Systematic Theology

The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons

Katherine Sonderegger

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781451482850
  9781451482850
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506464183
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Katherine Sonderegger follows her monumental volume on the doctrine of God with this second entry of her Systematic Theology, which explores the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Locating her analysis first in the Hebrew Scriptures, Sonderegger examines the thrice-holy God that is proclaimed to Isaiah in the sanctuary and manifested in the sacrifice of the temple. The book of Leviticus, read in conversation with Exodus, unfolds the doctrine of the Trinity under the character of holiness. In the one God, Trinity speaks of the life, movement, and self-offering of God, who is the eternal procession of goodness and light. In Israel's sacrificial covenant, the triune God is perfect self-offering: the eternal descent of the Father of Lights is the offering who is Son, eternally received and hallowed in the one who is Spirit. Anchoring the theology of the Trinity in Israel's Scriptures in this way elevates the processions over the persons, exploring the mystery of the Divine Life as holy, rational, and good. The Divine Persons, named in the New Testament, cannot be defined but may be glimpsed in the notion of perfection, a complete and perfect infinite set. In all these ways, the Holy Trinity may be praised as the deep reality of the life of God.

§ 1. Holiness as Triune Mystery

“The Lord is in His Holy Temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him!” (Hab 2:20)

The pilgrimage to the Mystery of the Holy Trinity begins in the temple. There we encounter the One Lord, present to His sanctuary as can be no idol, plated be they in silver or gold. This is the True Lord, the Sovereign of heaven and earth, the Living One who spoke in fire and glory, from the thorn bush, from the mountaintop, from the cloud above the altar and people on the march, from a river near the wilderness, and from a hillside where disciples trembled from the Glory covering them all. This is the Lord God of Israel who is the Triune Lord; He is present in His Holy Temple. He is against all idols, all that is dead, inert, powerless, and profane. He alone is Hidden, He alone Present as the Unseen. He marks Himself off from all that is manufactured and made. He alone is not set apart; He sets Himself apart, sanctifies Himself, declares and defines and guards zealously His Holiness. His Holiness is Mystery, Incommunicate, Utter Reserve; He is Unlike, without contrast or comparison. Yet in just these ways, He is Present. In just this way, in just this mode, He is Trinity.

To encounter this holy place where the Glory of the Lord dwells is to be undone, made anew. In the temple, filled with smoke and with glory, the priest and the prophet Isaiah can only cry out in awe: “Woe is me!” It is not first the creature’s undoing and then the Holy Presence, but first the Holiness and then the terror of sin exposed and owned, seared, and burned away. Just so the Deity of the One Lord, Jesus Christ, fills the disciples with awe as the roaring waves fall into stillness, and Peter, the fish spilling out of the nets and breaking them into pieces, breaks apart in fear and confession: “Depart from me for I am a sinner.” Holiness is contagion, overspilling the holy precincts, the furniture, the vestments, the altar; It annihilates, reduces to ash. The Most Holy cannot be seen. He is the High and Lofty One, dwelling with the lowly, and the Humble One, dwelling invisible in His own creation. Holiness is hidden between the wings of gold, elevated high beyond the savory and sweet offerings, rising in smoky incense and fire. Holiness is Power, Dunamis; It is Mystery. It is the Spirit of Holiness, the Fire and Glory that illumines every dark corner; convicts, renews, lifts up the Son of Man and reveals the vision; lifts up the people from the parched places and the grave; and raises up the Final Son of Man and makes life the end of all things. The Spirit of Holiness drives newfound preachers from village to village, making witnesses of these Holy Things, freeing and giving stout hearts, until the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

The Presence of the Holy One discloses sin and blessing, but even more, the searing Fire of Holiness teaches the silence in which every mouth is stopped. Holy Wisdom bestows the fear of the Lord that stills any presumption, any rash speech. Silence, we might say, is the music of the temple. The free will offerings, the cereal and sin and well-being offerings, the whole pungent and blood-soaked work of sacrifice are made in silence; the inner courtyard is bathed in blood and in silence. The Lord’s Presence, His smoke-filled Glory, consumes any voice but the heavenly beings who can but cry, “Holy!” The whole earth is reduced to silence when the Lord descends to His temple. It is the very first praise and reverence of creatures before their God; the wordless worship of the greater and lesser lights, the stars in their courses; the silence, rest, and blessing of Sabbath; the silence of the prophets before the One who calls; the silence Aaron must keep when fire burns away rebellion; the silence that envelops the boy Samuel in the haunted darkness of the temple; the sheer silence of the Lord as He passes by; the stillness in heaven after the Lamb, alone the Worthy One, breaks open the seventh seal and the mighty choruses and tumult are stopped; and at the end, when all have drawn their last breath, the primal silence that breaks out for seven days, the holy consummation and peace, the final Sabbath, the Serene Glory that stood at the beginning of all things. The whole earth, the whole human race, the whole creaturely realm—not just the chosen people—keep this silence. But to Israel is given this prophecy and gift, to them the temple, the sacrifice, the presence, the holy law, and they endure forever. And always the holy blessing is more. Israel is the light to the nations; it is representative, universal existence. The Divine Light overspreads, succeeds, presses down, and spills over so that the whole earth falls into the Silence who is the Holy God. Silence is the Presence and the sign of Presence of the Holy Triunity, the Majesty of the One God.

