealt with in precise fashion by the Fathers and Councils of the Catholic Church of the first millennium. Inevitably, since there is no coherent principle by which a person can keep delaying his denial of a doctrine which he cannot personally (i.e. according to his own conscience) cannot reconcile with his interpretation of scripture. Due to the incredible sophistication of these issues and their complex relationship with scripture, history, and philosophy, it is no surprise that many jump off the boat of a traditional doctrine when they have yet to consider counter-arguments which would solve their problem. The catholic tradition of the Church on Christology and Trinitarian theology plays an immense clarifying role in interpreting scripture, helping to stop a person from wasting valuable intellectual time and energy on false trails like incarnational Sonship.