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Albert: As I understand it, the Greek framework in your quote argues that the personal hypostasis of the Father wills the substance of the one God to be and to be one God, and wills the hypostases of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

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Personhood

Theology and Church life involve a certain conception of the human being: personhood. This term, sanctified through its use in connection with the very being of God and of Christ, is rich in its implications.

The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The Person is an identity that emerges through relationship (schesis, in the terminology of the Fathers); it is an “I” that can exist only as long as it relates to a “Thou” which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the “I” from the “Thou,” we lose not only its otherness butalso its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from the individual.

The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this concept of Personhood: the Father cannot be conceived for a moment without the Son and the Spirit, and the same applies to the other two Persons in their relation with the Father and with each other. At the same time each of these Persons is so unique that their hypostatic or personal properties are totally incommunicable from one Person to the Other.

Personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say “different” instead of “other” because “different” can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, holy, etc.), which is not what the person is about. In God all such qualities are common to the each three Persons. Person implies not simply the freedom to have different qualities but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. This means that a person is not subject to norms and stereotypes and cannot be classified in any way; its uniqueness is absolute. This means that only a person is free in the true sense.

And yet one person is no person; freedom is not freedom from the other but freedom for the other. Freedom becomes identical with love. God is love because He is Trinity. We can love only if we are persons, allowing the other to be truly other and yet be in communion with us. If we love the other not in spite of his or her being different but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom.

The other is a condition of our freedom. Freedom is not from but for something other than ourselves. This makes the person ec-static, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the self. But this ecstasis is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite; it is a movement of affirmation of the other.


John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon
Communion and Otherness
Orthodox Peace Fellowship
Occasional Paper no. 19, summer 1994.

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. . .But it was for the reason which I mentioned, and that he might show all things to be common to Father and Son which were done in our behalf. For that Himself alone was sufficient to "put all things in subjection under Him," hear again Paul saying, (Philippians chapter 3, verse 21) "Who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of His glory, according to the working whereby He is able even to subject all things unto Himself."

Then also he uses a correction, saying, "But when He saith, all things are put in subjection, it is evident that He is excepted who did subject all things unto Him," testifying even thence no small glory to the Only-Begotten. For if He were less and much inferior, this fear would never have been entertained by him. Neither is he content with this, but also adds another thing, as follows. I say, lest any should doubtingly ask, "And what if the Father hath not been `put under Him?' this doth not at all hinder the Son from being the more mighty;" fearing this impious supposition, because that expression was not sufficient to point out this also, he added, going very much beyond it, "But when all things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected;" showing His great concord with the Father, and that He is the principle of all other good things and the first Cause, who hath begotten One so great in power and in achievements.

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CHRYSOSTOM'S "Homily XXXIX"-- http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF1-12/npnf1-12-44.htm#P1912_1165237

But what is, "that God may be all in all?" That all things may be dependent upon Him, that none may suppose two authorities without a beginning, nor another kingdom separated off; that nothing may exist independent of him. For when the enemies shall be lying under the feet of the Son, and He having them cast under His feet be at no variance with His Father, but at concord with Him in entire perfection, then He shall Himself "be all in all."

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Fourthly, I would say that being a servant and being in submission are essential elements of God's intrinsic nature, and that any doctrine of God that doesn't understand this, is gravely defective.

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• Might-Counterfactuals


• Is God free?


• What constitutes a "settled event"?

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(c) I think I have confused you about something, though. Whe you say that there is concord amongst the persons of the trinity, I agree with you 100%. There is no discord or conflict whatsoever. The Son rejoices to carry out the righteous judgements of the Father; the Father delights to see the Son executing his commands. The Holy Spirit delights in the union of the two. So it is quite untrue to say there is disharmony. In this I agree with Chrysostom. So proving that their is harmony amongst the persons of the trinity, does not constitute a refutation of my position. In fact, it is in perfect concord (if I may use the term!) with my position.

