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Appendix 2: The Doctrine of A Autotheos utotheos in Calvin and the Reformed Tradition John Calvin introduced the idea that though the Father is the ultimate origin of the subsistences of the Son and Spirit, nonetheless all three persons possess the divine essence of themselves.1 What prompted this novel move? He was trying neither to pit Western against Eastern trinitarianism nor to set one Cappadocian father against another, as has been suggested.2 He did this to reconcile the apparent tensions within the patristic writings in response to his semi-Arian contemporaries.3 In a sense, it was Calvin’s way of restating the Nicaean homoousion.4 Though Calvin insisted that the divine persons and essence are not to be separated, he seems finally to have rejected the Nicene notion of the communicatio essentiae.5 In eschewing the idea that the Father communicated different essences to the Son and Spirit, Calvin discounted the idea that their being is in any way derived.6 This is corroborated by his dismissal of the notion of the Son’s generation as an eternally perfect yet perpetual communication of essence from the Father to the Son.7 Without reservation, therefore, Calvin contrasts the autotheos with any derivation of the divine essence.8 The positions taken up by various Reformed writers were varied. A few, like Francis Cheynell, went further than Calvin by insisting that the divine persons are autotheos even as to subsistence in light of the perichoresis.9 Others attempted to reconcile the Nicene communicatio essentiae with Calvin’s autotheos. Thomas Cartwright, for example, restated Calvin’s distinction between person and essence: when the divine person of the Son is regarded in relation to the Father, the Son is derived; when the divine essence is considered in se, all three divine persons are autotheos.10 Puritans closer to Edwards, such as Thomas Goodwin, recapped Nicaea: the Father is the Fons Deitatis and the communication of the divine essence coincides with the divine processions.11 Francis Turretin affirmed the communicatio essentiae without denying Calvin’s autotheos completely.12 The divine essence, being given to the Son by the Father, is absolute 357 and autotheos, for it is independent, undivided, and underived.13 Turretin’s mediating position is the one Edwards chooses to adopt. Notes 1. “Therefore we say that deity in an absolute sense exists of itself; when likewise we confess that the Son since he is God, exists of himself, but not in respect to His Person; indeed, since he is the Son, we say that he exists from the Father. Thus his essence is without beginning; while the beginning of his person is God himself” (John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics 20 [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960], 1.13.25, 154). Gunton, quoting Wolfson approvingly, traces this distinction to Augustine: “For him the other two persons do not derive their Godhood from the Father (they derive only their existence, not their divinity, from him)” (Wolfson, Philosophy of the Church Fathers, [n.p.], as cited in Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd ed. [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997], 54). 2. Warfield contends that Calvin was in favor of a more egalitarian and Western, specifically Augustinian, doctrine of the Trinity against the more subordinationist Eastern or Athanasian account (B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” Princeton Theological Review 7, no. 4 [1909]: 553–652). Neither was Calvin’s intent to pit the Cappadocians against one another: Basil and Gregory of Nyssa did not think of the Father as the “essentiator,” and Gregory of Nazianzen did not anticipate Calvin’s autotheos argument (Thomas F. Torrance, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity, in Trinitarian Perspectives: Towards Doctrinal Agreement [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994], 60–61). Cleenewerck points out that Gregory of Nazianzus clearly affirmed the Father as the cause of the other Two; see Laurent A. Cleenewerck, His Broken Body: Understanding and Healing the Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches (Washington, DC: Euclid University Consortium Press, 2007), 326n2. 3. Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.19, 143–44. Calvin thinks that “the opinions of the ancients are to be harmonized” through the autotheos doctrine (ibid.). Hence, both the divine essence and the Father may be called “unbegotten” (Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.25, 153). Calvin himself points out that Cyril affirmed that the Son has a nature a se ipso (Calvin, Defense against the Calumnies of Peter Caroli, vii, 322, as cited in...

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