The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity as we know it today was formulated
three centuries after the final edition of John’s gospel. The process of
theological reflection that eventually produced that formulation falls outside
the scope of this book. It has been studied adequately by Church historians and
dogmatic theologians. It is obvious that many separate factors contributed to
mold it into its present shape: the influence of Greek philosophy; the tug of
war between the Antiochene and Alexandrian theologians; the idiosyncracies of
certain dominant Church leaders; the threat of erosion of the Christian message
by freak heresies.(1) But the gospel of John played its role, too. It was the
NT writing that dominated the Council of Nicaea. Ever since, the trinitarian
model that sprang from it developed as a norm within very narrow limits and one
direction; excluding other traditions from making history in the Christian
churches. (2) Given other circumstances and other dominant personalities, the
doctrine might well have been expressed in another way.
What is relevant to our study is to investigate whether the substance of our belief in the Trinity can be found in John. God, we believe, is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; one God, yet existing in three “Persons”. The Spirit is God as much as the Father and the Son. Or, to put it differently again, God has revealed himself to us as Spirit no less than as Father and Son. Can such a belief be substantiated from John?
Until recently classical textbooks on doctrine presented a neatly dovetailed chain of arguments. First they would establish, from both OT and NT texts, that the Holy Spirit is divine. Then they would show that the Spirit is an autonomous person. The Paraclete passages were here accorded pride of place. For as Paraclete, the Spirit could be demonstrated to act as a person: he is sent as an envoy; he hears, speaks, teaches, guides; he glorifies Jesus; he reminds the disciples of past doctrine; he indicts the world. Next, they would prove that the Spirit, though one in nature he takes all from Father and Son (16:13-15) - is distinct from both. He is sent by them; he performs a different task; he relates in a unique way to Father and Son. In this way the traditional doctrine would be presented as vindicated by Scripture. (3)
The approach can no longer satisfy us because we realise better than previous generations the literary nature of the inspired writings. Statements in John, for instance, are not philosophical assertions that may be lifted out of context to convey a meaning of their own. Most of all, the Paraclete, as we have seen, is an image of the Spirit. His personalised features may not be taken literally; just as little as the image of personified wisdom (Prov 8:1-9:6) may be taken to prove the existence of Lady Wisdom as a person. The approach is invalid because unconsciously we try to make John speak about God the way we do now after nineteen centuries of theological rephrasing. We look at John with “trinitarian spectacles fashioned in a different century”. (4)
In fact, if we were to interpret John’s mind as presenting the Paraclete as a person, it would not help our trinitarian salvage attempt. For in that case, the Paraclete would be clearly inferior to Jesus. Only Jesus carries the titles Son and Servant. The Paraclete depends on Jesus in his teaching. He is secondary, as much as preceding prophets and succeeding disciples. “If the Paraclete was a 'person’ sufficiently distinct from the person Jesus..., we should have to say that in the Fourth Gospel Jesus was consistently superior to the Paraclete”. It is precisely the unity of Jesus and the Spirit, the fact that the Spirit expresses the divinity of Jesus, by making him ‘the Son’ or providing the inner reason of the application of that title, that establishes their equality. (5)
It may help us to examine more closely what exactly we mean when we call the Spirit a Person in the Blessed Trinity. The notion of “person” in this part of the creed is a well defined term which was only accepted after a lot of soulsearching, haggling, modifying and refining. It does not mean what we understand by “person” today. The old trinitarian formlua stands or falls by a fine distinction between “nature” (whatever belongs to God’s being) and “person” (inner-divine subsistence). The element of consciousness, of having one’s own will, of self-awareness, and so on, do not fall under this dogmatic notion of “person”. For, while there are three Persons in God, there is only one will, one self-presence, one consciousness.
This is where the problem comes in. Whatever theologians may tell us, when we use present-day language, the term “person” will automatically denote a separate spiritual center of activity, or separate consciousness. “While formerly ‘person’ meant directly only the distinct subsistence, and co-signified the rational nature only indirectly according to the thing-like thinking of the Greeks, the ‘anthropocentric’ turn of modern times requires that the spiritual—subjective element of the concept of person be first understood”. (6)
Many theologians who attempt to prove from the Paraclete passages that the Spirit is a “person”, totally overlook this fundamental distinction. They are actually seen to prove that the Spirit is a person in our present-day understanding of the term, as a distinct spiritual center of activity. G.S. Sloyan, for example, states that it is at the last supper that the person and work of the Spirit become explicit. (7) F.X. Durrwell maintains:
“St. John stresses the personal characteristics of the Spirit with great emphasis. The Spirit is the Paraclete .... He answers to a personal pronoun .... He teaches, he reminds; he testifies in favour of Jesus, reveals him and glorifies him. Side by side with Jesus, who is also a Paraclete, the Spirit is ‘another Paraclete’, a person just as Jesus is a person. He is sent by the Father and by Jesus; but an impersonal reality cannot be sent”. (8)
The problem with this kind of argumentation is that it destroys the Trinity because it proves too much. Father, Son and Spirit have all external operations (opera ad extra) in common. This includes teaching, reminding, testifying and being sent to the disciples. To say that the Spirit is a person just as Jesus is a person begs the question; for it compares the Spirit with Jesus’ human ‘personality’: the fact that he had a will and mind and initiated actions. Such traits cannot distinguish Father, Son and Spirit from each other because they have all this, including self-awareness, in common. The Church’s doctrine is that “everything in God is one except where there is the opposition of relatedness”, that is, the mutual opposition of one divine Person to another by their relation within the godhead. (9)
I believe that these reflections will suffice to show that the transition from John’s words about the Spirit to our own theological concepts is more complex than making simple equations. John uses images. Even the term “Holy Spirit” is a symbolic expression, let alone the Paraclete with his personalised features. (10) It is realistic to recognise that the scriptural witness on the Spirit is unreflective in character; that the NT lacks a mature, nuanced teaching on the Spirit. (11)
Does this mean that the Spirit should be interpreted merely as a manifestation of God’s power; implying that our trinitarian belief is an overstatement? (12) I do not think so. I believe we can, indeed, find the roots of a trinitarian experience of God in John. The key lies in recognising that there could be such a valid experience before notions were formulated. (13) There is in John awareness of a threefoldness of divine activity in Father, Son and Spirit. John had reflected on the problem of how we experience God. He sees the problem in a threefoldness. “His answer does not cope with al1 its complexities. When he had finished, there was much room for development and explanation. But although he never uses the word ‘Trinity’, he sees the triadic nature of the problem”. (14)
Here we should not see John in isolation. The early Christian Church. of which the Johannine community was a part, was searching to express the contents of its experience. Underlying the squabbles of trinitarian controversy, and preaching them, there is a truly impressive Christian awareness of God revealing himself as Father, Son and Spirit. With the notion of Jesus’ divinity gaining ground in explicit belief, it would have been natural to expect a duality to develop: an invisible, transcendent Father and a visible, incarnate Son. In fact, we do find a good amount of binatarian thought among the pre-Nicene writers.(15) But that the Spirit, on balance, was given equal weight is truly astonishing and demands more explanation than is usually assumed. It shows that the earliest Christian generations experienced the reality of the Spirit as God; as clearly as they recognised the Father and the Son to be God.
