The Day-Age Theory

 The Day-Age Theory

Thomas Allen

The following is an excerpt from Adam to Abraham: The Early History of Man by Thomas Allen (Franklinton, N.C.: TC Allen Co., 1998).

The Day-Age Theory

According to the Day-Age Theory, the six days of creation should not be or cannot be regarded as ordinary 24-hour days.[1] They should be considered as periods of indeterminate length. As these days have an indeterminate length, they can be equated with the vast amount of time required for the geological history of the Earth.

In the first chapter of Genesis, the Hebrew word yôwm or yôm is translated “day” in the King James Version and most other translations. Fenton translates  yôwm as “age.” The word means day both in the literal sense of from sunrise to sunset or from one sunset to the next or in the figurative sense of a space of time of unspecified duration, era, or age. For example, Genesis 2:4 reads, “These are the generation of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven.” Here, “day” refers to the entire period described by the six days of creation in chapter one. Even in Genesis One, the word “day” is used in several different senses. In Genesis 1:5 “day” is used as a term for light. It seems to mean a period of 24 hours in Genesis 1:8 and 13. In Genesis 1:14 and 16, it seems to mean a period of 12 hours. As makers of day and night, the Sun and Moon did not exist until the fourth day. Therefore, the first three days cannot be treated as ordinary days.[2] 

The seventh day is described as God's day of rest. This day has not yet ended and therefore extends a long time. If the seventh day extends a long time, then the preceding six days may also legitimately be considered as long periods of indeterminate length.[3] It, therefore, cannot be dogmatically asserted that the six days of Genesis One must be treated as ordinary days. Based on the discoveries of science, the logical and reasonable interpretation of yôwm in chapter one would be “era” instead of a literal 24-hour day. Such an interpretation does not infringe upon God's sovereignty or creative powers. Neither does it prove evolution. What seems to finite man as an extremely long time is less than a moment in God's present, which is infinite.[4]

Further evidence that the days in Genesis One are not 24-hour days, but are days or eras of indeterminate length, is the description of events that occurred on the third and sixth day. Much more than 24 hours is needed for the water to run off from the emerging dry lands on day three. This is especially true if subsequent growth of vegetation also occurred on the same day. For all the events that occurred in the sixth day to occur within 24 hours is impossible. Adam could not have named the multitudes of species of animals that would have existed on that day, even if God created them during the first second of the day.

Time is relative. When one looks at the Andromeda galaxy, he sees what happened more than two million years ago. That is, his present is Andromeda’s past two million years ago. As Psalm 90:4 puts it, “For a thousand years in thy [God's] sight are but as yesterday when it is past.” That a thousand years in man’s eyes is but a day in God’s shows that God’s idea of time differs from man’s. That God has a different idea of time is supported by 2 Peter 3:8, which reads, “But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Time is relative to the observer. The days in Genesis One are best thought of as days of God and not as 24-hour days.[5]

Another problem with a literal 24-hour interpretation is how the Hebrews measured the length of a day. To the Hebrews, days were measured from sunset to sunset. Thus, a day was seldom 24 hours long. They varied in length. Between the winter solstice and the summer solstice, each day was the same length or slightly longer than the preceding day. Between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, each day was the same length or slightly shorter than the preceding day. The length of day would also vary with latitude. Between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, the farther north or higher the latitude, the longer the day in the northern hemisphere. Several days may pass at the equator while only one day passes above the Arctic Circle, where the sun does not set for days.

The creation week of Genesis One is best interpreted as a figurative week with long overlapping days. However, such an interpretation does not mean that the days and the week are allegorical, mythological, or symbolical. What is being described in Genesis One is a historical week, a real week. The events described for the various days are actual events that occurred in space and time. The day-structure is figurative only in the sense that these days are not identical to ordinary 24-hour days. Rather, they are indeterminate stretches of real, historical time. 

Genesis One presents a concise summary of the major events that occurred during the creation week. The general sequence of creation is given, but overlapping of these events is not ruled out. The creation week is described in terms of very broad, large-scale phenomena. It is not described in terms of precise, scientific, technical phenomena (as much as modern man may have wished it to have been so described). Not everything that happened is described. Genesis One is an economy of expression. It is a generalized description of major events.

Creation is just as Divine and miraculous under the long periods allowed under the Day-Age Theory[6] as it would be if God created the world suddenly and completely. The power necessary to originate and support a ceaseless and prolonged process of developing the world is at least as great as the power necessary to bring it into being in a week.

