One in Essence, Three in Person

We say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. But we don't say that the Father is the Son and the Son is the Holy Spirit or that the Holy Spirit is the Father. It's vital that we get the doctrine of the Trinity right. Because if we get it wrong, we're getting God wrong. And as we've seen already this week, people throughout history have got the doctrine of God, of Christ, and the Trinity wrong.

and they're fallen into heresy. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. Today, we come to the final message that you'll hear this week from RC Sproll's series, The Mystery of the Trinity.

that you can own the entire series on DVD, receive digital access to the messages and study guide in the free Ligonier app, and receive a copy of his title, What is the Trinity when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends at midnight tonight. When we speak of the Trinity, we often say that God is one in essence and three in person. But what do we mean by these terms? Here's Dr. Sproll to explain and to conclude his series, The Mystery of the Trinity.

In our last session in our study of the Trinity, we looked at the difference between contradictions and mysteries. with specific reference to The formula for the Trinity that has developed in church history. We saw the importance of precision in language that we capture the content of Scripture itself. And in this final lecture, I want to look at some of the. Terms that are used historically to articulate our confession of the Trinity.

Before I do that, let me turn your attention briefly to the very first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. Where we read these words in verse 1. God who at various times And in various ways spoken time past to the fathers by the prophets. has in these last days spoken to us by his Son. Here we have Christ referred to again as the Son of God.

Whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world. He's the agent of creation. Who? being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sin, and sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. Yeah.

Obviously, the Christology that we find in the book of Hebrews is exceedingly high, and one of the reasons why the early church was inclined to affirm the deity of Christ. But here we have this interesting concept where the Son of God is seen as the brightness of the glory of God, which is a reference to his deity, and the express image. of his, that is, the father's person. And so I just want us to see here that the Son of God Is distinguished from the Father in terms of the idea of personhood. It is the Father's person.

who is expressed in the person of the Son.

So, even though we have the distinction between father and son, we also have here that idea of a person. personal distinction. In the Godhead.

Now, one of the problems that we have, admittedly, With the language of our expression of the Trinity, is that when the early church used the term person. to distinguish the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost from each other. The term person was used in a somewhat different manner from how the term person is used in our culture today. And that's always a problem with language because language tends to be dynamic, that it changes its little nuances from one generation to the next. In Elizabethan English, if you called a girl cute, Cute, you insulted her because cute meant bowlegged, where today it means something.

Quite different from that. And that's the way language has a tendency to change over time. It was the church father, Tertullian, who who had a background not only in theology but also in law, in legal studies and in the legal field, who introduced the Latin term Persona. In an attempt to express the Logos Christology of the time. Yeah.

And there were basically two references to the concept of persona in antiquity, in the Latin language. And it was this. First of all, in legal terms, A person's estate or a person's ownings and possessions were part of the persona. of the individual. And so, in that sense, the term persona had a legal.

reference point, at least to Tertullian. Also in antiquity, the term persona Translated into the Latin from the Greek concept of the drama. Of the period. The way drama was carried out was that sometimes the actors on the stage had multiple roles or multiple parts in the play, the same actor having more than one part. And when a actor was changing his role during the play.

He would put a different mask in front of his face, and he would speak through that mask because the mask indicated the role that he was playing at the time. You've seen the symbolism of Greek drama, where you have the twin masks, one of them frowning, which goes back to the dramatic tragedy, and the other one with a big smile that represents comedy.

Well, those masks that were used on stage by actors who had multiple roles were called persona. I saw that done once in my life. Many years ago one of the biggest hit plays on Broadway was a modern version of the Biblical Book of Job, and it was entitled Simply JB. And Basil Rathbone of Sherlock Holmes, fame, and Sheriff of Nottingham, fame from the Old Robin Hood series. Basil Rathbone played both the role of God And the role of Satan in that Broadway production.

In fact, when I saw it, I was fortunate enough to sit literally front row center. And Rathbone would stand right at the front end of the stage. He wasn't five feet away from me during the production of that play, and he had these two masks. And when he was articulating the role of God, he would put one mask in front of his face and speak through it. And when he was articulating the role of Satan, he would take the other mask and speak through that.

And that was a throwback to antiquity when these masks were used to indicate different roles or different persons. That's why they were called, in the plural, personae.

Now that's the original concept that Tertullian introduces into church history. But as the church developed over the first four or five centuries, the concept of person became more specified than that. In the Greek Word that was used was the word hupostasis, or we call it in English, hypostatic. A hypostatic union. And The word hupostasis also has a certain significance in the Greek language.

