I’ve been reading Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity lately. He’s a Reformed kind of guy, and like many contemporary theologians, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about Karl Barth. Now it’s well known that Barth in many places denies that he’s a “modalist” about the Trinity, and yet he says many things like these (these are quoted from Barth’s works by Letham):
God is one in three ways of being… (276)
The life of God would appear to be a kind of uninterrupted cycle of the three modes of being. (279)
God is who he is… subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of revelation, the revealed; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (281)
Moreover, according to Letham, Barth holds that (in Letham’s words) “Personality is properly ascribed only to the whole Trinity, not to the individual aspects by themselves.” (281) Letham seems to criticize Barth’s views as modalist, but then in conclusion oddly pulls his punch.
There is this persistent ambiguity at the heart of Barth’s Trintarianism that does not change. If he is not modalistic, he will escape from the charge of unipersonality only with the greatest difficulty. (289)
This attitude, by the way, is highly characteristic of recent theology – they may gently suggest an imbalance or a problem of expression, but there’s an enormous reluctance to unequivocally object to the substance any Historical Great’s claims about the Trinity – be he Barth or some church father. But I digress. We should ask, What does Letham mean by “modalism”? Luckily, his book has a glossary, with the following entry:
modalism. The blurring on erasing of the real, eternal, and irreducible distinctions among the three persons of the Trinity. This danger can arise when the unity of God, or the identity in being of the three persons, is overstressed at the expense of the personal distinctions. It can also surface where there is a pervasive stress on salvation history, so as to eliminate any reference to eternal realities. When that is so, God’s self-revelation in human history as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is no longer held to reveal who he is eternally in himself. (500)
This definition / mini-lecture is unhelpfully metaphorical (“blurring or erasing”). Worse, it treats it as a matter of degree – as if “modalism” were not a claim or set of claims, but was rather some quality to some degree or other had by various writings. Worse, it seems to embody the error, common in theology, of thinking of modalism as simply phenomenal and/or serial modalism. This is confirmed, when he sort of defends Barth against the charge:
In fact, [for Barth] God is eternally the Father, eternally the Son, and eternally the Spirit… Barth certainly does not consider himself to be a modalist. This is clear again when he firmly opposes any refusal to see that God’s self-revelation grants us access to God himself. (289)
Bottom line? It seems that Barth isn’t a phenomenal FSH modalist, or a serial FSH modalist. Rather, he’s a noumenal, eternally concurrent FSH modalist. Yes, even if he never liked the label “modalist“.
The most disturbing thing about all this? It’s this part of Letham’s discussion:
Barth’s translator Geoffrey Bromiley, renders [Barth’s German term seinweise, which he suggested as a replacement for “person”] almost uniformly as “mode of being.” For casual readers, this at once conjures up the specter of modalism. Bromiley himself rightly regards such a claim as absurd, for Barth “stays very close to the orthodox formularies,” and his polemic against the term “person” [to the effect that it is misleading to use that term in trinitarian theology] “aims to defend rather than subvert the orthodox position. (277)
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Hi Greg!
Thanks for the quote and the comment. The quote is interesting, and also fairly typical.
I don’t have access to it right now, but I believe the refs you seek are in this article.
As to your final comments, I think you’re right that for A and B to be two “persons” it must be at least possible for them to have a personal relationship with one another. Just attributing various actions to one mode or another doesn’t render those modes persons – persons are substances, and modes are not. When you attribute an action to a mode, you’re really attributing that action to the thing/substance which that mode is a mode of, and the mode “gets” the action in a secondary sense. (crude example: You fly into a rage and kill a toll-booth attendant (tolls have been rising lately). We can truly say that “Angry Greg” killed her, but of course in a more fundamental sense, Greg killed her.)
But there’s a danger of getting into a linguistic mudfight about “person”. Traditionalists will make a big fuss about God being beyond our concepts, and will stress that “person” is an inadequate term. Unlike some social trinitarians, it seems to me that many in the “Latin” mainstream aren’t really that interested in there being genuine personal relationships between Father and Son. So I think the question is not “What concept of “person’ should we apply to the Trinity?” but rather, does the NT require any of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be persons (intelligent substantial agents), or will their being (some sort of) modes of God cut it?
I’m curious to know about Barth’s polemic against the use of the term “person.” Could you outline it for me? Or do you know where Barth addresses the issue?
I find this very interesting because I came to the same conclusions (that he is a “noumenal, eternally concurrent FSH modalist”) when I had to read portions of Barth’s “Church Dogmatics” for a class of mine. I found this remark interesting:
“[T]o systematize the one-sidedness [of the Trinity], as we partly find it in the ancient modalism (e.g. in the form of ‘Patripassianism’), is absolutely forbidden, because it would mean the dissolution of the three-in-oneness into the neutral fourth†(CD I:1, 456).
Notice that Barth does not condemn all forms of modalism, but only one sort. It is the sort that does not preserve the necessary distinction between the modes. But could it not be consistently maintained by a “noumenal, eternally concurrent FSH modalist” that certain actions could be attributed to one mode and not another without granting the mode true personality? For even if certain actions could be attributed to one mode that does not mean that personal inter-relations exist between the FSH. And it would seem to me that this aspect must be affirmed in order for the FSH to be regarded as true, distinct persons. What do you think?
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