Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque - Paul D. Molnar

Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque

Paul D. Molnar

Rather than a historical discussion of the problems associated with the filioque, this will be an exploration of its theological implications.¹ Most would agree that the phrase stating that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son was unecumenically added to the Creed by the Western Church.² Many also would agree that the original intention of this statement underscores the belief of both East and West that the Holy Spirit is homoousion with the Father and the Son, that is, the Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and Son as one God in three persons. Karl Barth, for instance, believed that from the beginning East and West did not disagree materially about the procession of the Spirit even when the expression was used, and he maintained that passages such as Jn 15.26, which speak of the Spirit proceeding from the Father, could not be isolated from other New Testament texts that clearly refer to the Spirit of the Son. Thus, he explicitly affirmed the filioque because he held that

statements about the divine modes of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation. All our statements concerning what is called the immanent Trinity.³

Thomas F. Torrance also noted that this was its original intention and partially agreed with Barth, even though, as we shall see below, he had reservations about the ‘ element of “subordinationism” in his doctrine of the Trinity’, which he believed was a ‘hang-over from Latin theology but also from St Basil’s doctrine of the Trinity’.⁴ As we shall see, Torrance held that if theologians returned to the thinking of Athanasius and Cyril,⁵ then the problem of subordinationism within the immanent Trinity would not even arise and there would be no need for the filioque since all would agree that Father, Son and Spirit are each fully divine and inseparably equal in being, in virtue of their perichoretic or co-inherent eternal relations. At stake ultimately is the unity of the Trinity.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, it might be worth noting that the issue of the filioque is one that is ripe for true ecumenical agreement today among the Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Reformed. Avery Dulles, for instance, relying heavily on the thinking of Yves Congar, points out that in the East, Maximus the Confessor had no difficulty accepting the filioque when rightly understood.⁶ And that meant that it could not imply that there were two ultimate sources of the Spirit within the Godhead. Such a notion would undermine the unity of the Trinity on a very basic level since if there were two ultimate sources for the Spirit, one of them would have to be inferior to the other. And that is precisely what the Nicene view of the Trinitarian relations rightly rejected. After considering the historical and theological developments surrounding the filioque, Dulles favored retaining the filioque for various reasons. Yet he also seemed open to accepting both the Eastern and Western formulations, namely, that the Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father through the Son’ and that the Spirit ‘ proceeds from the Father and the Son’ as long as these two expressions are seen as complementary rather than as contradictory⁷ and as long as both expressions are rightly understood.

Yves Congar was more daring since he proposed that the Western Church should suppress the filioque today because we now have ‘an atmosphere which recognizes that two different expressions of a common faith may be compatible and equivalent to each other’⁸ and such suppression ‘would be a gesture of humility and brotherhood on the part of the Roman Catholic Church which might have wide-reaching ecumenical implications’.⁹ But, in his view, two conditions must be met. First, the two expressions should follow the agreed path followed at the Council of Florence which held that they were complementary expressions of the same faith. That means that ‘ the non-heretical character of the Filioque, properly understood’ must be affirmed and that the depth of the Eastern tradition should be respected as long as the Orthodox do not ‘go beyond the implications in the “from the Father alone” of the monarchy of the Father and the demands made by the New Testament texts’.¹⁰ Second, Christians on both sides should be prepared for this ‘so that it may be done in the light, in patience, with respect for each other’s legitimate sensibilities and in love’.¹¹

What is notable about these suggestions is that they open the door to much wider theological agreement because in part they are quite similar to the suggestions offered by T. F. Torrance who was instrumental in formulating the agreed statement on the Trinity in 1991¹² between the Reformed and Eastern Orthodox churches. As indicated above, Torrance believed that once the element of subordinationism within the Trinity was set aside by firmly asserting the full equality of the three persons as the one God of Christian faith, then there could be no question as to whether or not there was more than one principle of origin of the Spirit, because the Spirit would be understood to proceed from the being of the Father and not from the person of the Father in the sense that the Father was the cause of the being either of the Son or of the Spirit. Hence, Torrance himself concluded that both sides could affirm that the Spirit proceeds ‘ from the Father through the Son’ and ‘ from the Father and the Son’ as long as the full equality of the three persons in the one being of God was maintained.¹³

But, like Congar, he also had his conditions. One could only accept both of these statements as long as they are not understood to mean: (1) ‘ that the Monarchy is limited to the Father which both the Western and the Eastern Church have held in their different ways’; (2) ‘ that there is a distinction between the underived Deity of the Father and the derived Deity of the Son and Spirit’ and (3) ‘ that the Holy Spirit does not belong equally and completely homoousially with the Father and the Son in their two-way relation within one another in the divine Triunity’.¹⁴ In other words as long as the monarchy or the fullness of divinity is not lodged in the Father alone as Person, there would be no possibility of espousing the idea that the Father is the cause of the divinity of the Son and of the Spirit. And as long as the monarchy of God is lodged within the perichoretic relations of the Trinitarian persons, the idea that there could be two ultimate principles that might be the source of the Spirit would never even arise as a possibility. Moreover, Torrance wanted to stress that the formula ‘ one Being, three Persons’ had to be understood in a completely personal way to avoid any idea that the one being of God that is common to all three Persons is not personal. Such an idea would rest on a preconceived idea of divine unity and therefore would not be derived from God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit. It would thus obscure the fact that ‘the “One Being” of God does not refer to some abstract divine essence, but to the intrinsically personal “I am” of God’.¹⁵

