Summary and Commentary

Weinandy opens his discussion of the second person of the Trinity with an analysis of some relevant moments in the Nicene creed. He draws particular attention to the innovative theological term made famous at the council: “homoousion.” This word is meant to convey that both the Father Almighty and his Son our Lord Jesus Christ are fully divine, each individually being “the one God,” while also remaining distinct from each other. This is a fundamental doctrine and mystery of Christianity, there are no easy explanations for it and it is difficult to gain an intuition for it’s coherence and logical consistency.

Weinandy points out that the names “Father” and “Son” are the correct and superior way of referring to the two persons, rather than, say, “Creator” and “Redeemer.” He notes that the creed says “for us men and for our salvation Christ came down and became incarnate,” and he thus draws attention to the fact that there is an intimate link between christology and soteriology.

Weinandy mentions that the Father is only the Father in relation to the Son and that the Son is only the Son in relation to the Father. I sympathise with the thrust of this argument, but I think that when considered at face value this particular way of articulating the theology leads to a sort of “Binitarianism” because the Spirit is not mentioned and it is therefore fair to conclude that the Spirit is either subordinate to the Son and Father, or completely irrelevant. I suspect it would be more accurate to articulate the point with reference to the Spirit included, for example “The Father is only the Father in relation to the Son and the Spirit.” In the following discussion Weinandy does however bring in the spirit in as an essential factor in his outline of Trinitarian theology.

Weinandy introduces a curious theological term as a sort of complement to the filioque: Spirituque. He doesn’t develop the idea very deeply, but I think it holds promise and potential. The idea seems to be that just as the Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and the Son, perhaps it is also accurate to say that the Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit. This would be an interesting area for further research, and no doubt would take into account the different senses of “procession,” especially with reference to the underlying Greek and Latin technical terminology.¹

Weinandy touches on the Augustinian idea of the Spirit as the “bond of love” between Father and Son. The idea is that the Father is the subject, the Spirit is the (ditransitive) verb, and the Son is the object. Or to put it in a formula The Father loves/begets the Son and the Spirit is the act of loving/begetting. The Son also returns the love to the Father, which makes the “grammar” of the Trinity more interesting, but Weinandy does not touch deeply on this linguistic dimension in his article.

Weinandy heavily underlines the idea that the Son is referred to as “Word” because he exhaustively expresses the full truth about who the Father is. The Son is perfect the image of the Father, while individual humans are images of the Son.

Weinandy then draws attention to Aquinas’ opinion that the image of God in man is restricted to the human intellect. Weinandy disagrees: To be created in the image and likeness of God is to be created in the image and likeness of the Son. It is not merely the human intellect and soul that images God, but rather “the whole human being.” Weinandy notes how Aquinas argues that any of the three divine persons could have potentially incarnated, but that it was most fitting and “right and proper” for only the Son to incarnate. My comment on this theme would be as follows: The question of “Could the Father possibly have incarnated” is deeper than we might at first think. In one sense, God is completely unconstrained, totally and fully free from any necessity or coercion, and he can therefore do anything and nothing can prevent him from doing what he desires.² But from another angle, God is who he is. God is pure actuality and has no potency, therefore who he actually is in this reality exhausts all possibilities and does not allow for alternatives: there are no other possibilities or potentials for who and how God is: God simply is as he is and he couldn’t be otherwise. When approaching the question of “could the Father have incarnated” from this angle, it is clear that in fact only the Son actually incarnated, and therefore it is more or less meaningless to speak of the other divine persons incarnating, actually or potentially. The fact that only the Son is incarnate is simply how it is and because God has no potential then it couldn’t be otherwise.³

When Weinandy meditates on these themes, his essential conviction seems to be that it had to be the Son who became man, because the entire Christian ordo salutis depends on it being this way. The explanation he offers is that the Son is the image of the father, and we are saved as humans by being brought into conformity with that image.

Weinandy moves on to consider the mechanisms and inner workings of the salvific work of Christ: Jesus interacts with us and saves us as man but the entire time he does this he remains as the second – divine – person of the trinity; Jesus is always the divine Son of the Father.⁴ So it was and is the divine person of the Son of God who offered and continues to offer the sacrifice which infallibly and efficaciously achieves universal salvation, but the divine Son does this as man. Weinandy sums up this obedience and recapitulation theology succinctly: “The Son humanly achieved humankind’s salvation.”

Weinandy finishes by talking about how human beings appropriate the saving work of Jesus and become recreated in his divine image. Curiously, he doesn’t outline any ordo salutis or propose an answer to the question “what must man do to be saved?” Rather, Weinandy outlines a very christo-centric narrative account of what Christ, the Spirit and the Father have already achieved on our behalf, as well as how the Trinity incorporates us into the divine life.

Concluding comment

Most of my comments are mingled in with the summary, but I would just like to take this opportunity to raise an objection to one particular claim of Weinandy. He suggests that Christ assumed a fallen human nature. I just want to flag that my reading of St. Maximus the Confessor’s Neo-Chalcedonean Christology would seem to indicate that this is inaccurate. In brief, according to Maximus there is no ontological difference between a fallen and unfallen human nature: Both are simply one and the same human nature, however existing in different states. The difference is that a fallen nature is one that is enslaved to passions, sin, ignorance and so on, whereas an unfallen nature is exactly the same, but without suffering these negative and evil limitations. Finally, there is a divinized human nature, which is a human nature for which there is indeed an ontological distinction in that it enjoys a “communication of idioms/attributes” with the divine nature. My understanding of Maximus’s Christology is that Christ was born with an unfallen human nature, and then by his recapitulatory life of perfect sinless obedience, he managed to undergo theosis and divinize the human nature. I offer all of this without references and the disclaimer that I may be wrong in my understanding of Maximus, but look forward to investigating further in the future.

TIK

Johnny is a Bishop, Heretic, Prophet, Priest, Apostle and ASM (Ascended Spiritual Master). On his good days he is often also the one true almighty God incarnate. He enjoys writing theology and philosophy articles and spreading the Gospel promise of Universal Salvation

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