Category: Theology

In trinitarian theology, the word “mission” is a precise and technical term. Though the word itself just means “sending,” a trinitarian mission is the external personal operation of one of the Trinity. It presupposes something very important, and that is an eternal relation of origin within the Trinity. The temporal mission extends or manifests that…

I think it’s fair to say this will not be one of the easier episodes, because Polanus lays out quite a bit of difficult material here, and it’s all interconnected. We are nearly done with the very long Axiom 14. This sub-section of the axiom brings us to Polanus’ discussion of the order and the…

Tropos hyparxeos! Polanus comes to the point where he is ready to teach about the distinction of the persons from each other, and he invokes Cyril and Aquinas as authorities in affirming that the distinction among the persons ought to be the smallest of distinctions. This smallest distinction is made by a relation, and the…

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 “always, at all times, by everyone” (in Vincent of Lerins’…

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 essential properties of deity, in the act of…

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 “God begets God,” or “God begets the Son,” because it…

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 essence: the Father is God, and so on. There is…

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 take several episodes to get through, but some of Polanus’…

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 bad. Polanus also clarifies that the three persons of the…

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 times now, Polanus has succeeded in bringing us face to…

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 it, giving the reader just one idea at a time:…

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 first half of Axiom 6, Polanus made this point by…