Hat tip to Gary Yates (via Twitter) for reminding me of this 2003 article by noted Greek grammarian Dan Wallace:
Daniel B. Wallace, “Greek Grammar and the Personality of the Holy Spirit,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 13 (2003): 97-126.
Here’s the abstract:
The modern, broadly conservative articulation of the distinct personality and deity of the Holy Spirit has often included in its arsenal a point or two from the realm of philology. The Fourth Gospel has especially been mined for such grammatical nuggets, though Ephesians, 1 John, and sometimes even 2 Thessalonians have been claimed as yielding syntactical evidence in defense of the Spirit’s personality. Two kinds of texts have been put forth in support of this supposition: passages involving grammatical gender and passages involving notions of agency. Those involving grammatical gender are used as an apologetic defense of a high pneumatology; those involving agency are simply assumed to prove the point. I believe that this grammatical defense for the Spirit’s personality has a poor foundation. If it is indeed invalid, then to use it in defense of a high pneumatology not only damages Trinitarian apologetics but also may well mask an emerging pneumatology within the NT.
Coming from Wallace, it’s no surprise that this is a very good article. You’ll need some knowledge of Greek to follow it completely. As those who have read my “Myth book” draft may recall, my own thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity does not derive from grammar.
This can go a bit with Larry Hurtado’s 2010 book “God in New Testament Theology” Abingdon Publications Oct. 1 2010. Like a commenter on Amazon said about the book: “If you are a Trinitarian, you will like that Hurtado has laid a scriptural foundation for you to build your case. If you are not a Trinitarian, you will like that Hurtado reveals that the NT writers themselves made no case for a Trinity,” and also: “This is a fascinating study for those who have been told that “the Bible teaches the Trinity.” It will be clear to anyone familiar with the New Testament that Hurtado’s view is more representative of the text than that statement…Although Hurtado doesn’t say what I am about to say, at least not in these words, this is a fair conclusion to be drawn from his book: If the Trinity is true (i.e. understood in the formulation that God is three persons in one being), the writers of the New Testament didn’t know it.”
I would disagree; I think the statement is much too categorical. I think NT writers (not all of them since they don’t all write about the same issues) picked up on the OT godhead (how Yahweh could be more than two persons at the same time, and how the second Yahweh – the one in human form – “was but wasn’t” Yahweh). I see them taking that idea and using it of the Spirit in relation to Jesus. Phrases like “the Spirit of Jesus” and “the Spirit of Christ” tell me that they were thinking the Spirit “was but wasn’t Jesus” – and if he “was but wasn’t the Father,” the result is Trinitarianism – three different persons (there’s the “wasn’t”) and one essence or (biblical ontological term) presence (there’s the “was”). None of that is about grammar. It’s about conceptions of godhead – multiple figures / persons of the same deity presence. The recent books by Sommer (“Bodies of God”) and, in some respects, Herring (“Divine Substitution”) show how that thinking was not unusual in the ancient Near East. I don’t think we can say the NT authors knew nothing of this. I also don’t see Hurtado dealing with that material, as his attention is focused on the NT.
Brian – you could ask Larry yourself if you ever come to SBL (hint – it’s in San Diego this year!)
Alright, thanks Mike. I’ve never been able to go to SBL and I dont think I will be able to. I will probably ask Larry by email later this week. Larry blogged a bit on his view of Trinitarianism in the NT (http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/jesus-pre-existence-etc-responding-to-questions/), and I am slowly reading “God in New Testament Theology” on Kindle. But, what I was referring to is that Wallace is refuting the grammatical contentions that we can detect a distinguishable personality of the Holy Spirit because of grammatical gender and other textual details, but as you correctly point out, the precursors for the triadic Godhead are found in the way that phrases are interchanged and conjoined between all three: Father, Son, Spirit–That, I understand. But, Larry’s additional point is that we do not yet see a defined, developped Trinitarianism in which the Spirit is a distinguishable person or being within what we know today as the Godhead.
In other words, the precursors or the raw materials for the Trinity in the OT that you have shared with us in the past (Isaiah 63 / Psalm 78) do not have enough details for us to conclude that the spirit is a separate person/being from YHWH, at least, much less that the interchange between the angel of YHWH (angel of his Presence). In the NT, without reading later Trinitarian categorical expressions into it, it is also equally difficult to see a sharp contrast between God/Christ and the Spirit in that the Spirit is necessarily a distinguishable person/being from God/Christ. That is, binitarianism is clearly existing, but blurred in the OT and much more clearly revealed in the NT. But, when we look at the Spirit, it is not so clearly existing in the OT, and it is blurred in the NT, but more sharpen in later Trinitarian developments into the second CE.
In any case, someone critical in this regard could ask: “If YHWH *is* Spirit, then, how is the Holy Spirit distinguishable from YHWH/Christ in terms of person/being?”
What I am saying, and what Larry made me think about by reading his material, is that binitarianism is much more existential and sharpened between the OT and the NT, then it is the case for the Spirit into the Godhead (i.e. Trinitarianism).
Agree, somewhat, now? 🙂
I would agree that the systematized trinitarian doctrine we get in early church writings and philosophical theology isn’t all discernible from the Bible (but of course those things use the Bible). I’d also say that nothing in the Bible contradicts those conclusions, nor would biblical writers think those guys nuts (presuming they could follow the philosophical discussion).
Right, it’s a good point to mention that the Bible doesnt contradict later apostolic systematized trinitarian expressions, which some are reflected in the variants of the NT.
Dr. Heiser,
I’ve recently seen a growing internet movement towards “Christian Unitarianism” (not Unitarian Universalism). People who claim the Bible is the word of God, Jesus is the Son of God, the virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection, and so on…but they are nontrinitarian. Many of them say that they are “subordinationist” in their theological/Christological views and that this reflects the beliefs of Origen, Just Martyr, Eusibius, etc.