Endnotes

1. Before the Reformation, the days of Genesis One were not generally interpreted as 24-hour days. Only in the last 400 years have they been interpreted as a literal week of seven consecutive 24-hour days.

2. Augustine contended that the first three days of creation were not ordinary 24-hour days because they were not marked by the rising and setting of the Sun. The Sun is not specifically mentioned until the fourth day of creation. He said that it was difficult, if not impossible, to conceive the type (or length) of days in these verses. (He also held that the events described in the first two verses of Genesis were not part of the six days of creation.)

3.  Proof that the seventh day did not end with Genesis 2:3 is that, unlike the other six, the Bible does not state that “there was evening and there was morning—the seventh day.” The absence of this phrase is one clear indication that the seventh day was never terminated. Hebrews Four provides further support to the continuing existence of God’s Sabbath.

4. Perhaps God created the Universe 15 billion years ago, which is an extremely long time, just to show man how insignificant time is when compared to the eternal God.

5. In Joel 3:18, Acts 2:20, and John 16:23, “that day” seems to mean the whole Christian era.

6. A more in-depth discussion of the Day-Age Theory is found in Christianity & the Age of the Earth by Davis Young.

Copyright © 1998 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Loofs on the Trinity Doctrine

Loofs on the Trinity Doctrine

Thomas Allen

In What Is the Truth about Jesus Christ? Problems of Christology Discussed in Six Haskell Lectures at Oberlin, Ohio (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), pages 171-176, Friedrich Loofs identifies three major difficulties or contradictions of the orthodox Trinity Doctrine and its Christology. Dr. Loofs is a professor of church history at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His discussion of the difficulties of the orthodox Trinity Doctrine and its Christology follows.

[1] The first one Augustine already experienced as a disturbing element, and the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages tried in vain to get rid of it. If, as Augustine thinks and this has been the orthodox opinion since the distinction of persons in the Trinity is limited to their internal relation to each other within the triune God, how was it possible that only the second person was incarnated? And, on the other hand, if the incarnation of the second person only is certain, how can the oneness of the triune God, i.e., how can Christian monotheism be retained? This unsolvable dilemma, perhaps, may be escaped and the incarnation of the Son only be retained, without endangering monotheism, by emphasizing that the Father and the Holy Ghost were not separated from the incarnated Son.

[2] But then the second difficulty I was going to mention becomes all the greater. Even as it is in itself, the idea of the incarnation, the idea that a divine person became the subject of a human life, restricted with regard to time and space, involves the greatest difficulties. For we cannot imagine the Godhead as being constricted by the limitations of human existence. Then only two alternatives remain. We must either assume that the “Son of God,” when he became man, did not cease, separate from his humanity, to pervade the world in divine majesty. Or, with Luther, we must venture the bold thought that, in virtue of the union of the two natures, the human nature from the first moments of its beginning has been partaking of the divine omnipotence and omnipresence.

This latter view, viz., the Lutheran doctrine of the “ubiquity of Christ’s” leads us to absurdities. If we wish to avoid these really unbearable absurdities we are referred to the former view. But does it not destroy the idea of incarnation? Could we still say of the divine person who was also outside the historical Jesus, pervading the world in divine majesty, that he was in reality incarnated? Is not the idea of the incarnation in this manner really changed into the idea of a divine inspiration, an inspiration such as the prophets experienced without any change in God's position to the world? But then it would be impossible still to say that the second person of the holy Trinity was the acting subject in the historical Jesus. This difficulty evidently becomes greater still if the Father and the Holy Ghost were not separated from the incarnated Son. For in that case it is still more impossible to retain the idea of a real incarnation of the Son. Perhaps these arguments are too difficult to be made intelligible with a few short words. But I may not spend more time on them. I must be satisfied with having just mentioned them. This mention of them was necessary. For here lie the greatest difficulties of the orthodox Christology, which cannot be surmounted by any tricks of reasoning.