While neither Dulles nor Congar ever referred to the agreed statement between the Reformed and the Orthodox, it still remains true that both Dulles and Congar on the Roman Catholic side and Torrance on the Reformed side reached very similar conclusions even though the problem of inadvertently espousing the idea of a ‘derived deity’ and Torrance’s emphasis on the personal nature of the divine being might require further ecumenical discussion. Still, these agreements would seem to be extremely promising from an ecumenical perspective. In the rest of this chapter I would like to explore more deeply the theological issues embedded in the filioque by discussing in some depth the reasons why Torrance criticized what he took to be an element of subordinationism in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity along with a recent proposed solution that relies on Torrance and Barth in order to see whether or not the suggestions of Congar and Dulles on the one side and Torrance on the other could form the basis of a very practical agreement among the Christian churches.

I. Torrance and the element of subordinationism in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity

What exactly was Torrance referring to when he spoke of his ‘chief difference with Barth’ with respect to the earlier volumes of the Church Dogmatics? As seen above, Torrance himself says that this difference concerned ‘the element of “subordinationism” in his doctrine of the Holy Trinity’ which he considered a ‘hang-over from Latin theology but also from St Basil’s doctrine of the Trinity’.¹⁶ He believed that Barth’s support of the Latin text of the Creed was precisely what left him with that element of ‘subordinationism’. Torrance thought that this influenced his approach to the filioque clause in the Western version of the Nicene Creed. He completely agreed with Barth’s view that the homoousion applied to the Holy Spirit so that the historical mission of the Spirit had to be traced back ‘from the incarnate Son to the eternal mission of the Spirit from the Father’. But, in Torrance’s view, the very problem of the filioque ‘ was created by an incipient subordinationism in the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity, which the Eastern Church had to answer in one way and the Western Church in another way’.¹⁷ His position was that Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen and Cyril of Alexandria all ‘ rejected subordinationism in Trinitarian relations’ and if we followed their thinking, the whole issue that led to the filioque never would have arisen in the first place and there would have been no reason for division between East and West. He believes that if we return to their approach then ‘ the unecumenical Western intrusion of the filioque clause into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed simply falls away’.¹⁸ Moreover, according to Torrance, Gregory Nazianzen not only influenced both Calvin and Barth, but ‘ had expressed some serious misgivings with respect to the teaching of his fellow Cappadocians Basil and his brother Gregory’.¹⁹

The crucial issue here concerns the idea of causality. Torrance held that the Cappadocians ‘ were tempted to account for the oneness and threeness of God through recourse to the dangerous analogy of three different people having a common nature’ and that left them open to the charge of tritheism which they strongly rejected.²⁰ But, according to Torrance, they attempted to preserve God’s oneness by claiming that

God the Father, who is himself without generation or origination, is the one Principle or Origin (ἀρχή) and Cause (αἰτία) of the Son and the Spirit, although in such a way that there is no interval of existence, time or space between them and no “before” or “after” in the order of their being.²¹

Their notion of cause was unique in that it consisted of and was continuous with its effects. Gregory Nyssen spoke of the Son and Spirit being caused not in their nature but with respect to their ‘mode of existence’. Yet, ‘ he thought of the being of Holy Spirit as grounded through the being of the Son in the being of the Father’.²² At this point Torrance notes a twofold problem in the way Gregory Nyssen presents the procession of the Spirit. These are the words of Gregory:

The Holy Spirit, from whom the supply of all good things in the creation has its source, is attached to the Son with whom he is inseparably apprehended. He depends for his being on the Father as Cause, from whom he also proceeds. It is the identifying mark of his hypostatic nature that he is known after and with the Son, and that he derives his subsistence from the Father.²³

In Torrance’s judgement this statement suggests that the Cappadocians’ response to the charge of tritheism and their effort to maintain the oneness of the Godhead

by referring the three Persons to a single Principle (ἀρχή) or Cause (αἰτία) in the Father, were made at the expense of a damaging distinction between the Deity of the Father as wholly underived or “uncaused”, and the Deity of the Son and of the Spirit as eternally derived or “caused”.²⁴

In addition, when they differentiated the Trinitarian Persons ‘ they cast the internal relations between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit into the consecutive structure of a causal series or a “chain” of dependence “through the Son”’.²⁵

What they should have done is conceptualize the Persons more as Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzen, following Athanasius, had done. Instead of focusing on causality, they should have focused on the ‘living will of God’ (Athanasius) or ‘the identity of being, movement and will in God’ (Gregory Nazianzen).²⁶ What Torrance finds helpful in the thought of Gregory Nazianzen is the fact that he stressed that God’s unity was ‘complete not primarily in the Father but in each Person as well as in all of them’.²⁷ This is the key insight of Athanasius. And while Gregory Nazianzen also used causal language when referring to the Son and Spirit and referred to the Father as ἀρχή, he was, according to Torrance, also aware of the difficulties in that language in that it could imply that the Father is greater and that the Son and Spirit could be thought of as inferior to the Father as first principle. This would ‘insult ’ the Father with ‘ the idea of precedence in honour . . . For there is no greater or less in respect of the being of the consubstantial Persons . . . To subordinate any of the three is to overthrow the Trinity’.²⁸ Ultimately, Gregory Nazianzen thought of the Persons as relations ‘ subsisting in God which are beyond all time . . . beyond all origin ..., and beyond all cause’.²⁹ Cyril of Alexandria later took up this idea of the divine relations while specifically rejecting any idea of causality within the Trinity.³⁰

