All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism

by James E. Dolezal

This is no doubt a strange way to think of a person. If we consider creaturely persons, we find that each person is also a complete substance really distinct in being from all other persons. Further, in human persons relations inhere as accidents—they don’t subsist as persons themselves. Though this is true of creatures, however, it is not true of God.33 William Ames, tracking Aquinas, speaks representatively of the Reformed orthodox tradition when he states, “A relative property in God implies a person, but this is not so in creatures.”34 Louis Berkhof also spotlights the difficulty of our talk about divine persons: “God is one in his essential being, but in this one being there are three persons, called, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These persons are not, however, like so many persons among men three entirely separate and distinct individuals. They are rather three modes or forms in which the divine essence exists.”35 Augustine notes the difficulty of person language with respect to God as well: “Yet when you ask ‘Three what?’ human speech labors under a great dearth of words. So we say three persons, not in order to say that precisely, but in order not to be reduced to silence.”36 The three persons are not complete individual substances inasmuch as that would transform monotheism into a single class or category of divine being, comprised of multiple gods. This violates the fundamental demands of divine simplicity. When we say “God is one,” we mean one concrete and subs...

Perichoresis is the ancient teaching that argues that each of the three persons indwells and is interior to the others. Such is reflected in Jesus’s words in John 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father in Me.”

Like Moreland and Craig, he understands the three persons “as distinct centers of knowledge, will, love, and action.”

It is the communication of substantial unity from the Father to the Son and from the Father and Son to the Spirit that makes the persons one being, not the relations qua relations. Matthew Levering writes, “The truth of the Trinity hinges upon the fact that the Father’s divine being and unity is eternally shared or communicated, rather than constituted, in the ‘tripersonal movement of gift.’”