Holiness is Trinity. That is the central claim of Christian Triune monotheism. We do not seek first and principally the Triune Names—Father, Son, Spirit—when we speak of Trinity. We do not begin with the Divine Persons. Nor do we focus entirely on the Processions, the generative and self-giving Life of the One God, when we begin the encounter with the Triune Lord. Rather, we begin with Holiness. We stand before the Holy One, in life and in intellect: Holiness commands all. These terms of art in the dogma of Trinity—hypostasis and ousia; begetting and procession; relation and origin—these must be encountered in the Mystery of Holiness or not at all. Trinity is, without a doubt, a full-fledged metaphysical doctrine. It comprises an army of argument, of speculative reason, and of delicate, complex teaching. It is not simple, and I do not believe we make proper progress in the dogma by hoping or promising that it is so. But I believe there is one element of simplicity in Trinity, and that is its divine foundation in the One Lord’s Holiness.

The dangerous Christian philosopher G. W. F. Hegel shows us just how Holiness can serve as the principle metaphysical Divine Mode. In the celebrated preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that the Absolute Idea or Spirit must be “self-generating,” not constructed from without or elaborated through relations Hegel called “external”—those that were brought to a freestanding object by another power, adding and connecting the object to others. No, the proper relations of Spirit must be “internal,” essential, not received but rather moved and generated from within. Though we will not take the time now to comment and identify Hegel’s baroque vocabulary, it is worth tasting his remarkable fare directly:

The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. … Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself—not an original or immediate unity as such,—is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, it is actual.¹

Hegel did not rest content with his early experiments in the conceptual, self-moving Idea, but developed them historically, religiously, and doctrinally in a late series of lectures now published as Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In the last section, fittingly titled “The Consummate Religion,” Hegel directs his earlier conceptual work toward the doctrinal but once again underscores the internal, self-generating force of the Idea itself:

If we assign predicates to God in such a way as to make them particular, then we are immediately at pains to resolve their contraction. This is an external action, a product of our reflection, and the fact that it is external and falls to us, and is not the content of the divine idea, implies that the contradictions cannot in fact be posited by it. Its proper content, its determination, is to posit this distinction and then absolutely to sublate it; this is the vitality of the idea itself. … Specifically, the eternal idea is expressed in terms of the holy Trinity: it is God himself, eternally triune. Spirit is this process, movement, life. This life is self-differentiation, self-determination, and the first differentiation is that spirit is as this universal idea itself.²

Now we will have more leisure to inspect this fertile notion of Divine Life when we consider the Divine Processions in full, but here we may say that Hegel captures the sole magnificence of Divine Holiness: It is self-moving Idea and Spirit. In one way we might say that Hegel’s entire philosophical program, from logic to jurisprudence to philosophy proper, is a reflection on the Idea of God. It is a full and robust account of the structures of reason itself, a structure that is Spirit, Triune Spirit. It would be blind to portray this as orthodox Trinitarianism; we cannot follow Hegel along many of his pathways. But he sees further than many traditionalists, for he knows and unfolds the radiant truth that Trinity must be the final harbor in the journey into the very idea of God: to think the One God through to the very end is to think Spirit. God is Self-Moving Thought in just this sense: Triune Subject. From Hegel we learn how to reflect on Holiness. For Holiness is the Transcendental Mode of the One God, the Living Triunity.

§1.1. Holy Trinity and Israel

The Trinity is the One God, Present and Mighty in Blessing to Israel: One God, Thrice Holy. The dogma of Trinity, we have said, teaches monotheism. And Christian monotheism is Trinity. Now, for Christians, such confessions seem altogether natural. As the Holy God is Triune, in and for Himself, so He is Trifold Eternally; never was there the One God who was not Triune. But what is natural for the church, essential to doctrine and to the metaphysics of God, is alien to present-day Israel, to Jews of the Second Temple and of today. How can this be? How can the confession of the One God, the fundamental affirmation of Israel, from the days of Moses until now, not include the confession of the Holy Trinity, as it also is the very Mode and Reality of Israel’s God? The disciples of Jesus Christ share with Israel the Shema, the confession of God’s Radical Oneness, His Unicity; it is the Lord Christ’s own teaching. And we, Jews and Christians, share the reverence for Moses, the friend of God, who records and discloses the first commandment, that the Lord God is beyond all form, all image, all likeness, that He is Utterly Unique, Wholly One. How can congregations called together by the One God, chastened and directed by the same ten words, called to task by the same fiery word in prophets and seers, drawn to the same lovely earth, from Judean hill towns to Jerusalem, from shrines at Bethel and oases on a wilderness route to the Jordan River and to the Great Sea—how can congregations called and shaped and blessed by all these biblical treasures stand so very far apart in the one thing needful, the doctrine of God? How can Holy Scripture teach such different lessons to such similar peoples? Karl Barth was fond of saying that the great ecumenical question for Christians centered on the anguished relation of church to synagogue, not the broken tie of church to church,³ and it is just here, before the Presence of the Holy One, that this saying takes on its full measure. Anyone who has wrestled with Romans 9–11 and burned with the zeal that scarred the apostle Paul shares the very deep puzzlement, mystery, and sorrow of this fundamental question in the dogma of Trinity.

