While the predominant understanding of classical incomprehensibility requires Trinitarian persons who are absolutely non-personalist (see, for example, in Stephen Holmes), this paper will argue for a classical incomprehensibility that allows for a paradox: persons who are non-personalist, in one sense, and personalist, in another. This understanding of “paradoxical incomprehensibility” is theologically preferable to “absolute incomprehensibility” since holding to a Son who is non-personalist-without-qualification creates difficulties in Trinitarian hermeneutics. We risk turning Scripture’s analogical language into arbitrary equivocation if we-without qualification-reduce into the Son’s eternal, non-personalist generation, the Son’s being known by the Father (John 10:15), knowing the Father (John 17:25), loving the Father (John 14:31), being loved by the Father (John 17:24), receiving the Father’s chosen people (John 6:37–39; 10:29; 17:6, 24), choosing a people out of the world (John 15:19), being consecrated by the Father (John 10:36), and being sent by the Father (John 3:16, 6:38). Analogical, paradoxically personalist language is no more problematic for fundamental, classical doctrines (like simplicity, inseparable operations, and immutability) than analogical and creaturely predicates like “persons” and “essence,” “will” and “decree,” “Father” and “Son,” or “generation” and “procession.”
Lewis Ayres argues for just such a paradoxical understanding of classical incomprehensibility, though he once supported the absolute incomprehensibility position. In his 2004 work, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Ayres made the case that those who use personalist language of separable agents or distinct centers of consciousness would be seen by pro-Nicenes “as drawing inappropriate analogies between God and created realities and in serious heresy. Pro-Nicenes insist that we cannot imagine the diversity of divine persons in the simple Godhead in ways that would import distinctions that we observe between material objects in the world” (296–97). This understanding of absolutist incomprehensibility in pro-Nicene Trinitarianism serves to represent the majority interpretation of classical Trinitarianism. We cannot predicate of the Trinitarian persons any distinctions in agency, consciousness, or will.
However, a decade later in his article “‘As We Are One: Thinking into the Mystery,’” in the edited work, Advancing Trinitarian Theology, Ayres presents an understanding of incomprehensibility that is not just compatible with personalism but requires personalism. In this article, Ayres argues that the pro-Nicene account must make predications of personal agents and wills: “We can and should base our speaking about the divine life in a personalist language of individual agents acting” (103). Even so, we must affirm that such language ultimately refers to something non-creaturely, incomprehensible, mysterious, and opaque to our minds. According to this more recent position of Ayres, classical Trinitarianism requires at heart both “personalist and non-personalist language” (103n9). With this understanding of incomprehensibility, Ayres affirms both “the Nicene insistence that Father, Son, and Spirit are of one will” and the Nicene position that “there is no opposition between one or three wills” (106). Rather than classical incomprehensibility’s requiring absolutely non-personalist language, Ayres now views it as requiring non-personalist and personalist language. This paper will defend the possibility and promise of a divine incomprehensibility that allows for a paradoxically non-personalist and personalist Trinity.