My own version of material constitution

The following is an extract from a post I wrote on one of my old blogs back in March of this year, and represents one of my countless attempts, over the years, to make sense of the traditional understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. In some ways it is similar to Dr Michael Rea's ideas about material constitution that I criticised in this post. The words of my original post are in bold:

Most of the tenets of the doctrine of the Trinity, in its traditionally understood form are, of course, indispensable: The unity of God is non-negotiable as is the distinctiveness of the Persons and of course the Deity of each. However, the idea that God does not have 'parts' (the doctrine of Divine simplicity) seems to me to be less fundamental. It is a required belief for Roman Catholics according to the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 and also Vatican II, but as a protestant I do not feel bound by these Councils; and the Eastern Orthodox Church, with it's teaching on the distinction between God's essence and His energies does not seem as wedded to Divine simplicity as the RCC. By discarding the necessity for it to involve the idea of God having no parts, I have been able to come to an understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity which is, I would argue, both coherent and maintains those three 'non-negotiables': God's unity (oneness), the distinction between the Persons and the Deity of the Persons.
This understanding of the Trinity is as follows:

The Father is the one and only God ("for there is one God, even the Father", as the Bible says).

The Son is a part of God - namely His Word or Logos, His Wisdom, begotten of the Father and therefore of 'one substance' with the Father (analagous to how an earthly child is made from the very bodies of its biological parents).

Likewise, the Holy Spirit is a part of God - namely His Spirit (what it says on the tin!)

It could be objected that, according to this understanding, there is no difference between the Father and the Trinity as a whole. This is a reasonable objection, but I would argue that the name Father refers to the first Person of the Trinity (of whom the second and third Persons are parts) considered on His own, while the term Trinity refers to all three Persons considered together. Admittedly the difference is subtle and largely a matter of emphasis.
Another objection is that, on this understanding, the Son and the Spirt appear to be less than fully God; that each is merely a part of God. However, I would argue that, because of the unique and infinite nature of the Godhead, every part of God contains the fullness of everything that God is - the fullness of the Divine Essence or Nature - and that therefore each part of God may be rightly called God. This is not to say that each part of God is a distinct and seperate God, or that each part of God is literally identical with the whole of God. To illustrate what I mean I will use an analogy: Imagine you are holding an apple and you have just taken a bite of it. What you now have in your mouth is not an apple; neither is it the apple; nevertheless, it very definitely is apple. Because the apple is, in a sense, simple - not made up of distinct parts each of which is something other than apple - every bit of it can rightly be referred to as apple. Similarly, even though, according to the view described here, God does have parts, in another sense He can, in fact, still be described as 'simple' because each part of him, while not being the whole of God, nevertheless contains all the essential characteristics, qualities and attributes of Divinity and can therefore rightly be referred to as God. The Son is God, the Spirit is God, and yet there is only one God - the Father - just as in my analogy there is only one apple!
This way of understanding the doctrine of the Trinity may be somewhat unorthodox - some might even say heretical - although, paradoxically perhaps, I think it is closest to the Eastern (and Oriental) Orthodox way of thinking about the Trinity, which emphasises the Father's role as the eternal source of the Son (through 'generation') and of the Spirit (through 'spiration'), and also as the source of the Divinity of each of the other two. Nevertheless, Eastern/Oriental Orthodox theology does not (I believe) make the Son or the Spirit subordinate to the Father and neither is my portrayal of the Trinity intended to do so.

One problem with this attempt to make the doctrine of the Trinity work is that, in order to make it possible to refer to the Son and the Spirit as God, it requires us to think of the word 'God' as referring not only to the Father but also to some kind of divine substance, analogous to - if not actually - a material substance, of which the Father consists. For most Christians - as well as adherents of the other Abrahamic faiths - the word 'God' is, I think, used to describe a personal, supreme Being and not some kind of (albeit non-physical) material. But the term 'Divine Substance' is, of course, very much part of the traditional Trinitarian language and, as well as being used to denote the one divine Essence, Nature or Being of God, it is sometimes - particularly by some of the early Church fathers (Tertullian for example) - used to describe a kind of spiritual matter or 'stuff'. Still, as a solution to the problem of finding a logically coherent way to state the doctrine of the Trinity, I'm not at all sure that the method described above is entirely satisfactory!

Not guilty of modalism (possibly)

My formulation of the doctrine the Trinity as describing one God in three presences, rather than Persons, is, of course, open to the charge of being heretical on the grounds that it could be construed as a form of modalism or Sabellianism (the view that God is one Person with three 'modes' of existence - eg. that he existed originally as the Father, then came to earth as the Son and is now present with us as the Holy Spirit - as opposed to three Persons, each of whom exists as the same one Being). My only defense against this charge is to point out that it all depends on what is meant by the word 'person'. I don't know what the word 'person' meant to somebody in the Greek speaking world of the 4th Century. I understand that the Latin word 'persona' (from which we derive the English word 'person') is itself derived from a Greek word which originally meant 'mask' (as in the mask worn by an actor on the stage). Clearly, at least in its original form, it did not refer to an actual, individual self. However, our modern understanding of the word 'person' is that it refers to a conscious, self-aware subject or agent. In grammar, the subject of a verb is the one who acts while the object is that which is acted upon - so if God were three subjects then we would have to say, for example, that 'they created the world' rather than that 'He created it'.
Since none of us know exactly what the word 'person' meant to the people who devised the Nicene Creed or the early Trinitarian formulas, it is at least conceivable that they may have meant something similar to what I mean when I say that God is present to us in three different ways - that He exists as one self with three distinct presences, namely His transcendent presence as the Father, His very personal presence in the life and teachings of the man Jesus Christ and His immanent presence amongst us by means of His Holy Spirit.