[3] More easily understood is the difficulty which I am going to mention in the third and last place. The divine Trinity can, if need be, perhaps be thought of as the one God, the triune God, before the incarnation of the second person. But how is it after the incarnation? It is orthodox doctrine that the incarnated Son of God retained his human form, i.e. the human nature he had assumed, even after his ascension. Can, then, the distinction between the incarnated Son, on the one hand, and the Father and the Holy Ghost, on the other, be conceived of as being confined to the internal relations in which each person stands to the other within the one Godhead? And if this is not the case, the oneness of the Trinity is dissolved after the incarnation; the Trinity has become something different after the incarnation from what it was before. If neither is the case, then the humanity of Christ stands beside the Trinity. And then, also during the earthly life of Jesus, it could not have stood in a real personal union with the second person of the Trinity. Then the idea of the incarnation here again changes into that of an inspiration. Our dogmatics, I think, does not frankly face these difficulties. This, however, does not overcome them. These difficulties alone are sufficient to wreck the orthodox Christology. Augustine, the creator of the Occidental doctrine of the Trinity, when pressed by others, asked himself whether the exalted Christ could see God with his bodily eyes, and he answered the question in the negative. This proves that the difficulties we have discussed broke up the dogma of the Trinity and the closely related Christology even for Augustine himself. And the cause of this was not only that Augustine and the whole church orthodoxy as far as the eighteenth century pictured Christ’s body of glory too much like an earthly body when speaking of the bodily eyes of the exalted Christ; the difficulties, on the contrary, unavoidably remain so long as the humanity of the exalted Christ is conceived as something different from his Godhead. 

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The Soul

The Soul

Thomas Allen

Is the human soul immortal or mortal? Does the soul continue to exist consciously after the body dies? Or, does it die when the body dies?

There are two views of the nature of man. One is the dualistic view, which is the popular Christian view and the pagan view. The other is the holistic view, which is the Hebrew and Biblical view.

Greek, Egyptian, and other pagan philosophers claim that the soul is immortal and continuous a conscious existence after the body dies. According to the pagan Greeks, the soul is trapped in a material body. When the body dies, the soul is liberated and continuous a conscious existence elsewhere because the soul is immortal and, therefore, indestructible. Consequently, a person cannot really die; he merely transitions to another form. Death is merely the separation of the soul and the body.

The Hebrews claim that the soul is mortal and dies with the body — that is, its conscious existence ends with the death of the body. Since the soul animates the body, it dies (ceases to have consciousness) when the body dies; it not a distinct substance. When the body dies, the soul ceases its function of the animating life-principle of the body, and, therefore, it also dies. Furthermore, according to the Hebrews, the soul and body are an indissoluble unit. Moreover, man does not have a soul; he is a soul.

While the pagans teach a dualistic nature of man (the soul is immortal and the body is mortal), the Hebrews in the Old Testament teach a holistic view (both the soul and body are mortal). The pagan view asserts that the body, which is mortal, and the soul, which is immortal, are two different substances that coexist within one human being. Nevertheless, they are two characteristics of the same person. Thus, human nature consists of two entities (a body and a soul) that function independently — the dualistic view of man.

Contrasting with the pagan idea is the Hebrew. The Hebrew idea is that of an animated body, and the soul animates the body. When one dies, the other also dies. Both the body and the soul are mortal. Consequently, human nature is an indissoluble unity where the body and soul are different aspects of the same person — the holistic view of man.

For the Hebrews of the Old Testament and the early Christians of the New Testament, immortality is a gift from God given at the resurrection. Immortality is not an innate human possession as the pagans and orthodox Christians teach.

Tertullian and Origen introduce the Greek notion of an immoral soul into Christianity. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas expounded this pagan dualistic view of human nature. Consequently, the pagan dualistic concept of man became the orthodox Christian doctrine.

During the Reformation, Calvin, Luther, and most other Protestant leaders maintained that the soul was immortal. According to Calvin and Augustine, when the body dies, the souls of believers enjoy blessings in heaven while the souls of unbelievers suffer torments in hell. (However, the Anabaptists preached the Hebrew holistic concept of the soul, i.e., the soul is mortal and ceases conscious existence when the body dies.)

Adherents of the pagan dualistic nature of man believe that death is the separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body. At the resurrection, the immortal soul is reunited with the body. Today, most Christians believe in this dualistic doctrine.

Conversely, adherents of the Hebrew holistic nature of man believe the soul like the body is mortal and, therefore, dies with the body. At the resurrection, the whole person, body and soul, is resurrected.

What Is the Soul?