We have begun our intellectual worship of Trinity with a collation of Holiness texts from Israel’s Scriptures; they will be our steady companion throughout this doctrine. But it is a signal truth that present-day Israel does not read its Scriptures thus and, in more polemical moments, considers the Triune faith of the church a vulgar polytheism, a paganism in the heart of the church. In such Judaic polemics, the Christian faith is apostasy, a pagan rebellion directly prosecuted in the face of the One God, even as the people liberated from Egypt sat down to eat and drink, to rise up and play, in the very moment when the saving Torah blazed forth in word and fire to Moses on Sinai. In this sense, Israel says, Trinity is not new and is to be rejected for that reason, pulled from the thin air of Platonism. No! Christian teaching of the Triune God is, in such diagnoses, an old, old sin, a rebellion against the God of Sinai, a lawless and wayward and idolatrous heart. Medieval Talmudists scoffed at the attempts to make a rational defense of Trinity or at the Christian assurance that this dogma is taught in Holy Scripture; an Incarnate God can only be idolatry, flat paganism. In the modern era, Franz Rosenzweig speaks for many when he diagnoses the Christian as “striving with the hidden pagan” in the Christian heart.⁴ And this Christian reader, at least, must say that The Star of Redemption is not a misunderstanding but a shrewd, deep, and sympathetic understanding of the Christian faith—that empathy drove Rosenzweig to such sharp rebukes. So, too, Leo Baeck, another student of the high academic tradition in modern Christian theology, discovers a repellant paganism, a “Romantic religion,” in the fundamental categories of the Christian faith, a drawing near to God only in order to flee and disobey.⁵ To anchor Trinity in the temple, its sacrificial cultus, its holiness, and its Holy God is to expose, right from the first step, the painful legacy of Christians and Jews, together before God, at enmity about God.

Thus begins the long, ugly history of warfare over one another’s Scriptures. Who interprets, understands, “owns title” to Israel’s Scriptures? Is the apostle Paul the first Christian traitor, the first Pharisaic thief and apostate who declares the Torah the possession of the church? Justin Martyr quarrels with Trypho over just these questions; Chrysostom denounces Christians who bow before “Jewish law”; Athanasius draws his great essay on the Incarnation to a fiery close by denouncing Jews who read their own Scriptures with a “veil over their minds.” These are ancient debates, certainly, but the modern era of theology is not bereft of such polemics. No one who has read Martin Luther’s late, bitter treatises can imagine that anti-Judaism belongs only to the early, persecuted church. That Luther, a doctor of the church and a master of Holy Scripture, can advocate the penalties against Jews he names there and mock the Jewish fidelity to and observance of the Torah can only fill one with remorse. The legacy of debate over Israel’s Scripture turns dark there indeed. And though we must postpone a proper exposition of his remarkable legacy to the doctrine of the church, the great name of Karl Barth must be mentioned here. His was a “discovery of Israel for theology,”⁶ to cite an early commendation, but at a cost. Jews were not “faithful to their election” but were rather “disobedient to their own covenant,” unable to read their own Scriptures that testify to the One, elected for rejection, the Savior of Jews first but also of gentiles.⁷ The Scriptures remain a battleground here, teaching a history of calling and promise, yes, but also of rebellion, self-justification, and blindness. All Israel will be saved but only because the Son of God dies a saving death for the ungodly, His enemies. There is no easy summary of a theological mind as vast and rich as Barth’s, but we cannot allow ourselves the comfortable thought that anti-Judaism lies only in the distant past. (Modern anti-Semitism, I say, is another terrible story altogether, one that Christians must also face squarely and make proper contrition.)

So far, we have spoken in sweeping terms of the church catholic, the faith of Greeks and Latins. And polemics over common texts do mark the legacy of the church, both East and West, but it is in the West, the Latin Church, that this neuralgia breaks out as a fever. To the doctrines of providence and electio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• §1. Holiness as Triune Mystery
• §2. The Intellectual Legitimacy of the Trinity
• §3. Realism as Trace of the Trinity
• §4. Holy Scripture as Ground of Trinity
• §5. Leviticus and the Holiness School: Trinity as Holy
• §6. Holy Trinity as Being Itself
• §7. The Divine Persons
• Index