There were additional complications. Gregory Nyssen attempted to address the question of whether or not the being and existence of the Son and Spirit were to be traced back to the person of the Father. His solution was ambiguous because on the one hand he claimed that the word God signifies being and not person. This would imply that ‘ the Father is not God in virtue of his Fatherhood but in virtue of his being; otherwise neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit would be God’.³¹ On the other hand he simultaneously argued that everything ‘ proceeds from the Father as the centre of unity, who is properly called “God” for it is in his ὑπόστασις that the ἀρχή of Deity is lodged’.³² In the end this suggests that the Son and Spirit do not derive their deity from the Father but ‘ only their Persons’ or ‘their distinctive modes of existence . . . for the όὐσία of Deity is one and the same in all’.³³ In that sense the Son and Spirit can be considered as ‘ derived from and causally dependent on the ὑπόστασις or πρόσωπον of the Father’.³⁴ Whereas the term Father was classically used to refer both to the Godhead of God and to the Person of the Father within the Trinity without separating these two senses, the Cappadocians completely conflated these two senses in which God is Father into one and left the Church with the problem ‘ as to the significance of the Fatherhood of God, and as to the oneness of the Trinity’.³⁵ This is a big enough problem.

But there was an additional difficulty – they also shifted the emphasis from the homoousios ‘ as the key to the identity, intrinsic oneness, and internal relations of the Holy Trinity, to emphasis upon the three diverse ὑποστάσeις as united through the Μοναρχία of the Father and through having one being in common’.³⁶ All of this weakened Athanasius’ idea that ‘whatever we say of the Father we say of the Son and the Spirit except “Father”’.³⁷ According to Torrance, for Athanasius and for Alexander any idea that the Father alone was ἀρχή in this sense ‘ was an Arian concept’.³⁸ Athanasius’ view that ‘ the whole Godhead is in the Son and in the Spirit ’ so that ‘ they must be included with the Father in the one originless ἀρχή of the Holy Trinity’ is to be preferred.³⁹ In Torrance’s view then even though the Cappadocian stress on the one being, three persons of the Trinity helped Christians come to a better view of the distinctive modes of existence of the persons, it discounted the real meaning of ‘ όὺσία as being in its internal relations’ and robbed ‘οὺσία of its profound personal sense which was so prominent at Nicaea’.⁴⁰

II. Barth and the element of subordinationism

With this material in place, perhaps we can understand better what Torrance might have meant when he spoke of the element of ‘subordinationism’ in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. He certainly would have agreed with Barth’s description of Jesus’ Sonship. But he would have objected to the way Barth distinguished God the Reconciler from God the Creator even in CD I.1 as Barth spoke of Father/Son relation in terms of super- and subordination. Thus, on the one hand, Barth clearly wished to ascribe subordination to Jesus the Son acting as God the Reconciler for us (i.e., an economic subordination with which Torrance would agree) as when he explained that it was in the light of the

unity of content of revelation and the person of the Revealer that we then understood the original and proper sense of the fatherhood of God: He is Father because he is the Father of this His only-begotten Son. From the same unity we at once have the further result of the divine sonship of Jesus Christ. There is no abstract person of the Revealer, but the person of the Revealer is the person of Jesus Christ who is subordinate to the Creator revealed by it, yet who is also indissolubly co-ordinate with Him, who is with Him; in this person the revelation is a reality. . . there is no Jesus perse who might then acquire also the predicate of a bearer of the revelation of his Father. Nor is there any revelation of the Father per se which might then be apprehended in Jesus in an exemplary and pre-eminent fashion. Jesus is the revelation of the Father and the revelation of the Father is Jesus. And precisely in virtue of this “is” He is the Son or Word of the Father. (I.1, p. 412)⁴¹

Barth goes on to explain that there is an order between creation and reconciliation and that the latter follows and does not precede the former while it is through the latter that we understand God the Creator and through the former that we perceive the Reconciler. He says we must distinguish these two ‘in such a way that we perceive and acknowledge the relation of subordination that is present here’ (I.1, p. 413). This means that ‘the Reconciler is not the Creator, and that as the Reconciler He follows the Creator, that He accomplishes, as it were, a second divine act – not an act which we can deduce from the first, whose sequence from the first we can survey and see to be necessary, but still a second act which for all its newness and inconceivability is related to the first ’ (I.1, p. 413). In other words God is first the Father in heaven who creates and then in a free act the incarnate Son who reconciles us to himself. There is therefore an order of creation and reconciliation. To this order, on the other hand, Barth then claims that

there corresponds christologically the order of Father and Son or Father and Word. Jesus Christ as the Reconciler cannot precede the Creator, “our Father in heaven”. He stands to Him in the irreversible relation of following on Him and from Him as the son follows on the father. . . . But again this subordination and sequence cannot imply any distinction of being; it can only signify a distinction in the mode of being... Here, then, sonship as well as fatherhood, in and with the super- and subordination expressed thereby, is to be understood as unrestrictedly true deity. (I.1, pp. 413–14, emphasis mine)⁴²