My questions are, were these early church fathers subordinationists? And do you think subordinationists are genuinely Christians? Thanks.
First, I’m not an expert on church history. Second, my expertise is the biblical text – which trumps church fathers. Most of them could not read Hebrew (I know of two) and had little feel for the sort of ANE / Hebrew Bible conceptualizations of godhead that forms a lot of my own work. Many of them also weren’t good in Greek – as time moved on, Latin became the focus. But in this particular area, Greek was in play for most.
The real issue is not what a church father says, but what the text says / sustains. Period. When someone appeals to a father instead of the text, that ought to be a red flag.
Here’s a link to someone with expertise in this area – a journal article: L.W. Barnard, “The Antecedents of Arius,” Vigiliae Christinae 24 (1970): 172-188.
http://www.michaelsheiser.com/BarnardAntecedentsofArius.pdf
Even if you don’t know Greek, most of it is digestible. It asks the question of whether Arius’ system was around before Arius. It mentions Origen. Origen would not have agreed with Arius. From the article (p. 176):
“Arius reacted strongly against Origen’s allegorism and his doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son. Nevertheless, his main debt to Origen is his subordinationist doctrine of the Son which he intensifies and divests of the qualifications made by Origen. It would appear to be uncertain whether, in Origen’s day, there was a definite tradition which asserted that “there was when the Son was not” as Professor Wiles argues from Origen’s explicit repudiation of the phrase.”
As for Eusebius, he was both with and against Arius (pp. 187):
“The keystone of Eusebius’ system, which had been worked out before the Arian controversy began, was the transcendence of the Father, the indivisible Monad, who is alone self-existent and without beginning. The Son, for Eusebius, is not co-eternal with the Father, who alone is άγÎννητος and prior to the Son. The Son’s existence depends on a specific act of the Father’s Will. This is radical subordinationist Origenism, similar to that of Arius whose cause Eusebius embraced at an early stage of the controversy. Both Arius and Eusebius (prior to his theological rehabilitation at the Council of Nicaea) had an overrriding interest in soteriology, although this did not exclude Christology.”
Note the refernce to how Eusebius was “rehabilitated” at Nicea.
The article’s conclusion is of interest:
“Arius drew on no ‘proto-Arian’ tradition already evolving within the Church. His system was simply philosophical dualism – although not without a biblical colouring in its idea of the Sole, Unoriginate God – and left-wing Origenism decked out with an eclectic mixture of elements taken over from various thinkers mainly, although not wholly, Alexandrian. These were fused together by Arius into a logical whole. The result is a system which, while not lifeless nor a clear step back into heathenism, is nevertheless an inadequate account of the fullness of Christian truth.”
In other words, Arius adapted certain ideas before him, molding them into his own system. We can’t label earlier church thinkers as “proto-Arian” though some of what they said was attractive to Arius.
To make the point again, Origen was anti-subordinationist as Arius and others thought about that. One scholarly article as an example: Ilaria Ramelli, “Origen’s Anti-Subordinationism and its Heritage in the Nicene and Cappadocian Line,” Vigiliae Christianae 65:1 (2011): 21-49.
On Justin Martyr, here are a few excerpt from a relevant article (William Hunter, “Milton’s Arianism Reconsidered,” Harvard Theological Review 52:1, Jan 1959):
“every writer from Justin Martyr to Clement of Alexandria and Lactantius, all of whom seem to have identified the Johannine and Philonic Logos and interpreted the former in terms of the latter” (p. 21)
Here’s what these modern “unitarian Christians” don’t understand. From the above article:
“All of Arius’ opponents joined to agree that the Logos had not been created ex nihilo. This and only this point was condemned as heresy at Nicaea. The reactions to the other two points named above — the willed generation in two stages — are interesting and instructive.
Neither involved questioning the divinity of the Logos and so neither was declared anathema. We have already seen as to the first point that the Apologists from Justin Martyr through Lactantius had accepted the two-stage theory of the Word, with an implied unequal Trinity in many of the fathers as in Philo and Plotinus. But the theory was never banned: it is recognized now as subordinationism. Gradually the single-stage theory prevailed, though as has been shown it was a later development.” (p. 25)
Subordination in these early thinkers DOESN’T mean that (to quote Arius) “there was a time when the son was not.” At issue with their subordinationism was the emergence of the son from within the Father. Here’s the point: if the son emerges from the Father, the son exists with/in the Father – he had no beginning since the Father had no beginning.
Nicea articulated that the son was the same essence – an idea compatible with subordinationism of the type noted in the quotation. Nicea rejected the idea of the son having a beginning.
At the risk of sounding a bit condescending, I doubt whether these new Christian subordinationists have ever looked at the primary sources and thought this deeply (i.e., the article’s content). Am I’m sure they have little appreciation for the diversity of thinking within the subordinationist camps (plural – single vs. dual-stage emergence being among the nuances). They basically pluck statements that agree with what they want to say and then go for virtue by association (linking themselves to a famous father).
But all that sidesteps the real issue: what does exegesis yield? I’m guessing these folks can’t do the exegesis, so it becomes a “name game” approach for them to justify what they want to say.
Biblical interpretation isn’t about quoting people who agree with the view you want. It’s about exegesis in the original sources informed by the original contexts.
And, as always, you can quote me.
Very good and detailed response. I agree, scripture must trump all opinions of it (even if those opinions are from early church fathers). Thank you for the articles, I’m reading over them now. Blessings.
Yep.
I suggest visiting http://www.christian-history.org..
Though you may not agree with some of the ante-Nicene fathers, its a good site for that material.