What Are Divine Persons?

An Augustinian Answer to What Is Three in God Based on John 5:19

Christians confess that God is Father, Son, and Spirit. But what does that mean? What is a “divine person”? We often think of divine persons as if each Person in God signified a separate centre of consciousness or psychological self. But that is not what classical Christian theology meant. For example, Augustine held that divine persons are not independent beings but are the one God of Israel who is distinguished by eternal relations within the one divine life.

This becomes especially clear when we look at how Augustine and others interpreted Scripture. John 5:19 was one of the key texts used to explain how Father and Son relate to one another. For many early theologians, this verse did not suggest two rival gods or one subordinated god, but rather revealed what it means for the Son to be eternally from the Father. Their exegesis laid the groundwork for what we mean by “divine person.”

John 5:19: “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.’”

• Origen and Tertullian cite this text to argue for two (Father and Son) against Monarchianism.

• Eusebius argues that the Son copies divine ideas to do what the Father does (they exist in the Father).

• Athanasius argues that the Son has the same power as the Father from this verse.

• Eunomius (an Arian) cites John 5:19 against the Homoousians and Homoiousians: “he who creates by his own power is entirely different from him who does so at the Father’s command and acknowledges that he can do nothing of his own accord, just as the one who is worshiped is different from the one who worships” (Apol. 20, cited in Ayres, Augustine, 235).

• While Basil and Gregory mostly ignore Eunomius’s argument, Gregory of Nazianzus responds in Oration 30 (380 AD). For Gregory, the phrase “can do nothing” refers to an inconceivable action because the Father and Son are united, although he allows for a specialized sense of imitation. Seeing and acting are not about subordination.

• Didymus also responds to Eunomius. He says that seeing here means knowing by a shared nature. The Son sees because of one shared essence.

• Cyril of Alexandria (the latest of the above writers) denies that the Son imitates the Father, but argues that he can only do what is possible for the divine nature to do since he sees what that nature is.

• Phoebadius (c. 358), as a Latin, also argues that seeing is tied to unity with the Father.

• Hilary in the 350s knows about anti-Nicene exegesis of John 5:19 (Bk I), and argues in Book 7 of De Trinitate that seeing means knowledge. This knowledge is due to oneness of nature.

• Ambrose likewise sees a unity of nature, and so since they share one nature, the Son cannot do anything of his own accord.

(Summarised from Ayres, Augustine, 234–40)

Within this exegetical context, Augustine interprets John 5:19 in opposition to Latin Arianism. Latin Arians argued that the Son is a lesser God than the Father, because he enacts the will of the Father and does not act of his own accord. Thus, the Father and Son are two gods, but their unity centres on a unity of will between producer and product, or willer and enactor.

Augustine does not follow this line of reasoning. Instead, he argues that the Son’s dependence on the Father does not imply inferiority, but reveals their inseparable life. The Son does nothing “of his own accord” precisely because he is eternally from the Father and shares the Father’s very life. In this way, Augustine avoids both subordinationism and the notion of two separate gods.

How are Father and Son what they are?

Christian theology calls Father, Son, and Spirit divine persons. And what is a divine person? The question is important, because I have seen prominent Christians question the traditional definition that divine persons constitute eternal relations in God. And I have seen many confuse modern definitions of person with the theological definition. The word person in classical theology has zero correspondence to contemporary definitions of a person as a psychological and conscious centre.

If not, then what is a divine person? And what could the phrase “divine persons constitute eternal relations in God” mean? I hope to answer both of those questions here and now.

Relations

Augustine reasons biblically and so often does not use technical language like persona and substantia while speaking of the Father and Son. For example, in his tractate on John 8:25–27 (Tractate 39), Augustine shows how the Father and Son are what they are because they are Father and Son without recourse to such language:

“For instance, a man and another man, if the one should be a father, the other a son. That he is a man is in respect to himself; that he is a father is in respect to the son. And that the son is a man is in respect to himself; but that he is a son is in respect to the father. For the name father has been said in respect to something, and son in respect to something; but these are two men. But in truth, God the Father is Father in respect to something [ad aliquid], that is, to the Son; and God the Son is Son in respect to something [ad aliquid], that is, to the Father. But as those men are two men, not so are these two Gods” (§4).

These relations of one to the other constitute the shared life of God. But they do so precisely because God is Life itself.

Life

Commenting on John 5:26 (Tractate 19), “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself,” Augustine shows how Father and Son are both the Life of God as Father and Son.

“The Father is life, not by a ‘being born’; the Son is life by a ‘being born.’ The Father [is] from no father; the Son, from God the Father. The Father, in that he is, is from no one; but in that he is the Father, he is in regard to the Son. But the Son, both in that he is the Son, is in regard to the Father, and in that he is, is from the Father” (§2).

And a little later:

“Therefore, the Father remains life, the Son also remains life; the Father, life in himself, not from the Son, the Son, life in himself, but from the Father” (§4).

So while Father and Son are what they are because the Father relates to the Son as Father, and the Son relates to the Father as Son, they both are, through this mode of existence, Life Itself. God is overflowing life precisely because he is Father and Son—Life unbegotten, Life begotten, or Life from Life.

Simplicity

This relational mode of existence between Father and Son then points to the unity of their shared Life. Put another way, it requires a non-material existence that does not admit division or complexity of Being—or else Life would be Life 1 and Life 2. But there is one Life by which God is Life, and God does not lack Life only to beget Life later to gain life by participation. He is Life.

Hence, Christian theology requires a strong sense of divine simplicity to ensure that the mode of life that the Father and Son share in the eternal relation of Father to Son, and Son to Father, does not amount to two gods or polytheism.

Conclusion

God is Father and Son, and the Father is not God without the Son, and the Son is not God without the Father. While I have for economy’s sake not mentioned the Spirit, I would also affirm that God the Father is not God without the Son or the Spirit, but is God precisely in relation to the Son and Spirit.

To say God exists as eternal relations is to say that he is the Father, Son, and Spirit. God is the Father ad aliquid (the Son), the Son ad aliquid (the Father), and the Spirit ad aliquid (Father and Son). Together, God is Life itself—Life from Life from Life.

To say anything else suggests that we can think of God apart from being Father, Son, and Spirit. But that is not the God whom Christians worship. We worship that God who has eternally been Father of the Son, the Son who is eternally from the Father, and the Spirit who is eternally from the Father through the Son.