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GOOD, I THOUGHT SO. I would be undercutting the Orthodox position if I denied the (using your term) "law" of the Father's originating the (my term now) "Divine will." I 100% agre with: "the Father delights to see the Son executing his commands." That's Orthodox. I disagree with this Augustinian notion however, that says: "The Holy Spirit delights in the union of the two." I think the filoque Which is perfectly fine in its own right when aimed as it orivinally was by Augustine and the Spanish in an "economic" fashion) is an awful thing when an attempt to make is a statement (in the same paragraph as defining the "begottenness" of the Son).

*****************************************************BTW - I don't remember. Do you have a problem with the begottenness of the Son?
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Where I might want to continue to examine the plusses and minuses of "concord" verses "submition" (I'm not shopping for a perfect word--just mulling.) is in whether there is any lessening of the Son in his "submitting." Jesus' human nature "submitted" -- which was a completely "natural" thing. (Sin is un-natural; concord with God's will is according-to-nature for humans.) But that natural submission makes sense in my mind as one kind of motif. (I'm an artist--I like motifs. And I like the field of Design, which is the study of different sorts of deigns in conpositions and configurations. That's probably a more predominant mode of looking at this for me than "logic." There is more than one kind of logic!!! ) The motif of humanity "submitting" to God is that of two different natures. The relationship has a penetration of one into the other; but not the other way around. The incarnation, too, was (as George Florovsky refered to it) an "assymetrical union." www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/byzantine_theology_j_meyendorf.htm (...an "asymmetrical union" of God and man in Christ: while the hypostatic source of life — the goal and pattern — remains divine, man is not diminished or swallowed by the union; he becomes again fully human. )


That may be the best point to lead off with. Maybe it will make the others more solvable.

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(a) The Bible clearly teaches that each of the person of the trinity has a will. There are three wills. If there are not three wills, then there are not three persons.

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I think that the Orthodox view is that each "shares in" on Divine will. As each is a Person, I can come part way to your urge. But I do not agree with what Iconoclast (someone on this board) called "centers of willing." I completely disagree with anything that says the Persons of the Trinity EVER will different things. I STAND on the experssion that the one divine will has its source in the Father. Maybe you are accomplishing that by calling the Father the Law-giver. (You can perhaps see the direction where I'm wondering whether we can agree to understand but not embrace each others speach.)

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(b) Jesus has two natures, but he is ONE PERSON. A nature cannot be in submission to anything. Only a PERSON can be in submission. Jesus is one person. That PERSON is in submission. When Jesus talks of his "I" he is talking about his ego, his person, his self. It is crazy exegesis to say that he is only talking about one or the other nature. In my view, your position (oh ye of many names) is effectively Nestorian.

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Why can not human nature be in submission? I'm just thinking freely here; but it does occur to me to wonder whether what you said infers that the human person does not also reside in the body. you say "Only a PERSON can be in submission." Jesus either could or could not be in submission, depending on how that verb is defined. (Borrowing from your observation: The Divine Son could NOT be said to be "in submission" if submission were defined as overcoming "discord or conflict" -- because there was none!) We both felt comfortable with the word "concord." (Though that word is only newly familiar to me.)

The incarnation is a mystery. You are right when you say, "When Jesus talks of his "I" he is talking about his. . .self. He relly did have ignorance. Yet he remained completely divine. That is a mystery. He really did experience abandonment by God. Yet, He remained all the timw "One" with the Father and the Spirit. Again: mystery. But it is not "Nestorian" for scripture to lay out for us literary divices that let us see both the economic work of God and the Divine. Just as the mystery of the eschatological "now and to come" presents a mysterious truth of the "kingdom" being inwardly present though "to come" in its full and outward reality; also does Christ show in talking about "the day" from the point-of-view that he shares with us as human (Yet Scripture also says that whatever the Father knows he shares with the Son.) Why should this not be? And this certainly would not run counter to the message of the Scriptures.

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"All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." Matthew 11:27

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(d) I think the confusion has come about because of what I said about differentiation. I was talking there about a logical conflict (not a conflict of one will versus another) which brought the persons of the trinity into being. Once they were in existence, however, the "conflict" was completely resolved and perfect harmony was in place. "Conflict" is perhaps a bad word to use. This just consisted in the desire to play several equally good and important but mutually exclusive roles. It was logically impossible for one person to play all three roles, so there was a split into three, a differentiation. That was the origin of all time.

