In part
one and part
two of this series we examined two polar opposites as to whether or not
Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity constituted, "an epoch in the history of
the doctrine of the Trinity." In this post, we will examine the claim that
Calvin's Trinitarianism is essentially the same as that of the 4th Lateran
Council.
The
Reformed apologist, Steven Wedgeworth, in his
"Is There a Calvinist Doctrine of the Trinity?" (link),
wrote:
When
one turns to the text of the Fourth Lateran Council, the similarity with Calvin
becomes immediately apparent.
Wedgeworth goes on
to provide quotations from the 4th Lateran Council, and then focuses on
doctrinal points Catholics and Calvinists hold in common. But, and this
importantly, he virtually ignores a portion from the 4th Lateran Council (even
though he quotes it) that a number of Reformed folk clearly deny—maintaining
that Calvin denied it too—the teaching that, the Father, in begetting the Son from eternity, gave him his substance. From the Constitutions of the 4th Lateran Council
we read:
We, however, with the
approval of this sacred and universal council, believe and confess with Peter
Lombard that there exists a certain supreme reality, incomprehensible and
ineffable, which truly is the Father and the Son and the holy Spirit, the three
persons together and each one of them separately. Therefore in God there is
only a Trinity, not a quaternity, since each of the three persons is that
reality — that is to say substance, essence or divine nature-which alone is the
principle of all things, besides which no other principle can be found. This
reality neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds; the Father begets,
the Son is begotten and the Holy Spirit proceeds. Thus there is a
distinction of persons but a unity of nature. Although therefore the Father is
one person, the Son another person and the holy Spirit another person, they are
not different realities, but rather that which is the Father is the Son and the
holy Spirit, altogether the same; thus according to the orthodox and catholic
faith they are believed to be consubstantial. For the Father, in begetting
the Son from eternity, gave him his substance, as he himself testifies :
What the Father gave me is greater than all. It cannot be said that the
Father gave him part of his substance and kept part for himself since the
Father's substance is indivisible, inasmuch as it is altogether simple. Nor
can it be said that the Father transferred his substance to the Son, in the act
of begetting, as if he gave it to the Son in such a way that he did not retain
it for himself; for otherwise he would have ceased to be substance. It
is therefore clear that in being begotten the Son received the Father's
substance without it being diminished in any way, and thus the Father and the
Son have the same substance. Thus the Father and the Son and also the Holy
Spirit proceeding from both are the same reality. (4th Lateran Council - LINK - bold emphasis mine.)
[NOTE: This doctrine that
the Son receives His divine essence from the Father is known as communicatio
essentiae—i.e. communication of essence.]
In order for one to make
that claim that Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity is essentially the same as the
Trinitarianism defined at the 4th Lateran Council, one must demonstrate that
Calvin clearly taught that, "the Father, in begetting the Son from
eternity, gave him his substance". This means that the Son receives
not only His personhood from the Father, but also His Godhood/divine essence.
This particular portion from the 4th Lateran Council is a reaffirmation of the
same teaching found in numerous Church Fathers, and importantly, in the Nicene
Creed. The beginning of original the NC of 325 reads as follows:
We believe in one God the Father all powerful,
maker of all things both seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son
of God, the only-begotten begotten from the Father, that is from the substance
[Gr. ousias, Lat. substantia] of the Father... (LINK)
Though some Reformed folk (e.g. Benjamin
W. Swinburnson, Steven Wedgeworth) believe that Calvin
affirmed the 4th Lateran Council teaching that, "the Father, in begetting the Son from eternity, gave him his
substance" (i.e. communicatio essentiae), Warfield is
convinced that he did not. Note the following:
The
principle of his doctrine of the Trinity was not the conception he formed of
the relation of the Son to the Father and of the Spirit to the Father and Son,
expressed respectively by the two terms "generation" and
"procession": but the force of his conviction of the absolute
equality of the Persons. The point of view which adjusted everything to the
conception of " generation " and " procession " as worked
out by the Nicene Fathers was entirely alien to him. The conception itself he
found difficult, if not unthinkable; and although he admitted the facts of
" generation " and " procession," he treated them as bare
facts, and refused to make them constitutive of the doctrine of the Trinity. He
rather adjusted everything to the absolute divinity of each Person, their
community in the one only true Deity; and to this we cannot doubt that he was
ready not only to subordinate, but even to sacrifice, if need be, the entire
body of Nicene speculations. Moreover, it would seem at least very doubtful
if Calvin, while he retained the conception of "generation" and
"procession," strongly asserting that the Father is the principium
divinitatis, that the Son was "begotten" by Him before all ages
and that the Spirit "proceeded" from the Father and Son before time
began, thought of this begetting and procession as involving any
communication of essence. (B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of
the Trinity”, in Calvin and
Calvinism, volume V of The
Works of Benjamin B. Warfield –
Baker Book House, 1981 reprint, pages 257, 258 -bold emphasis mine.)