And it also has a role in modern science for some of you who are inclined to understand how it's used there. To understand the hypostatic union, I want us to review a couple of basic concepts that we have in our language and in our vocabulary. Specifically. Three words. that we're all familiar with.

But these three words are very important when it comes to understanding the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Those three words are, first of all, essence. Second of all, existence. And third of all, subsistence.

Now, you've all heard those three words at one time or another in your lifetime. Essence Existence and subsistence. And to understand the import of these concepts, we have to go back. A little bit into Greek thinking and Greek philosophy, where we've already seen. That with respect to the term homoousios and homoi usios.

At Nicaea, and so on, that the term usios. Is the present participle of the Greek verb to be. And so we would translate that term usios. into English by the word being. Or synonyms for the Greek concept of being, would include words like substance, Essence And the simplest, more crude definition of usios is simply stuff.

And if you go to the ancient philosophers who sought for ultimate reality, who were involved in the task of what we call metaphysics, or that fusis or physics that goes above and beyond what we perceive in this world, they were looking for ultimate reality, that which does not manifest change. They were looking for the substance or the essence of things.

Okay. And that Was called the usios, or as I said, the essence or substance. Plato made a very important distinction. between being and becoming. And again, this distinction was rooted in what we call pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophers before Socrates.

Those of you who have looked at our course on the consequence of ideas, which gives us an overview of the history of philosophy, would be familiar with this. I mentioned that two previous philosophers to Plato were locked in conflict about the role of being and becoming in reality. Parmenides, who was considered the most brilliant pre-Socratic philosopher, about whom almost nothing survives to this day, is famous for his statement that he made on one occasion: whatever is, comma, Yes Because if something is constantly changing, Can we ever really say? What it is, because as soon as you think you've described what it is, it's not that anymore. It's changed.

And he's saying, for anything to be real, ultimately, It has to be in a state of being. There has to be a real essence or substance to it, otherwise, it would just be a Fig Newton of our imaginations. All right.

So Plato made this distinction between being and becoming because Parmenides said whatever is, is, and his counterpart was Heraclitus.

Some call him the father of modern existentialists. Heraclitus said, no, whatever is. is changing. All things are in a state of flux. The only thing that's constant is change itself.

And he said you can't step into the same river twice, because by the time you take your second step, the river has moved on. And it's not the same river that you stepped in the first time. In fact, you're not the same person because you've changed, if only by being a few seconds older. And so he says what is most basic to all the reality that we perceive in this world is that whatever else we see, even if it's a rock, it's in a process of change. It's in a process of becoming.

But you see, Plato is saying nothing can become something unless it participates in some way in being. Because if it were totally becoming, and this is the way Aristotle said, if it were totally becoming, it would be only potentially something. And something that is pure becoming would be potentially anything, but actually. Nothing. And that's why Aristotle, as well as Plato, argued that for becoming to be meaningful, there has to be some prior being.

And in being there's no potentiality. God is pure. pure being, he's pure actuality. no potential in him. But in any case, When they were discussing the difference between being and becoming, they were speaking here of the difference between essence.

which is the being element of something, the substance of it, And if we want to talk about the becoming dimension. in philosophical terms. The key word that has been used historically is the second one. Existence. I want to have a lecture.

in one of our conferences. where I publicly denied the existence of God. I said, I want to emphatically affirm today that God does not exist. In fact, if he did exist, I would stop believing in him.

Now if ever anything sounded like a nonsense statement, it was that. But what I meant by that, when I said God does not exist, I said that God is not in a state of becoming. He's in a state of pure being. If he were in a state of existence, he would be undergoing mutations. He would be changing.

He would not be immutable. He would not be the God that we believe in.

Now, When Plato, for example, was dealing with these concepts. There were basically three categories. There were being, Becoming And lawn begging. And nonbing, of course, is a synonym for. Nothing.

And what is nothing?

Well, to ask that question is to answer it, because if I say nothing is something, I'm attributing something about nothing. I'm saying that nothing has some content to it, nothing has some being to it, and if it has some being to it, then it's not. Nothing. It's something.

So one of the most difficult concepts we have in philosophy to ever deal with is the concept of nothingness. Pure nothingness. Try to think about pure nothingness. You can't do it. I mean, Jonathan Edwards defined nothingness as what sleeping rocks dream of.