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I'm going to just leave this one on the table. I don't like trying to perform metaphysical experiments on God to see "how he ticks." This in only a theory--what you say above. But I don't "go there." Moveing along...

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(e) In relation to your question about the Father, no he is not in submission. He is the head. The whole point is that perfect deity must express both headship and submission, but it is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the one person to express both. That is why there must be three persons in the trinity. Otherwise the fullness of deity could not be expressed.

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You say: "perfect deity must express both headship and submission." Maybe this stems from a necessity created with your point-d. But in the Orthodox understanding, of the Father being the "fountainhead" this is not called for.


But I think that you might REALLY LIKE READING this. It jibes' with what you say of: "Otherwise the fullness of deity could not be expressed.":

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According to St. Maximus, God is "identically a monad and a triad."{24} He is not merely one and three; he is 1=3 and 3=1. That is to say, here we are not concerned with number as signifying quantity: absolute diversities cannot be made the subjects of sums of addition; they have not even opposition in common. If, as we have said, a personal God cannot be a monad– if he must be more than a single person– neither can he be a dyad. The dyad is always an opposition of two terms, and, in that sense, it cannot signify an absolute diversity. When we say that God is Trinity we are emerging from the series of countable or calculable numbers.{25} The procession of the Holy Spirit is an infinite [85] passage beyond the dyad, which consecrates the absolute (as opposed to relative) diversity of the persons. This passage beyond the dyad is not an infinite series of persons but the infinity of the procession of the Third Person: the Triad suffices to denote the Living God of revelation.{26} If God is a monad equal to a triad, there is no place in him for a dyad. Thus the seemingly necessary opposition between the Father and the Son, which gives rise to a dyad, is purely artificial, the result of an illicit abstraction. Where the Trinity is concerned, we are in the presence of the One or of the Three, but never of two.

The procession of the Holy Spirit ab utroque does not signify passage beyond the dyad but rather re-absorption of the dyad in the monad, the return of the monad upon itself. It is a dialectic of the monad opening out into the dyad and closing again into its simplicity.{27} On the other hand, procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone, by emphasizing the monarchy of the Father as the concrete principle of the unity of the Three, passes beyond the dyad without a return to primordial unity, without the necessity of God retiring into the simplicity of the essence. For this reason the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone confronts us with the mystery of the "Tri-Unity." We have here not a simple, self-enclosed essence, upon which relations of opposition have been superimposed in order to masquerade a god of philosophy as the God of Christian revelation. We say "the simple Trinity," and this antinomic expression, characteristic of Orthodox hymnography,{28} points out a simplicity which the absolute diversity of the three persons can in no way relativize.

http://www.jbburnett.com/auctor/lossky/lossky_img4-process-filioq.pdf

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The other portion LINKED below you might find even more rewarding.


==============================================
Summer reading list:

Vladimir Lossky, "God in Trinity" Chapter 3 of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (SVS Press, Crestwood, NY: 1976), pp. 44-67.
http://www.jbburnett.com/auctor/lossky/lossky_myst1-trinity.pdf

Vladimir Lossky, "The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine": Chapter 4 of In the Image and Likeness of God (SVS Press, Crestwood, NY: 1974), pp. 71-96.

http://www.jbburnett.com/auctor/lossky/lossky_img4-process-filioq.pdf




Edited by - fred on 07/01/2003 11:19:28 AM

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Albert: (oh ye of many names)

Fred: Different computer, different name.

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<lightbulb>

wakatta

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God is perfectly good because (a) moral imperatives/prohibitions are objectively true (b) he knows all moral imperatives/prohibitions and (c) he is perfectly free (and therefore has no irrational motivations). I think it follows from this that he would be perfectly good. But as I said in the other thread, that still leaves an enormous degree of scope for him to express his freedom. Ethics does not prescribe only a single course of action.

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