Now, it is quite interesting that though most Catholic
apologists of Calvin's day were as convinced as Warfield that Calvin did not
teach "any
communication of essence" from the Father to the Son, there was one who
believed that he did, and that man was none other than the esteemed Robert
Bellermine. Warfield takes Bellermine to task in the following selection:
The
evidence on which Bellarmine relies for his view that Calvin taught a
communication of essence from Father to Son is certainly somewhat slender. If we put to one side
Bellarmine's inability to conceive that Calvin could really believe in a true
generation of the Son by the Father without holding that the Son receives His
essence from the Father, and his natural presumption that Calvin's associates
and pupils accurately reproduced the teaching of their master - for there is no
doubt that Beza and Simler, for example, understood by generation a communication
of essence - the evidence which Bellarmine relies on reduces to a single
passage in the "Institutes" (I. xiii. 23). Calvin there, arguing
with Gentilis, opposes to the notion that the Father and Son differ in essence,
the declaration that the Father "shares" the essence together with
the Son, so that it is common, tota et in solidum, to the Father and the
Son. It may be possible to take the verb "communicate" here in the
sense of "impart" rather than in that of "have in common,"
but it certainly is not necessary and it seems scarcely natural; and there is
little elsewhere in Calvin's discussion to require it of us. Petavius points
out that the sentence is repeated in the tract against Gentilis - but that
carries us but a little way. It is quite true that there is nothing absolutely
clear to be found to the opposite effect either. But there are several
passages which may be thought to suggest a denial that the Son derives His
essence from the Father. Precisely what is meant, for example, when we are
told that the Son "contains in Himself the simple and indivisible essence
of God in integral perfection, not portione aut deflexu," is no
doubt not clear: but by deflexu it seems possible that Calvin meant to
deny that the Son possessed the divine essence by impartation from another (I.
xiii. 2). It is perhaps equally questionable what weight should be placed on
the form of the statement (§ 20) that the order among the Persons by which the principium
and origo is in the Father, is produced (fero) by the
"proprieties"; or on the suggestion that the more exact way of
speaking of the Son is to call Him "the Son of the Person" (§ 23) -
the Father being meant - the term God in the phrase "Son of God"
requiring to be taken of the Person of the Father. When it is argued that
"whoever asserts that the Son is essentiated by the Father denies that He
is selfexistent" (§ 23), and "makes His divinity a something
abstracted from the essence of God, or a derivation of a part from the
whole," the reference to Gentilis' peculiar views of the essentiation of
the Son by the Father, i.e., His creation by the Father, seems to preclude a
confident use of the phrase in the present connection. Nor does the exposition
of the unbegottenness of the essence of the Son and Spirit as well as of the
Father, so that it is only as respects His Person that the Son is of the Father
(§ 25) lend itself any more certainly to our use. A survey of the material in
the "Institutes" leads to the impression thus that there is
singularly little to bring us to a confident decision whether Calvin conceived
the essence of God to be communicated from the Father to the Son in
"generation" and from the Father and Son to the Spirit in
"procession." And outside the "Institutes" the same
ambiguity seems to follow us. If we read that Christ has "the fulness of
the Godhead" of Himself (Opp. xi. 560), we read equally that the
Fathers taught that the Son is "of the Father even with respect to His
eternal essence" (vii. 322), and is of the substance of the Father (vii.
324). In this state of the case opinions may lawfully differ. But on the
whole we are inclined to think that Calvin, although perhaps not always
speaking perfectly consistently, seeks to avoid speaking of generation and
procession as importing the communication of the Divine essence; so that
Petavius appears to be right in contending that Calvin meant what he says when
he represents the Son as "having from Himself both divinity and
essence" (I. xiii. 19). (B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of
the Trinity”, in Calvin and
Calvinism, volume V of The
Works of Benjamin B. Warfield –
Baker Book House, 1981 reprint, pages 258-260 - bold emphasis mine.)
I believe that Warfield's understanding of Calvin's doctrine
of the Trinity is the correct one. Not only does his view make sense of the
negative historical reactions to Calvin's views, but it also lends more
consistency to Calvin's overall reflections on the Trinity. Though Calvin
certainly maintained a number of common points with other Trinitarians within the
Augustinian trajectory of Trinitarian thought, I believe that he introduced a
theological novum in denying that the Son receives His Godhood/divine
essence from the Father. This denial when coupled with his strict teaching that
the Son is autotheos, gives considerable weight to Warfield's claim
that, Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity, "marks an epoch in the history of
the doctrine of the Trinity".
However, with that said, I depart from Warfield on the nature
of this so-called "epoch"; Warfield believes that it constituted a
positive theological development, I do not, but rather, maintain that it is a negative development, and as such, it should be rejected.
Grace and peace,
