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John 1:18
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, equal in power and glory. Against the heresy of modalism, the church has confessed that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not merely interchangeable names referring to the same, single agent. Instead, orthodox, biblical Christianity affirms that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct persons, three distinct subjects who nevertheless are each truly God. These persons are not three individual gods, and They do not divide or multiply the divine essence. In other words, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not each one-third of the divine essence when you consider Them individually and not collectively; and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not give us more God when you consider Them collectively and not individually.
We are treading on holy ground here, for we are talking about a mystery that goes beyond our full comprehension and that deals ultimately with the inner life of God, which He has not shown us in all its fullness. Nevertheless, Scripture does tell us something about the distinctions between the three persons that allows us to conceptualize what it means for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be irreducibly distinct persons and yet one divine essence.
So what distinguishes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from one another? It cannot be the divine attributes, as if each person possessed unique essential properties that are necessary to make God God. What distinguishes the three persons are what we term processions or relations of origin—that is, how They relate to one another. One divine person can be eternally from one or both of the other divine persons without suffering a diminishing of His deity. These relations of origin are as follows: the Father is eternally unbegotten, or eternally from none other; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, or eternally from the Father; and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son, or is eternally from the Father and the Son.
One text that indicates that the distinctions within the Godhead are distinctions in relations of origin is John 1:18. Most literally, the verse in the Greek says that “the only begotten God” is at the Father’s side. John notes that the Son is God and is with the Father, but what makes Him distinct from the Father is His begottenness. We will look more at the relations of origin over the next few days, but it is important to note now that these relations or processions are the only differences between the persons of the Trinity.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
The processions constitute the distinct Trinitarian persons, but they do so without introducing a difference in the divine essence between the persons. So the distinctions between the persons do not exist at the level of essence. If they did, we would have three gods, not one God. But there is only one God, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all fully God without compromising Their real personal distinctions.
For further study
- Psalm 2:7
- John 3:16–18
- John 8:42; 15:26
- 1 John 4:9
The bible in a year
- Leviticus 14
- Matthew 26:57–75