In light of what was said above, I think one can easily see that there is some ambiguity in this particular expression of the matter in the sense that Barth does not clearly and consistently indicate that the subordination of Jesus the incarnate Son, the Reconciler, to the Father is an act of economic condescension for our sakes and not a subordination within the Father/Son relation. This seems to be exactly what Torrance was objecting to in the reasoning of the Cappadocians discussed above. To put this in Torrance’s words: ‘the subjection of Christ to the Father in his incarnate economy as the suffering and obedient Servant cannot be read back into the eternal hypostatic relations and distinctions subsisting in the Holy Trinity’.⁴³ Here one must distinguish clearly between the order of the persons within the Trinity and their being – the Father is first in order – but Father, Son and Spirit

eternally coexist as three fully co-equal Persons in a perichoretic togetherness and in-each-otherness in such a way that, in accordance with the particular aspect of divine revelation and salvation immediately in view, as in the New Testament Scriptures, there may be an appropriate variation in the trinitarian order from that given in Baptism.⁴⁴

Nonetheless, according to Torrance, ‘ both Athanasius and Basil counselled the Church to keep to the order of the divine Persons given in Holy Baptism, if only to counter the damaging heresy of Sabellianism’.⁴⁵

The additional problem here is that any confounding of the order of the persons within the immanent Trinity with their co-equal being will necessarily result in some form of subordination, which will inadvertently lead to a weakening of the divine unity and thus the co-equality of the persons that both Barth and Torrance tirelessly sought to uphold. Moreover, it will open the door for a perceived need for the filioque, which Torrance claims never would have happened if the full co-equality of the persons of the Trinity were upheld in the strong Athanasian sense. That then is the issue that arises when one inadvertently reads back elements of the economy into the immanent Trinity. It may seem like a minor point, but it has wide-ranging implications because whenever that happens, God’s eternal being and action are made to be dependent upon his relations with the world in some way and to that extent his free love becomes indistinguishable from our human love. I do not believe that Barth himself drew this conclusion. But a number of his followers certainly have.⁴⁶ Once that conclusion is drawn, however, it is only a short move to the kind of thinking that equates love of neighbour with love of God and leads to arguments like those of John Hick who claims that the Golden Rule is all that is necessary for all religions because we are all called to treat others as we would have them treat us. He then claims that it is unnecessary and incorrect to assert that salvation can come only in and through Jesus himself.⁴⁷

This reading of subordination back into the immanent Trinity becomes even more explicit in CD IV.1 precisely because Barth carries his confusion of the order of the persons with their being to their logical conclusion by introducing a prius and a posterius as well as a superiority and subordination into the immanent Trinity as a condition for the possibility of the actions ad extra of the Son and Spirit. Both Torrance and Barth think of the obedience of the Son as God’s condescension to a life of humble obedience for our benefit. Thus both of them speak of the incarnate Son as the judge judged in our place,⁴⁸ and both utterly reject any idea that God is in conflict with himself in acting for us, as well as any sort of modalism and subordinationism within the being of God or any idea that God changes in acting for us either. But, Barth goes beyond this to argue that the basis for what the incarnate Son does for us is to be found in the obedience and subordination of the Son within the immanent Trinity.

Barth did of course mention that it is a difficult and tricky or elusive thing to speak about an ‘obedience that takes place in God himself’ (IV.1, p. 195). Even so, he argues that ‘ obedience implies an above and a below, a prius [before] and a posterius [after], a superior and a junior and subordinate’; indeed, Barth insists that ‘ a below, a posterius, a subordination ... belongs to the inner life of God’ (IV.1, p. 201). Barth then asks whether or not these ideas compromise the unity and equality of the divine being, wondering how God can be one and also ‘above and below, the superior and the subordinate ’ (IV.1, p. 195) and whether or not such thinking might invite the idea of two divine beings, one of which is not properly divine at all because he exists only within creation. Of course he opposes any such thinking. The question here, however, is this: why does Barth think he must introduce superiority and subordination into God’s inner life, as when he goes on to say that ‘ a below, a posterius, a subordination ... belongs to the inner life of God’ (IV.1, p. 201) to make the same point that Torrance makes? That point of course is that God acts as man in the incarnation so that God suffers both as God and as man for us in order to destroy sin, suffering, evil and death. But Torrance also thoroughly rejects any attempt to introduce superiority and subordination into the immanent Trinity. Both theologians of course firmly rejected the modalist idea that God the Father suffers eternally even while they accepted that there was an element of truth in the erroneous position of Patripassianism.⁴⁹ In CD I.1 Barth also wrote that ‘If revelation is to be taken seriously as God’s presence, if there is to be a valid belief in revelation, then in no sense can Christ and the Spirit be subordinate hypostases’ (I.1, p. 353, emphasis mine). With Barth, Torrance believes that what God is toward us, he is in himself, and also holds firmly to the fact that there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ; both also insist that the incarnate life of Jesus falls within the being of the eternal Trinity. But never once does Torrance attempt to ground these assertions in a superiority and subordination within the immanent Trinity; nor does he claim there is a prius or a posterius in God’s inner being.⁵⁰ In fact, following Calvin, Torrance writes:

the principium of the Father does not import an ontological priority, or some prius aut posterius in God, but has to do only with a “form of order” (ratio ordinis) or “arrangement” (dispositio) of inner trinitarian relations governed by the Father/Son relationship, which in the nature of the case is irreversible, together with the relationship of the Father and the Son to the Spirit who is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son.⁵¹

