The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is a beautiful cathedral with high stain-glass windows through which shines the light of God. Outside the stone walls are the heterodox, and the non-Christian. Inside stands the church of the living God, trinitarian worshippers who gaze at the divine light flooding through the multicolored windows into the cathedral’s many quarters.
Purpose. In the confession of three persons and one essence, relational understandings have always accompanied and are essential to the Nicaean faith. Not merely to be reduced to relations of origin, the Father-Son personal dynamic safeguards the rich mystery of the doctrine of the Trinity. The personal roles and relations are not to be conceived as egalitarian; rather the trinitarian communion reflects asymmetry of relations while simultaneously equality in deity with consequent shared glory.
In swift strokes I will defend the essential importance of relational trinitarianism in 8 points.
1. The divine interpersonal dynamic of John’s gospel, bedrock of revelation; beyond economic to immanent Trinity.
2. The development of proto-trinitarianism in the early church with the preeminence of the Father, eternal begottenness of the Son, and mysterious divine Spirit.
3. The Cappadocian fathers’ recognition—given God the Father’s preeminence—of genuine personal relations in the Godhead, notably through mutual glory and love. The Eastern church’s contentment with apophatic mystery regarding one essence.
4. Chalcedon’s Christological description of the two natures which together “form one person [prosopon] and being [hupostasis]” further distinguishes the Son and advances the quest for defining personhood in ontology and relationality.
5. Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure admirably developed relational and familial analogies of the Godhead, soon to be eclipsed by Thomas Aquinas’s overwhelming priority of the One. Yet this underside and complement of Trinitarianism continues.
6. The Latin Western priority of the One over the Three continues, with exceptions in Calvin, John Owen, and especially Jonathan Edwards who stressed distinct trinitarian roles in harmony and communion.
7. Twentieth and twenty-first century Trinitarianism have branched into multiple models and ensuing debates. While extremes of certain branches are necessarily pruned (from neomodalism to social trinitarian tritheism), there remains significant impasse between a Trinity defined by simplicity of essence with relations of origin versus social/relational models.
8. Global reappreciation of Trinity in new cultural paradigms challenges “classical” Trinitarian metaphysics and leads to renewed forms of biblical trinitarianism while respective of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan confession. Can multiple models of the Trinity enrich the faith?
Amidst the diversity of biblical trinitarian faith within the expansive Nicaean cathedral, one perspective need not say no to another. There is no back stairwell to the transcendent God. We stand humbled before divine revelation shining down and made flesh in our finite world. We do well to value multiple models, not the least of which envisions the intensely personal communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into which we are invited.