The closest thing I ever came to a definition of nothingness was when my son was in junior high, and he'd come home from school. Every day I'd say, What did you do in school today? And he'd say, Nothing. Yeah. So I would define nothing as what my son did in school every day.

It's impossible to do nothing. If you're doing, you're doing something.

So What Plato was getting at was that human existence or that realm of becoming is somewhere between being And non-being. You notice that I started to say exists and then I said change it to is. There's no way. I mean, people who object to the use of Greek categories in Christian thought, I challenge them, try to speak for two minutes without using some form of the verb to be. See how long you can be articulate and communicate anything without falling back on some category of being or existence.

It's absolutely essential to our language and to all communication.

So In any case, the etymological derivation of the word existence is that it comes from the prefix in Latin X, which means Out of And the root sestera, the verb, which means to stand.

So literally. To exist means to stand out of something. No, that doesn't mean that if you exist, that you're outstanding. Don't come to that conclusion. What it means is that it is describing a position or a posture.

And the idea, if I could try some artwork here, is let's say that this person. is a stick figure. And that stick figure has one foot. in being And the other foot in non-being.

So that he is standing. out of being But he's also standing out of non-being. And so he's in that position. Between pure being He's not pure being, but at the same time we're not Nothing. We have reality attributed to us, and so we stand out of being and we stand out of non-being, and therefore we are in a state of existence.

Now, when the church historically articulated the doctrine of the Trinity. It did not say one in essence, three in existences. did not say one in essence. They did say three in person. But What is meant by the personal distinction in the Trinity is not so much three distinct existences, but rather the term that is used is the term subsistence.

And subsistence is just the Latin equivalent to the Greek concept of hypostasis, because both of them mean basically the same thing linguistically and etymologically. You hear the term subsistence frequently used in our culture and our language with respect to people who are. poverty stricken. who are extremely Needy. Who were barely surviving, eking out what we call a subsistence level.

of life. Almost like they're lower than existing.

Now, the reason for that use of the term is, again, instead of the prefix x like we have in the word existence, We have the prefix sub. with the same route. And the prefix sub means Below or under. And so Again, if we go to that Greek concept of hypostatic union, hupostasis means in Greek standing beneath or standing under.

So the two words, hupostasis or hypostatic, and subsistence, mean linguistically the same thing. And both of them deal with this same root that we find in existence: the root to stand.

So, in this case, what the church has said is that in God there is one essence. But three, subsistences. There are three. personae, that is, who stand Under The Essence. They're part of the essence.

They are all of the same essence. But we are making a distinction that I said before that is not essential. There's not an essential difference between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit because all three have the essence of Deity. Nevertheless, There are true peculiar Attributes of each of the members of the Godhead by which we distinguish one from another. We say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.

Okay. But we don't say that the Father is the Son. And the Son is the Holy Spirit, or that the Holy Spirit is the Father. We don't do that. Because we make these real distinctions, they are real, but they do not disturb the essence of deity.

So the distinctions within the Godhead are, if you will, sub distinctions. Within The essence, sub-points within the singular being of God, one essence, three. subsistences. And that's really about as close as we can get to articulating. The historic doctrine.

of the track. That was R. C. Sproll from his series The Mystery of the Trinity. I'm Nathan W.

Bingham, and I'm glad you're with us today for this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. If you'd like to hear more teaching from Dr. Sproul, you can hear him several times a week on the Ultimately with R. C. Sproul podcast.

Simply search for Ultimately with R. C. Sproul wherever you listen to podcasts to hear short snippets of Dr. Sproul's wisdom and theological insights from his many decades of teaching. Don't forget that today is the final day that we're featuring this series, The Mystery of the Trinity.

Go back and listen to today's message, or listen to the other messages in the series that were not featured this week, when you request lifetime streaming access to the series and the study guide, a copy of the series on DVD, and a copy of Dr. Sprohl's short book, What Is the Trinity? When you give a donation in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343. The doctrine of the Trinity is not merely academic. This study was produced to help you understand the God we love and worship better.

And that's important, isn't it, to know who God is. Until this offer expires at midnight, you can request this resource bundle with a donation at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. But don't delay as only hours remain. Have you read R. C.

Sproll's children's book, The Lightlings? It's a favorite, so be sure to join us next time as Dr. Sprull weaves an allegorical tale that captures the essence of the biblical story of redemption. In a manner that will fascinate and delight children.

So join us Thursday, here on Renewing Your Mind.