Consequently, Torrance firmly and consistently argues that ‘ the subordination of Christ to the Father in his incarnate and saving economy cannot be read back into the eternal personal relations and distinctions subsisting in the Holy Trinity’.⁵²

A full treatment of this matter cannot be presented here.⁵³ But it is worth noting two statements made by Barth that lead more to confusion than to clarity. These are statements Torrance expressly avoids because he does not ascribe the Monarchy to the person of the Father but rather to the being of the Father which is also the being of the Son and Spirit; therefore Torrance consistently avoids any notion at all that the Son and Spirit derive their deity from the Father. Furthermore, Torrance consistently emphasizes the doctrine of perichoresis at precisely this point and so avoids confusing the order of the Persons with their unity of being.

First, speaking of God’s pre-temporal election in relation to Jesus’ human existence Barth claims that ‘In this free act of the election of grace the Son of the Father is no longer just the eternal Logos, but as such, as very God from all eternity He is also the very God and very man He will become in time’ (IV.1, p. 66). How can God already be God and man before he becomes man in time? While Barth clearly meant to distinguish God’s predestination of himself to be born of the Virgin for our salvation and affirmed that that event would occur in the fullness of time, he has unfortunately been read as collapsing the inner Trinitarian relations (the processions) into the missions. If he had done so, that would be a clear indication that he had indeed conceptually reduced God to who and what God is for us in his missions.

He certainly did not do that when he asserted that to speak of the Son’s being begotten of the Father before all time means that the pre-existent Son who exists as God for us by virtue of the incarnation ‘ did not come into being in an event within the created world’ (I.1, p. 426). Indeed,

Jesus Christ does not first become God’s Son when He is it for us. He becomes it from eternity; He becomes it as the eternal Son of the eternal Father. . . . But this becoming (because it is this becoming) rules out every need of this being for completion. Indeed, this becoming simply confirms the perfection of this being. (I.1, p. 427)⁵⁴

That is why Barth could and did say that

We can certainly say that we see the love of God to man originally grounded upon the eternal relation of God, Father and Son. But as this love is already free and unconstrained in God Himself, so, too, and only then rightly, is it free in its realisation towards man. That is, in His Word becoming flesh, God acts with inward freedom and not in fulfilment of a law to which He is supposedly subject. His Word will still be His Word apart from this becoming, just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit would be none the less eternal God, if no world had been created. (I.2, p. 135 emphases mine)

And that is something that he theoretically maintained throughout his career. It is certainly something Torrance consistently maintained in the interest of affirming the sovereignty of God’s grace and judgement. For instance, Torrance insisted that ‘ the incarnation was not a timeless event like the generation of the Son from the Being of the Father’.⁵⁵ This is a complex issue as there are times when Barth is very clear in making such distinctions, as when he says: ‘ Jesus Christ was at the beginning. He was not at the beginning of God, for God has indeed no beginning. But He was at the beginning of all things, at the beginning of God’s dealings with the reality which is distinct from Himself. . . He was the election of God’s grace as directed towards man’ (II.2, p. 102).⁵⁶

Second, Barth claims that ‘In His mode of being as the Son He fulfils the divine subordination, just as the Father in His mode of being as the Father fulfils the divine superiority’ (IV.1, p. 209).⁵⁷ This too is a confusing remark because the eternal persons within the being of God do not need to fulfil anything even according to Barth’s own understanding of the Trinity. The only way this statement could make sense is if Barth clearly had stated at this point that what the Son fulfils in his mission is the eternal divine decree to be God for us and thus to act as our Reconciler. To assert simply that the Son fulfils his subordination and that the Father fulfils his superiority within the immanent Trinity inadvertently implies that God needs some sort of fulfilment which perhaps then is finally realized in his actions within history for us. That is something that Barth firmly rejected as when he wrote: ‘In order to not be alone, single, enclosed within Himself, God did not need co-existence with the creature. . . . Without the creature He has all this originally in Himself’ (IV.1, p. 201).⁵⁸ But it is certainly a road taken by all too many of his followers as already noted above!

III Understanding the divine Monarchy: T. F. Torrance and the current discussion

My intention has been to show that the issues related to the filioque do not stand in isolation but involve many theological concerns, especially as these have been contrasted in the thinking of Barth and Torrance. Now I will illustrate exactly how these problems are still very much in evidence in the thinking of those who inadvertently introduce some notion of causality into the Father/Son relation.

