Keep It Simple

Jonathan Williams

Last time we talked about the doctrine of divine simplicity. That the Father, the Son, and the Spirit all share in one Godhead or essence. That because of this we are able to truly know God through Jesus Christ because He truly is God. That we are through our union with Christ by the Holy Spirit able to be kept by the Father forever and that we will one day see the face of God as we dwell with Him forever. That is the extremely practical nature of this truth. That when Jesus says, “If you have seen Me you’ve seen the Father,” (John 15:10). Not because they see the person of the Father in the person of the Son. But because they share in the same divine essence. The point is that God did not stay far off in Heaven where we would be unable to know Him, to access Him or be near Him. Instead, He came down and became man so that as our Mediator we would be able to know Him and be near Him. That is your hope just as much as it was 2,000 years ago and you can know God through Christ just as well as the Apostles. Jesus even says that it is to our benefit that He go to the Father so that the Spirit would come and indwell us and allow us to know God better (John 14:25-30, 16:5-15). But this doctrine of simplicity, while it has these immediate benefits of growing our confidence in our ability to God the Father in Christ does not do that alone. It also protects us from errors and serves as a guardrail for us.

When I was in math class I was taught a rule that would help me understand how to multiply fractions: K.I.S.S. or keep it simple stupid. You may have been taught the same rule as a child. It was extremely helpful and it kept me from getting the wrong answers. While I don’t want to call anyone stupid here I do want to advocate that if we remember the doctrine of divine simplicity, it will keep us from a lot of errors when it comes to our understanding of God. It is when we do not hold to the understanding that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit share the same identical essence that we verge off into errors. Now, simplicity can’t solve everything and we can so far with simplicity that we forget there are three consubstantial persons (a topic for next time) but it does keep us from a few major errors. Let’s look at these.

First, simplicity keeps us from believing in three Gods. This is fairly easy to see I think. We as Christians, confess there are three persons in the Godhead, in the essence of God. We are careful to say that the persons of God are how God relates to Himself. We’ll discuss this more fully next time. But we are equally careful to say that they are not three gods. How can that be? If there are three persons that are fully God then how can they be only One God? That is because of two reasons. One, we don’t think of the persons of the Trinity the same way we consider personhood for humans. We don’t mean three separate centers of consciousness.[1] Another way to say it is that the three persons are not three separate individual agents that God’s essence is divided up into.[2] That would make us tritheists and not Trinitarian Christians. Rather, we say that the three persons all share the one divided essence of God. That the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three modes of subsistence or existence in the essence of God not three Gods with three wills and three essences. The way that we distinguish these persons or subsistences is how they relate to one another, the Father is unbegotten, the Son is eternally begotten or generated by the Father, and the Father and the Son eternal breathe out or spirate the Spirit. But that does not mean that they are three separate beings. That’s a lot of technical language but the point is that we don’t pray to nor worship three separate gods. But one united Lord above all and He is alone worthy of our praise.

Second, simplicity protects us from believing that there is a hierarchy in God. In other words, it stops us from thinking of Jesus or the Spirit as less God than the Father. That is a temptation that we have. We think that since Jesus is the 2ndperson then He must be less and the Spirit is even less because He’s 3rd. But 1st, 2nd, and 3rd have to do with the way the persons relate to each other and not their rank. Time after time Jesus is said to be God, whether that is outright when he declares that He is the Son of God or when He calls Himself I AM in John 8:58. Or when Thomas calls Him God in John 20:28, or when He is called that throughout Acts and the Epistles. The Spirit as well is attested as the Creator of the World in Genesis 1:2 and as God in Acts 5:1-11 and 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. They are not lesser gods. That concept is foreign to the God who says “There is no God beside me” (Isaiah 44:6) or that He would not share His glory with another (Isaiah 42:8). There is no rank. They are all equally God and as the Athanasian Creed says all Almighty.

A more deceptive form of this is called Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son or Social Trinitarianism. It teaches that the Son eternally submitted Himself to the Father in the inter-trinitarian relationships in His obedience to the Father. Some have said that the Son’s existence is obedience. The way that ESS/EFS proponents accomplish this is by thinking that the persons are centers of consciousness and have three wills. This is a rejection of simplicity that teaches that God has one will in His essence and so the three persons have one essence. They understand God as a society not as the Church Fathers described one God in essence with one will who relates to Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. Having the Son submit in eternity past, means that He ether has a different essence because He has one will or it means that the Son is less than the Father.[3]

To sum up, you don’t have to have a seminary degree to be kept from heresy or from misunderstanding God. When we talk about simplicity and we talk about these things that it protects us from it much seems like a lot for us to understand. It is. God is someone we cannot comprehend. But we can know Him. Through His Son Jesus Christ, we can know the Father by His Word and act of revealing Him to us. We are not knowing a lesser God but God. The promise that we have in Christ is that when we’ve seen Him we have seen the Father because they share the same essence. Beloved let us rejoice in the fact that we know our God and we can know Him more and more as we grow in our relationship with Christ through the Spirit.

The LORD be with you all!

Reverend Jonathan Williams

[1] Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity The Unmanipulated Father, Son and Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2021),  149.

[2] Barret, Simply Trinity, 146.

[3] This will require a longer post at another time.