Calvin's Institutes

Section: 1.13.5-8

5. Limits and necessity of theological terms

If, therefore, these terms were not rashly invented, we ought to beware lest by repudiating them we be accused of overweening rashness. Indeed, I could wish they were buried, if only among all men this faith were agreed on: that Father and Son and Spirit are one God, yet the Son is not the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but that they are differentiated by a peculiar quality.

Really, I am not, indeed, such a stickler as to battle doggedly over mere words. For I note that the ancients, who otherwise speak very reverently concerning these matters, agree neither among themselves nor even at all times individually with themselves. What, now, are the formulas employed by the councils and excused by Hilary? With what great freedom does Augustine sometimes burst forth? How unlike are the Greeks and the Latins? But one example of the difference will suffice. When the Latins wished to translate the word hornoousios they said “consubstantial,” indicating that the substance of Father and Son is one, thus employing “substance” instead of “essence.” Hence, likewise, Jerome in a letter to Damasus calls it a sacrilege to predicate three substances in God. Yet you will find more than a hundred times in Hilary that there are three “substances” in God. But how confused is Jerome by the word “hypostasis”! For he suspects poison lurking when three hypostases in one God are mentioned! Even if one uses this word in a pious sense, he does not, nevertheless, hide the fact that it is an improper expression. This would be true even if he spoke sincerely, rather than tried willingly and knowingly to charge the Eastern bishops, whom he hates, with unjust calumnies! Surely he shows little candor in asserting that in all profane schools ousia is nothing else but hypostasis, an opinion repeatedly refuted by common and well-worn usage. Augustine is more moderate and courteous, since even though he says that the word hypostasis in this sense is new to Latin ears, yet he leaves to the Greeks their manner of speaking so much that he gently bears with the Latins who had imitated the Greek phrase. And what Socrates writes concerning hypostasis in Book 6 of the Tripartite History suggests that it was wrongly applied to this matter by unlearned men. But the same Hilary accuses the heretics of a great crime, that by their wickedness he is forced to submit to the peril of human speech what ought to have been locked within the sanctity of men’s minds; and he does not hide the fact that this is to do things unlawful, to speak things inexpressible, to presume things not conceded. A little later he excuses himself at length for daring to put forward new terms; for when he has set forth the natural names-Father, Son, and Spirit-he adds that whatever is sought besides these is beyond the meaning of language, above the reach of sense, above the capacity of understanding. And elsewhere he pronounces the bishops of Gaul happy because they had neither wrought out, nor received, nor known, any other confession at all than the ancient and very simple one that had been received among all churches from the apostolic age. And Augustine’s excuse is similar: on account of the poverty of human speech in so great a matter, the word “hypostasis” had been forced upon us by necessity, not to express what it is, but only not to be silent on how Father, Son, and Spirit are three.

And “this modesty of saintly men ought to warn us against forthwith so severely taking to task, like censors, those who do not wish to swear to the words conceived by us, provided they are not doing it out of either arrogance or frowardness or malicious craft. But let these very persons, in turn, weigh the necessity that compels us to speak thus, that gradually they may at length become accustomed to a useful manner, of speaking. Also let them learn to beware, lest, when they have to resist Arians on the one hand and Sabellians on the other, while indignant that the opportunity to evade the issue is cut off, they arouse some suspicion that they are disciples either of Arius or of Sabellius. Arius says that Christ is God, but mutters that he was made and had a beginning. He says that Christ is one with the Father, but secretly whispers in the ears of his own partisans that He is united to the Father like other believers, although by a singular privilege. Say “consubstantial” and you will tear off the mask of this turncoat, and yet you add nothing to Scripture. Sabellius says that Father, Son, and Spirit signify no distinctions in God.

Say they are three, and he will scream that you are naming three Gods. Say that in the one essence of God there is a trinity of persons; you will say in one word what Scripture states, and cut short empty talkativeness. b(a)Indeed, if anxious superstition so constrains anyone that he cannot bear these terms, yet no one could now deny, even if he were to burst, that when we hear “one” we ought to understand “unity of substance”; when we hear “three in one essence,” the persons in this trinity are meant. When this is confessed without guile, we need not dally over words. But I have long since and repeatedly been experiencing that all who persistently quarrel over words nurse a secret poison. As a consequence, it is more expedient to challenge them deliberately than speak more obscurely to please them.

6. The meaning of the most important conception

But laying aside disputation over terms, I shall proceed to speak of the thing itself: “Person,” therefore, I call a “subsistence” in God’s essence, which, while related to the others, is distinguished by an incommunicable quality. By the term “subsistence” we would understand something different from “essence.” For if the Word were simply God, and yet possessed no other characteristic mark, John would wrongly have said that the Word was always with God [John 1:1]. When immediately after he adds that the Word was also God himself, he recalls us to the essence as a unity. But because he could not be with God without residing in the Father, hence emerges the idea of a subsistence, which, even though it has been joined with the essence by a common bond and cannot be separated from it, yet has a special mark whereby it is distinguished from it. Now, of the three subsistences I say that each one, while related to the others, is distinguished by a special quality. This “relation” is here distinctly expressed: because where simple and indefinite mention is made of God, this name pertains no less to the Son and the Spirit than to the Father. But as soon as the Father is compared with the Son, the character of each distinguishes the one from the other. Thirdly, whatever is proper to each individually, I maintain to be incommunicable because whatever is attributed to the Father as a distinguishing mark cannot agree with, or be transferred to, the Son. Nor am I displeased with Tertullian’s definition, provided it be taken in the right sense, that there is a kind of distribution or economy in God which has no effect on the unity of essence.

