Persons Divine and Human: an Analogical Conception

The concept of person underlies every major claim of Christian theology and ethics. Person is presupposed in how we understand relations with one another, with the world, and with God. But elucidating what the concept means has always been difficult, even elusive.¹ By drawing out analogies between divine and human persons, some mutual illumination can be obtained; something beyond mystery can be said. This article will begin with the concept of the person that emerged in the Trinitarian and Christological debates, and will end with an analogical conception of human persons in light of the Trinitarian Persons.

Persons in the Trinitarian Debates

The early church was trying to understand the relation of Father and Son and then later of Spirit to Father and Son; it was not looking for a concept of the person. But as the church debated Trinitarian and Christological issues, an incipient understanding of person emerged that was pivotal in resolving those issues.

Using different terms, certain pre-Christian writers occasionally glimpsed something similar to the concept of the person.² However, Christians were the first to develop and sustain the terminology and the concept over time. There were two reasons for this development within Christianity. First, as a perduring community of inquiry, Church tradition was able to retain and build upon past revelation and insight. Second, the concept of the person is hidden at the heart of the Christian (and Jewish) understanding of God. In Creation, God chooses to share life with persons created in the divine image. In the advent of Christ, the Word is not an abstraction; the Word arrives in person and calls forth personal involvement. In the presence of the Holy Spirit with us, personal involvement is ongoing.

Debates at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) took the first steps toward Trinitarianism. Everyone involved in the debate held to divine simplicity—the seamless, infinite unity of God; and everyone revered Christ as the Son of God. But Athanasius and his followers insisted on a strict equality between the Father and Son, while Arius and his followers insisted that the Son had to be subordinate to the Father. The assembled bishops chose well in supporting Athanasius and condemning the views of Arius, even though Arius’s view was more strictly logical, more in keeping with the strictures of divine simplicity, and could claim some Scriptural warrant. But in this dispute, something greater than logic and ease of understanding was at stake. Any God that was worthy of worship and could also become human is likely to surpass dictates of human logic. Christian theology demands thinking that is both logically consistent and able to include the personal, historical acts of God.

Because simplicity implies perfection, it thereby also implies absence of change.³ Arius and his followers simply could not fathom any distinction or change within the absolute perfection of divine simplicity. For them, to say that Christ was equal to God the Father would shatter monotheism—the impregnable unity of God. They reasoned that Christ had been born, “grew in stature and in wisdom” (Luke 2:52), suffered, and died. The Arians were right that these historical changes in Jesus do not sit comfortably with the non-changing, perfected unity of divine simplicity. Millions of Christian parishioners, let alone Jews and Muslims, have also been puzzled by the dual claims that we believe in one God; but that one God is Father, Son, and Spirit—which looks a lot like three. The Arian position was neither stupid nor irreverent; it was trying to protect something.

However, Arians failed to grasp that a new kind of thinking was required to explore the depth of the Incarnation. Rejecting Arius’s subordination of Christ to the Father, the early Church maintained the equality of Father and Son as well as divine simplicity. Having adopted the counterintuitive notion that Father and Son are homoousios (same substance or same being), the Church then needed to articulate their distinctions. Investigating these distinctions gave rise to the earliest understandings of the person.

It would have been far easier for the Church to follow Arius’s unequivocal protection...