A recent article discussing Torrance’s view of the divine Monarchy does a largely admirable job duly stressing his emphasis on the twofold meaning of God’s Fatherhood as noted above. But when the author turns to Karl Barth’s understanding of these matters, the critical issues raised by Torrance himself to Barth are glossed over, even though Torrance’s objection to the element of subordination in Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity is noted in a footnote. The question about whether or not Barth has illegitimately read back elements of the economy into the immanent Trinity is not addressed, though the author claims that Barth’s account of ‘the Father’s property of mastery and the Son’s property of service’ is better than Torrance’s account.⁵⁹ He maintains that Torrance simply avoids the question concerning the Son’s obedience and the Father’s superiority. But the fact is that Torrance does not avoid this question at all. As already illustrated, he firmly rejects any idea of ascribing superiority or subordination to the eternal Trinitarian persons in the interest of avoiding modalism and subordinationism and in the interest of recognizing the freedom of grace. The point to be made here, however, is simply this – whenever subordination is introduced into the immanent Trinity, problematic conclusions follow. Hence,

The Father and the Son, together God and servant, origin and consequence, begetting and begotten, majestic and humble, are never apart from one another, and the dynamics of their interrelationship, free, loving and mutual are fulfilled, perfected and brought to completion by the work of the Holy Spirit.⁶⁰

We have already seen that one cannot speak of the Holy Spirit fulfilling, perfecting and bringing to completion the love of the Father and Son since all three persons of the Trinity are fully God and thus fully perfect in their perichoretic mutual love and freedom within the eternal Trinity. What is perfected by the Spirit is the work of the Trinity within the economy of salvation.

Missing from this thinking is any realistic attempt to distinguish without separating the immanent and economic Trinity. Hence, one then might say that in John’s Gospel

A unity of Being and purpose between the Father and the Son is affirmed alongside the Father’s bestowal and the Son’s consistent deference: “the Father sends Jesus; Jesus obeys and depends on the Father; he comes from and returns to the Father; and the Father does his work and speaks his words through him”.⁶¹

Further, the ‘Father communicates self-existence, ultimate right of rule and determination to the Son (through the Spirit)’.⁶² But this thinking approximates only too closely the notion of causality Torrance rightly rejects when he opposes any idea that the Father causes the deity of the Son and Spirit. What is present here is the very unfortunate insinuation that God’s love is in need of perfection and that this is what occurs as Christ lived out his being in the servant form of his activity for our sakes. Beyond this, after some exegesis of John’s Gospel arguing that the Father ‘has original self-existence, life and ultimate authority in and from himself (5.26)’ and that the Father ‘has conferred . . . similar life and authority to the Son’⁶³ there is a rather unfortunate but consistent confusion of the processions with the missions. Finally, we are told that ‘According to Person, ontological priority and absolute authority belong to the Father. According to Being, ontological supremacy and absolute reign, rule and authority belong equally to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.^’64 While this may appear to be an ideal solution on the surface, there is a deep problem embedded in this suggestion. According to Torrance, any idea that the principium of the Father with respect to the order of the Trinitarian Persons might imply ‘an ontological priority, or some prius aut posterius in God’ must lead to some sort of subordinationism.⁶⁵ Any denial that all three Persons are equal in authority and power is in reality a denial of their oneness in being.⁶⁶

Such denial inevitably follows the confusion of the immanent and economic Trinity as when it is said that ‘The Father’s authority has been unilaterally delegated to the Son’⁶⁷ and that ‘it is the Father who has original self-existence, life and ultimate authority in and from himself’.⁶⁸ Torrance’s understanding of this matter is much clearer and to be preferred as when he writes This priority in order or Monarchy of the Father within the trinitarian relations is consonant with the Father’s relation to the Son and the Spirit within the indivisibility of the Triune Being of God. Hence the priority or Monarchy of the Father within the Holy Trinity must not be taken to imply a priority or superiority in Deity.⁶⁹ This is because ‘It refers to the fact that “the Son is begotten of the Father, not the Father of the Son”, which is the order manifested in the incarnation between the Father and his only begotten Son, and is reflected in the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Father in the name of the Son’.⁷⁰ Ultimately, the problem here can be skilfully summed up in the words of Torrance himself:

the inner trinitarian order is not to be understood in an ontologically differential way, for it does not apply to the Being or the Deity of the divine Persons which each individually and all together have absolutely in common, but only to the mysterious “disposition or economy” which they have among themselves within the unity of the Godhead, distinguished by position and not status, by form and not being, by sequence and not power, for they are fully and perfectly equal.⁷¹

Torrance is criticized for allowing the Father’s person to recede ‘ into the background’ because he refuses to think ‘ of the Father’s Person as in himself the hypostatic root of God’s self-existence, kingly reign and rule’.⁷² But that was precisely Torrance’s point in emphasizing the homoousion in the first place and appealing to Athanasius and others to exclude any notion of a derived deity which is clearly implied whenever the Father is portrayed as the ‘hypostatic root of God’s self-existence’. Here it must be said that any attempt to build upon and then expand Torrance’s thinking by introducing some type of causality into the eternal Trinity by ascribing eternal obedience to the Son as a condition of his actions ad extra will always end up in conflict with Torrance’s most important positive contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity. As we have just seen, Torrance refuses to confuse the order of the persons with their oneness in being and thus does indeed avoid modalism, tritheism and subordinationism at every turn.

1.      For a historical discussion see A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For an intriguing discussion of Barth and Torrance on the filioque which offers a critical and constructive analysis of both theologians’ key insights and then attempts to move beyond them in ways that merit further reflection and discussion but that will not be discussed here, see Myk Habets, ‘Filioque? Nein: A Proposal for Coherent Coinherence’, in Trinitarian Theology After Barth (eds Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), pp. 161–202.

