Perichoresis! So hot right now. Actually, so hot all the time. The confession that the persons of the Trinity mutually indwell each other –“I am in the Father and the Father is in me”– is directly evident from Scripture, has been confessed in the church

One of the things you can say about the divine persons is that they are equal with each other. Right between affirming their consubstantiality and their mutual indwelling, Polanus devotes a couple of paragraphs to affirming their equality. “The three persons are equal among themselves

In the journey through his long 14th Axiom, Polanus has one last thing to say about how we should speak of a person of the Trinity in relation to the divine essence. What he wants to say is that we should avoid weird sentences like

In this section –one sub-section of Axiom 14– Polanus focuses on a difficult task. He intends to show how to speak responsibly about a divine person in relation to the divine essence. What’s difficult about that is that a divine person just is the divine

Polanus’ eighteen Axioms on the Trinity are mostly pretty short, but Axiom 14 stands out for its length and comprehensiveness. It’s as long as the other seventeen put together (3,000 words out of the total 6,000), and it covers a lot of ground. It will

These two axioms are very short, and fairly straightforward: Polanus wants to clarify that while the persons are distinguished by relations, this does not introduce composition in any way: the persons are not composed by relations, nor is God composed by relations. Constitution good; composition

In these two axioms, Polanus teaches how to think about God in terms of essence and relation. One of the tricky parts of this is that essence and relation are two different ways of talking about the same thing in God, which is God. Several

In this little set of axioms, Polanus wants to show that the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by real, opposed relations. He is aware that this is a packed phrase, which contains and summarizes quite a few judgments. So he eases his way into

Here’s our next conversation about the Trinity, following Polanus’ 18 Axioms. The main thing Polanus wants to clarify in this axiom is that when we speak of difference in God, it can never be difference in essence; it is instead difference in person. In the

Axiom 5 is very short, but Axiom 6 is very long. So even though this is organizationally strange, we’re devoting one discussion to Axiom 5 and the first half of Axiom 6. But in our next discussion, we’ll only cover the second half of 6,

In his fourth axiom on the Trinity, Polanus clarifies how the persons of the Trinity are related to each other by clarifying how they are related to the divine nature. To make the point, he contrasts the right answer, homoousioi, with a number of wrong

Is the Son like the Father, or unlike the Father? More precisely, are the Father and the Son similar in essence, or dissimilar? It’s a trick question. “Similarity” is not a useful category for talking about God’s essence. In his third Axiom, Polanus helps us