7. The deity of the Word

Yet before I proceed farther, I must demonstrate the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Thereafter we shall see how they differ from each other.

Certainly, when God’s word is set before us in Scripture it would be the height of absurdity to imagine a merely fleeting and vanishing utterance, which, cast forth into the air, projects itself outside of God; and that both the oracles announced to the patriarchs and all prophecies were of this sort. Rather, “Word” means the everlasting Wisdom, residing with God, from which both all oracles and all prophecies go forth. For, as Peter testifies, the ancient prophets spoke by the Spirit of Christ just as much as the apostles did [I Peter 1:10-11; cf. II Peter 1:21], and all who thereafter ministered the heavenly doctrine. Indeed, because Christ had not yet been manifested, it is necessary to understand the Word as begotten of the Father before time [cf. Ecclus. 24:14, Vg.]. But if that Spirit, whose organs were the prophets, was the Spirit of the Word, we infer without any doubt that he was truly God. And Moses clearly teaches this in the creation of the universe, setting forth this Word as intermediary. For why does he expressly tell us that God in his individual acts of creation spoke, Let this or that be done [Gen., ch. 1] unless so that the unsearchable glory of God may shine forth in his image? It would be easy for censorious babblers to get around this, saying that the Word is to be understood as a bidding and command. But the apostles are better interpreters, who teach that the world was made through the Son, and that he upholds all things by his powerful word [Heb. 1:2-3]. For here we see the Word understood as the order or mandate of the Son, who is himself the eternal and essential Word of the Father. And indeed, sane and modest men do not find obscure Solomon’s statement, where he introduces wisdom as having been begotten of God before time [Ecclus. 24:14, Vg.], and presiding over the creation of things and all God’s works [Prov. 8:22ff.]. For it would be foolish and silly to fancy a certain temporary volition of God; when God willed to set forth his fixed and eternal plan, and also something

more secret. That saying of Christ’s also applies here: “My Father and I have worked even to this day” [John 5:17 p-j- For, affirming that he was constantly at work with the Father from the very beginning of the world, he explains more explicitly what Moses had briefly touched upon. Therefore we conclude that God has so spoken that the Word might have his share in the work and that in this way the work might be common to both. But John spoke most clearly of all when he declared that that Word, God from the beginning with God, was at the same time the cause of all things, together with God the Father [John 1:1-3]. For John at once attributes to the Word a solid and abiding essence, and ascribes something uniquely His own, and clearly shows how God, by speaking, was Creator of the universe. Therefore, inasmuch as all divinely uttered revelations are correctly designated by the term “word of God,” so this substantial Word is properly placed at the highest level, as the wellspring of all oracles. Unchangeable, the Word abides everlastingly one and the same with God, and is God himself.

8. The eternity of the Word

Here some dogs bark out, who, while they dare not openly deprive him of his divinity, secretly filch away his eternity. For they say the Word for the first time began to be when God opened his holy mouth in the creation of the universe. But they are too reckless in inventing a sort of innovation in God’s substance. For as the names of God that have respect to his outward activity began to be attributed to him after the existence of his work (as when he is called Creator of heaven and earth), so piety recognizes or allows no name which intimates that anything new has happened to God in himself. For if there had been anything adventitious, the passage of James would fall to the ground: that “every perfect gift comes from above, and descends from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of change” [James 1: 17 p.]. Therefore nothing should be more intolerable to us than to fancy a beginning of that Word who both was always God and afterward was the artificer of the universe. But they think they are reasoning shrewdly when they aver that Moses, by narrating that God then spoke for the first time, hints thereby that there had been in him no Word before. Nothing is more trifling than this! For because something begins to be manifested at a certain time, we ought not therefore to gather that it never existed before. Indeed, I conclude far otherwise: the Word had existed long before God said, “Let there be light” [Gen. 1:3] and the power of the Word emerged and stood forth. Yet if anyone should inquire how long before, he will find no beginning. Nor does He delimit a certain space of time when he says, “Father, glorify thy Son with the glory which I had with thee before the foundations of the universe were laid” [John 17:5 p.]. Nor did John overlook this: because, before he passes on to the creation of the universe [John 1:3], he says that “in the beginning the Word was with God” [John 1:1 p.].Therefore we again state that the Word, conceived beyond the beginning of time by God, has perpetually resided with him. By this, his eternity, his true essence, and his divinity are proved.