2.      Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit: vol. III (trans. David Smith; New York: Crossroad, 1997), p. 205, asserts quite bluntly that ‘The one-sided introduction of the Filioque, without consulting the Eastern Church, into a creed of ecumenical value was not only a way of behaving that was canonically illicit, but also an action which devalued the unity of the Christian family’. T. F. Torrance asserts that the ‘ex Patre filioque clause ’ was ‘inserted unecumenically into the Creed’ and thus created ‘ a serious impasse in the relations between East and West’, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), p. 186. See also Siecienski, The Filioque, p. 204 and p. 207.

3.      Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, The Doctrine of the Word of God (eds G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley; 4 vols in 13 pts; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), p. 479. What Torrance and Barth both wanted to affirm at all costs was that what God is towards us in the economy, he is eternally in himself and what he is eternally in himself he is in the economy. And so both theologians would oppose any attempt by Eastern theologians to claim that the procession of the Spirit from the Father took place in God in one way and historically in the mission of the Spirit from the Son in another. That would indeed drive a wedge between who God is eternally and who he is in the economy and would have to raise the question that Torrance himself raises: if the Spirit proceeds only from the Father eternally but is sent by the Son in history since what the Father does he does ‘through the Son, as Basil pointed out ’ then ‘Does this mean that the sending of the Spirit by the Son has to do only with revelation and faith, and is not grounded immanently in the eternal Being of God? If so, would that not call in question the full homoousial relation of the Holy Spirit to God the Father?’ Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 187. Torrance clearly thinks it would and believes Athanasius attacked this very thinking. This would be the ‘incipient subordinationism’ that Torrance finds in the Cappadocians and also in aspects of Western theology.

4.      Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), p. 131.

5.      Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), p. 20.

6.       Avery Dulles, S. J., ‘The Filioque: What is at Stake?’, Concordia Theological Quarterly 59 (January–April 1995), pp. 31–48 (32). See also Congar, Holy Spirit, pp. 52–3.

7.      Dulles, ‘The Filioque’, p. 40 and pp. 44–5. Dulles concludes his article saying ‘The toleration of different wording in the Eastern and Western churches seems, then, in this writer’s judgement, ecumenically appropriate at the present time’. This approach is based on suggestions made by Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (trans. Matthew J. O’Connell; New York: Crossroad, 1986), pp. 221–2.

8.      Congar, Holy Spirit, p. 204.

9.      Ibid., p. 206.

10.  Ibid.

11.  Ibid.

12.  See Torrance’s

13.  Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 190.

14.  Ibid.

15.  Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives, p. 89.

16.  Torrance, Karl Barth, p. 131. Torrance astutely notes two critical points. First, while the term Father refers absolutely to the one being of God which the Father has in common with the Son and Spirit, it also refers relatively to the Father in relation to the Son, that is, to the Person of the Father. Second, Torrance believes that the Cappadocians conflated these two senses by conceiving the unity of God ‘ as deriving “from the Person of the Father” and in that way they replaced the Nicene formula which held that the unity of God derived “from the Being of the Father . . .”’ In Torrance’s view this meant that ‘ procession is regarded as taking place between different modes of existence or relations of origin, which is hardly satisfactory for it falls short of affirming the homoousion of the Spirit’, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 186. Gregory Nazianzen was the exception here, ibid., pp. 186–7. Nonetheless the Cappadocians rejected Arian and Macedonian ideas that the Spirit was created by God. Augustine also rejected the Arian idea that the Son is subordinate to the Father by affirming the filioque. However, Western theologians following this view mistakenly also espoused the idea that the Spirit proceeds ‘ from the Father principally (principaliter)’ and so the conflation seen in the Cappadocian view also seeped into the theology of the West.

17.  Ibid., p. 132,208.

18.  Ibid., p. 132. Like Torrance, Barth believed that materially East and West did not disagree about the procession of the Spirit from the beginning (Barth, CD I.1, p. 477).

19.  Ibid., p. 209.

20.  Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 237.

21.  Ibid.

22.  Ibid., p. 238.

23.  Gregory/Basil, Ep. 38.4 cited in Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, p. 238.

24.  Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, p. 238, with references to Gregory Nazianzen to support his critique and to support his own view, following Gregory Nazianzen, that the Godhead can be referred to as the Μοναρχία.

25.  Ibid., p. 238.

26.  Ibid., pp. 238–9.

27.  Ibid., p. 239.

28.  Ibid.

29.  Ibid.

30.  Ibid., p. 240.

31.  Ibid.

32.  Ibid.

33.  Ibid.

34.  Ibid.

35.  Ibid., pp. 240–1.

36.  Ibid., p. 241.

37.  Ibid.

38.  Ibid.

39.  Ibid.

40.  Ibid., p. 242.

41.  At this point Barth connects this thinking with his rejection of ebionite and docetic approaches to Jesus, just as Torrance does in following Barth in this.