This Christian awareness could rightly look to John for support. In fact, we may say it started in communities like the Johannine ones; then developed and became more explicit as time went on. For when the disciples of John spoke of being born of the Spirit, they knew it involved an inner transformation brought about by God (chap five). The Spirit was for them nothing else than a powerful manifestation of God himself. When the Spirit adopted Paraclete functions by teaching new insights about Jesus, they knew he was the Father’s Spirit and Jesus’ Spirit. Father, Son and Spirit were three modes of experiencing the same God. God has pitched his tent among us by a twofold incarnation: the incarnation of the Word and the incarnation of Christ in the Spirit. (16) Or to put it in Johannine ways of speaking: Who sees the Spirit at work, sees Christ; who sees Christ sees the Father. Who hears the Spirit speak, hears Christ; who listens to Christ listens to the Father. The substance of our trinitarian belief is contained in this confession.
While theologians today are attempting to rephrase trinitarian doctrine on the Spirit in terms both faithful to tradition and relevant to our own times, (17) we should open ourselves wholeheartedly to the reality of his presence in our life. Having been born of the Spirit, we are in the middle of God’s kingdom (3:5). We see the Spirit and know him because he makes his presence felt in us (14: 17). He makes us understand how to put Jesus’ words into action (14:26). His inspirations well up in our heart (7:38-39). “The world cannot see him or know him, but you will”.
17. P. Corcoran, “Some recent writing on the Holy Spirit”, Irish Theological Quarterly 40 (1973) 50-62; J. O’Donnell, “Theology of the Holy Spirit”, The Way 23 ( 1983) 48-63; 135-147.
1. For two modern studies, see W.G. Rusch, The Trinitarian Controversy, Fortress Press, Philadelphia 1980; A.I.C. Heron, The Holy Spirit, Westminster, Philadelphia 1983.
2. E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus. An Experiment in Christology, Collins, London 1979, p. 570.
3. For recent examples of this approach, see C. Granado, “El Espiritu Santo revelado como Persona en el Sermón de la Cena”, Estudios Biblicos 32 ( 1973) 157-173; R.G. Gruenler, The Trinity in the Gospel of John, Baker, Grand Rapids 1986.
4. J. P. Mackey, The Christian Experience of God as Trinity, SCM, London 1983, p.83.
5. “Most of the Spirit material in the NT is christology. It is concerned to give expression to Jesus of Nazareth, God’s anointed one. It is not in the least concerned to give us any substantial information about a divine ‘person’ or hypostasis distinct from both Jesus Christ and the God he called Father”. J.P. Mackey, lb., p. 86.
6. K. Rahner, The Trinity, Burns and Oates, London 1970, p. 108; see also pp.73-76.
7. G.S. Sloyan, The Three Persons in One God, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1964, p. 18.
8. F.X. Durrwell, Holy Spirit of God. An Essay in Biblical Theology, Chapman London 1986, p. 135.
9. “In Deo omnia sunt unum ubi non obviat relationis oppositio”. Council of Florence, Decree for the Jacobites in Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. H. Denzinger, Herder, Freiburg 1955, no. 705; p. 260.
10. E.J. Dobbin, “Towards a theology of the Holy Spirit”, Heythrop Journal 17 (1976) 5-19; 129-149; esp. pp. 6; 130.
11. K. McDonnell, “A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit”: Theological Studies 46 (1985) 191-227; here p. 203.
12. So, in different ways: G. Johnston, “The Spirit-Paraclete in the Gospel of John”, Perspective 9 (1968) 29-37; G.W.H. Lampe, God is Spirit, Clarendon, Oxford 1977.
13. E. Schweitzer, “The Spirit of Power”, Interpretation 6 (1952) p. 259.
14. A.W. Wainwright, The Trinity in the New Testament, SPCK, London 1962, pp. 260-264.
15. P. Mackey, o.c. pp. 135-137.
16. D. Coffey, “The ’lncarnation of the Holy Spirit in Christ”, Theologica/ Studies 45 (1984) 466-480.