A Little Trinitarian Backup...

Concrete Worldview: Part 1B(?)

Trevor:
Two weeks ago, I began a new series on the foundations that make for a strong, Biblical worldview.

Today, I happened to read a section from a book that laid out the exact same foundational truths. (Even including large quotes from Herman Bavinck!)

The two sections below are pulled from a chapter written by Brian Mattson.

It is a deep theological examination, so take your time reading.
It’s heavy, but it’s also very important stuff!

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The Self-Contained Ontological Trinity

God is the Creator of all that is, and therefore he is the absolute source and ground of all that is. The revelation of God as Trinity entails at least three essential dogmas.

First, God is absolutely personal. When it comes to ultimate questions, in other words, one is never dealing with an “it” or a “what,” but a “whom.” Humans live before the face of a person to whom they are accountable, not an abstract power or substance.

Second, the Trinity means that God is “a se.” He is independent of his creation and all-sufficient unto himself—sufficient in every way, in all his perfections. So, for example:

The Father eternally gives to the Son, and with him to the Spirit, to have life in himself (John 5:26). And the community of being that exists among the three persons is a life of absolute activity. The Father knows and loves the Son eternally—from before the foundation of the world (Matt. 11:27; John 17:24)—and the Spirit searches the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10). All these works of God are immanent. They bear no relation to anything that exists or will exist outside of God, but occur within the divine being and concern the relations existing among the three persons. However,… they make God known to us as the all-sufficient and blessed Being, who is “not served by human hands as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25). God does not need the world for his own perfection. He does not need the work of creation and preservation in order not to be unemployed. He is absolute activity within himself.
(Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2 God and Creation, 342)

The Trinity, in other words, precludes the possibility of all forms of pantheism, the commingling of divine and creaturely being—what is sometimes called “correlativity.” This is the animating interest in the characteristic phrase, “the self-contained ontological Trinity.” It might seem that “self-contained” might make God unavailable to us, but in fact the Trinity also precludes Deism, the radical divorce of God and creation:

Deism creates a vast gulf between God and his creatures, cancels out their mutual relatedness, and reduces God to an abstract entity, a pure being, to mere monotonous and uniform existence.…Pantheism, though it brings God nearer to us, equates him with the created world, erases the boundary line between the Creator and the creature, robs God of any being or life of his own, thus totally undermining religion. But the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes God known as essentially distinct from the world, yet having a blessed life of his own.
(Bavinck, Vol 2 God and Creation, 331)

The Triune God is therefore not at the top of a continuum of “being”; God has “a free, independent existence and life of his own.”(Bavinck, God and Creation, 150) But neither is he absent; he is present in and to his creation as its Creator, sustainer, and Lord.

Moreover, and thirdly, the Trinity displays the “equal ultimacy” of the one and the many, unity and diversity.

The Trinity reveals God to us as the fullness of being, the true life, eternal beauty. In God, too, there is unity in diversity, diversity in unity…. \[I\]n God both are present: absolute unity as well as absolute diversity. It is one selfsame being sustained by three hypostases. This results in the most perfect kind of community, a community of the same beings; at the same time it results in the most perfect diversity, a diversity of divine persons.
(Bavinck, Vol 2 God and Creation, 331)

And this divine unity and diversity is the ground of creaturely unity and diversity. Creation reflects its Creator and, moreover, is completely dependent on its Creator to hold it all together. Consider this quote:

All these creational elements and forces with their inherent laws, according to the theistic worldview, are from moment to moment upheld by God, who is the final, supreme, intelligent, and free causality of all things. As creatures, they have no stability or durability in themselves. It is God’s omnipresent and eternal power that upholds and governs all things. In him, in his plan and also in his rule, originates the unity or harmony that holds together and unites all things over the entire range of their diversity and leads them to a single goal.
(Bavinck, Vol 1 Prolegomena, 370)

And note that if there is no created thing that has stability or durability in itself, but that it receives its meaning and significance from the mind, plan, and power of God, it means that there is no such thing as a “brute” or uninterpreted fact.

So the doctrine of the Trinity entails that God is absolutely personal, that he is “a se”—that is, independent and utterly self-sufficient—and that creation is utterly dependent.

Human Knowledge as Analogical

All knowledge can only be grounded in God’s own self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Creaturely knowledge is derivative of God’s knowledge.

So, for example:

He is, in the absolute sense of the term, the source…of our knowledge of him, for he is absolutely free, self-conscious, and true. His self-knowledge and self-consciousness is the source…of our knowledge of him. Without the divine self-consciousness, there is no knowledge of God in his creatures… The relation of God’s own self-knowledge to our knowledge of God used to be expressed by saying that the former was archetypal of the latter and the latter ectypal of the former. Our knowledge of God is the imprint of the knowledge God has of himself but always on a creaturely level and in a creaturely way. The knowledge of God present in his creatures is only a weak likeness, a finite, limited sketch, of the absolute self-consciousness of God accommodated to the capacities of the human or creaturely consciousness. But however great the distance is, the source…of our knowledge of God is solely God himself, the God who reveals himself freely, self-consciously, and genuinely.
(Bavinck, Prolegomena, 212)

Because of this disparity between the Creator and the creature, human knowledge can never be called “univocal,” a one-to-one identical correspondence—that is, one knows only as a creature can know, in a finite and limited way. Creaturely knowledge is, in the nature of the case, “analogical.”

Our knowledge of God is always only analogical in character, that is, shaped by analogy to what can be discerned of God in his creatures, having as its object…God in his revelation, his relation to us, in the things that pertain to his nature, in his habitual disposition to his creatures. Accordingly, this knowledge is only a finite image, a faint likeness and creaturely impression of the perfect knowledge that God has of himself.
(Bavinck, God and Creation, 110)

This does not imply that creaturely knowledge is defective; it simply means that it is creaturely. It is derivative, not original; finite, not infinite; limited, not exhaustive. So:

It is not contradictory, therefore, to say that a knowledge that is inadequate, finite, and limited is at the same time true, pure, and sufficient. God reveals himself in his works, and according to that revelation we name him. He permits us to speak of him in language that is weak and human because he himself displayed his perfections to us in his creatures. Hence, in actual fact, it is not we who name God. Where would we get the ability and the right to do that? It is God himself who, through nature and Scripture, has put his splendid names in our mouth… God’s self-consciousness is archetypal; our knowledge of God, drawn from his Word, is ectypal.
(Bavinck, God and Creation, 107)

While this may seem an abstract point, it is of utmost importance when considering the constant efforts of the natural man to achieve a kind of absolute certainty—the kind of knowledge with which the serpent fraudulently tempted in the garden and that legions of philosophers ever since have sought as their holy grail: a “godlike” exhaustive comprehension of reality. But Christian theology calls off that quest at the start:

There is a big difference, certainly, between having an absolute knowledge and having a relative knowledge of such an absolute Being. Given the finiteness of human beings, the former is never an option… What we know of God we know only of his revelation and therefore only as much as he is pleased to make known to us concerning himself and as much as finite humans can absorb. Knowledge of God, accordingly, can be true and pure, but it is always most relative and does not include but excludes comprehension.
(Bavinck, God and Creation, 51)