42.  At least one contemporary theologian observes that Barth ‘ distinguishes between two forms of subordination within the Trinity’. First, ‘“Subordination [Unterordnungsverhältnis] regarding their deity”’ (I.1, p. 393) which Barth unequivocally rejects, and second ‘“the relation of subordination [Unterordnungsverhältnis]”’ (I.1, p. 413) which Barth favours as ‘ a matter of the distinction and relationality between the various modes of being of the one essence’, Adam J. Johnson, God’s Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth (London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2012), pp. 73–4, n. 37. Johnson concludes by saying that ‘Barth reaffirms and more fully explores the nature of this Trinitarian subordination in CD IV.1, pp. 200–10’, ibid., p. 74.

43.  Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 180. Importantly, Torrance claims that this is part of the significance of 1 Cor. 15.24 and Phil. 2.7–10.

44.  Ibid.

45.  Ibid. 46

46.  See, for example, Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘Obedience, Trinity, and Election: Thinking With and Beyond the Church Dogmatics’, in Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (ed. Dempsey; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 138–61. He claims ‘ that the eternal identity of the Son encompasses and, in a sense, is constituted by the concrete life of Jesus Christ’, p. 155. And he also argues that ‘the incarnation, as an elective event of divine self-transformation, intensifies God’s triune self-differentiation’, Paul Daffyd Jones, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), p. 212. Both of these ideas undermine the unity and Trinity within the immanent Trinity by making the eternal Son’s deity in some sense dependent on events that will occur or do occur ad extra. Jesus’ human life does not constitute his identity as the eternal Son and election does not transform the Son since he remains the God he always was and is even in the incarnation. For a rather overt example of someone espousing the idea of a dependent deity, see Wolfhart Pannenberg: ‘God, through the creation of the world, made himself radically dependent on this creation and on its history’ (italics in original), ‘Problems of a Trinitarian Doctrine of God’, Dialog 26 (1987), p. 255. See also Ted Peters, GOD as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), who claims that ‘God is in the process of becoming Godself through relationship with the temporal creation’, p. 92, and says that ‘the fullness of God as Trinity is a reality yet to be achieved in the eschatological consummation’, p. 16. Finally, he properly claims that ‘the God of Jesus Christ is inextricably and passionately involved in the affairs of human history’ and then mistakenly concludes that ‘this involvement is constitutive of the trinitarian life proper’, p. 82.

47.  See, for example, Paul D. Molnar, Incarnation and Resurrection: Toward a Contemporary Understanding (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 244–60, esp. p. 255.

48.  See IV.1, p. 157, pp. 211–83 and Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ (ed. Robert T. Walker; Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster and Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), p. 148, 184.

49.  See, for example, Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 199, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), pp. 146–7 and p. 163; Barth, IV.2, p. 357. Both theologians agree that ‘it is God, really God in Christ, who suffers and bears the sin of the world – that is the particle of truth ... as Karl Barth once said, in the Patripassian heresy’ (The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, p. 167).

50.  In the rare instance where Torrance speaks of ‘ a “before” and an “after” in the life of God’ he attempts to make sense of the fact that the incarnation was something new even for God. See Thomas F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 69 and Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 253–9. See also Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 241–2.

51.  Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives, p. 66; cf. also ibid., pp. 28–36, pp. 118–20 and p. 133.

52.  Ibid., p. 67.

53.  For a full treatment of this matter, see Paul D. Molnar, ‘The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67 (2014), pp. 50–69.

54.  Compare this to Torrance’s assertion that God’s eternal being is ‘ also a divine Becoming’ but that ‘This does not mean that God ever becomes other than he eternally is or that he passes over from becoming into being something else.... His Becoming is not a becoming on the way toward being or toward a fullness of being . . . Becoming expresses the dynamic nature of his Being’, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 242.

55.  Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 144.

56.  George Hunsinger, ‘Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth’, Modern Theology 24 (April 2008), pp. 181–3 explains perfectly that when Barth says that Jesus Christ is the subject of election he is not speaking without qualification.

57.  While I think much of Rowan Williams’ critique of Barth is off the mark, his observation about this remark is interesting: ‘What, if anything, this can possibly mean, neither Barth nor his interpreters have succeded (sic) in telling us’, ‘Barth on the Triune God’, in Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Method (ed. S. W. Sykes; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 175. Here Barth was inconsistent in distinguishing without separating the processions and missions, the immanent and economic Trinity.

58.  See II.1, p. 306. and I.1, p. 427 as well as IV.1, p. 113 and especially IV.2, p. 755 where Barth says ‘God loves, and to do so He does not need any being distinct from His own as the object of His love. If He loves the world and us, this is a free overflowing of the love in which He is and is God and with which he is not content, although He might be, since neither the world nor ourselves are indispensable to His love and therefore to His being’. Torrance agrees with this (Christian Doctrine of God, p.242).

59.  Benjamin Dean, ‘Person and Being: Conversation with T. F. Torrance about the Monarchy of God’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (January 2013), pp. 58–77 (69).

60.  Ibid.

61.  Ibid., p. 71.

62.  Ibid.

63.  Ibid.

64.  Ibid., p. 72.

65.  Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives, p. 66.

66.  See Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 176.

67.  Dean, ‘Person and Being’, p. 71.

68.  Ibid.

69.  Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 176.

70.  Ibid.

71.  Ibid.

72.  Dean, ‘Person and Being’, p. 74.

Bibliography

Molnar, Paul, “Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21st Century (Article), 2014,” pp. 3-37