What is the soul? The soul is the life-giving force; it is man’s consciousness and awareness. Consequently, the soul is that part of a being that interprets the outside world through the senses. It interprets what one sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels. Therefore, the soul and not the brain is what sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels. It is what perceives and evaluates. (Further, the soul is what gives all living creatures their life, consciousness, and awareness.  Consequently, all animals, plants, fungi, protists, and monerans have souls.)

Moreover, the soul is the seat of one’s emotions, personality, intellect, and memory. As such, it is what makes a human being human. It is that part of a person that believes, decides, reasons, judges, rejoices, sorrows, loves, hates, doubts, and the like. Furthermore, from the soul come man’s moral and religious attributes.

The soul is the mind as opposed to the brain. (Some theologians claim that the spirit of man is the mind instead of the soul. [See the last paragraph for a discussion on the spirit of man.]) Through the soul does a person perceive and understand the material world. However, the soul does not reside in the brain and has no corporal nature. On the contrary, the soul is distinct from and independent of the brain.

Although signals received from the senses are analyzed in the brain, the soul is what understands and gives this information meaning and significance. The brain merely serves as a vehicle delivering information to the soul. The soul observes and interprets the information formed in the brain.

The existence of the soul refutes materialism, and, therefore, it repudiates Darwinism and evolution. Materialists believe that the movement of chemicals in the brain controls a person’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. Blind, unconscious atoms and electrical signals cannot be the source of awareness, perception, thought, beliefs, emotions, and the like.

Some theologians distinguish between the soul of man and the spirit of man. For these theologians, the soul of man is identified with the secular exercise of an individual. The spirit of man is that part of human nature that allies with God. Also, some identify the spirit of man as what makes man a rational being. However, many treat the soul and the spirit as two names for the same entity. This article does not distinguish between the two.

Reference

Bacchiocchi, Samuele. Popular Beliefs: Are They Biblical? Berrien Springs Michigan: Biblical Perspectives, 2008.

Davis, John D. The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible. Revised by Henry Snyder Gehman. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 1944.

Douglas, J.D. et al., editors. The New Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids: Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962.

Jacobus, Melanchthon W., Edward E. Norse, and Andrew C. Zenos, editors. A New Standard Bible Dictionary. New York, New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1926.

Martin, William C. The Layman’s Bible Encyclopedia. Nashville, Tennessee: The Southwest Company, 1964.

Tenney, Merrill C., editor. The Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids: Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1967.

Yahya, Harun (Adnan Oktar). Darwin’s Dilemma the Soul. First English edition. Editor Tam Mossman. Translator Carl Nino Rossini. Istanbul, Turkey: Global Publishing, 2008.

Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Augustinian Trinitarianism

Augustinian Trinitarianism

Thomas Allen

    Following is a summary of Augustinian Trinitarianism as Levi Leonard Paine presents in A Critical History of the Evolution of Trinitarianism and its Outcome in the New Christology (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900). Referenced page numbers enclosed in parentheses are to Paine’s book.
    Augustine significantly changed Athanasian Trinitarianism. Athanasius considered homoousios (same substance) synonymous with homoiousian (like substance). Augustine made a great distinction between the two. He also added filioque (from the Son).
    The addition of filioque to the Nicene Creed radically changed it. “It broke down its monotheism; it reduced generation and sonship to a metaphor; it turned three personal beings into one being revealing himself in tri-personal form; it changed the mediating Logos into absolute Deity” (p. 57).
    Before Augustine, homoousios “meant numerical unity in essences” (p. 62). Also, before Augustine, the Latin Fathers like the Greek Fathers, “held to a trinity of three personal beings united in a generic unity by community of essence. They held to the real subordination of the Son to the Father, distinguishing the Father, as self-existent and the first cause, from the Son as derived and dependent” (p. 62). Augustine changed this concept of the Trinity.
    The Trinitarianism that Augustine developed had little historical background. His Trinitarianism “was mostly a new creation from a new standpoint, which was drawn, not from either Greek or Latin Christian sources, but from the ideas which he had imbibed from his philosophical studies and which he applied in his own original way to the defense of what he wrongly understood to be trinitarian orthodoxy” (p. 62).
    Augustine’s philosophical views were based on New Platonism, which was Platonism heavily modified by Stoicism. New Platonism was essentially pantheistic (i.e., God is equated with the forces and laws of the universe) and monistic (i.e., only one kind of substance, a reality composed of one unitary organic whole with no independent parts). Although New Platonism was close to Stoicism in its materialism, it did retain the spiritualistic aspects of Platonism.
    During Augustine’s time, the great controversy was dualism versus monism; that is, did two substances and separate realms exist in the universe — spiritual and material — or were the two essentially the same. Holding to the ultimate differences between spiritual and matter, Platonism built “its dualistic and spiritualistic philosophy, making God the Supreme Spirit and the creator of the material world” (p. 66). On the other side, Stoicism “insisted on the ultimate unity of all existence, and thus identified God essentially with the world” (p. 66). In the controversy between dualism and monism, New Platonism fell on the monistic side. Consequently, it “substituted a doctrine of evolution from the Supreme One to the lowest forms of matter, in place of the Platonic theory of creation, thus reducing the dualism of Plato to unity, in harmony with Stoic ideas” (p. 66).
    In God’s relation to the material world universe, Platonists were transcendentalists (i.e., the spiritual and transcendent have primacy over the material and empirical). They “held that God is essentially separate from all created things, though explicitly accepting the doctrine of God’s providence and efficiency as active in the upholding and governing of the world He has made” (p. 66). Accordingly, “Platonism is theistic, regarding God as a personal Being whose substance is separated by an infinite chasm from all created or material substance” (pp. 66-67).
    On the other hand, Stoicism “made God immanent in the world” (p. 66). They reduced “Him philosophically to the central principle or force that gives life and activity to all things, thus confounding Him with all the forms of finite existence” (p. 66). Thus, Stoicism “is pantheistic, treating the universe as essentially of one essence evolved out of a spermatic principle which is its only Deity” (p. 67).
    While “Platonism holds to the supernatural, a world above nature, spiritual and eternal, . . . Stoicism is a pure doctrine of nature and natural development and knows nothing of a distinct spiritual kingdom” (p. 67). The Nicene Creed and Constantinopolitan Creed were based on Platonism.
    Augustine’s philosophical views were based on Stoicism and its kindred New Platonism. Therefore, his concept of the Trinity reflects the philosophy of the Stoicism and New Platonism.
    “Augustine’s whole philosophy starts with a monistic doctrine of unity. The world is but the expression of God. Augustine seems scarcely to admit what we call second causes or laws of nature. . . . He reduces the system of natural causation and law to a direct Divine operation” (p. 69). Under his system, miracles do not subvert the laws of nature because no such laws exist to subvert. “God’s own immediate will is the sole cause of all things” (p. 69).
    Augustine, as do most of his followers today, believed that he was a strict trinitarian and was opposing Sabellianism and Arianism. (Sabellianism claims that God is a trinity of attributes, names, functions, or manifestations instead of three coequal Gods or three independent beings; i.e., God is only one person, who reveals Himself in three manifestations, personalities, or functions. Christ is merely an attribute or function of almighty God. Arianism claims that the Logos who became Jesus was the first and noblest being created by God.)
    In explaining and expounding on the Trinity, Augustine seeks to show that “the Trinity is not three Gods but one God” (p. 70). Expressing the Trinity such that it appears to be one God, thus, retaining monotheism, instead of three Gods, tritheism, has always been an extremely difficult problem for Trinitarians. Athanasius attempted to overcome this problem with “the doctrines of generic unity of essence, and eternal generation of the Son, and procession of the Holy Spirit” (p. 71). Thus, “the Father is the alone eternal, self existent God, and that He eternally generated the Son and sent forth the Holy Spirit, so that while there are three divine beings in the Godhead, there are not three eternal self -existent Gods, since the Father is the source of being to the others who are thus dependent and subordinate, though receiving from the Father all divine attributes” (p. 71).
    Whereas Athanasius attempted to explain how three are one, Augustine attempted to explain how one is three. Beginning by treating the Trinity as a problem of faith, Augustine ended up developing it as a problem of reason. Starting with Scripture and revelation, he passed into the most speculative regions of philosophy.
    In developing his doctrine of the Trinity, he gave little attention “to previous theological systems or speculations” (p. 72). However, he thought that he was following his orthodox predecessors: Athanasius and the Nicene Fathers. Nevertheless, he left “traditional Trinitarianism and moved out along the line of his own philosophical ideas” (p. 72), which were monistic. What saved him from reaching absolute pantheism was the clear monotheism of the Bible.
    “Augustine starts from the assumption that there is but one eternal substance in the universe. This one substance is God. God then, as a being, is essentially one” (p. 72). He “held to the idea of a numerical rather than a generic unity of essence. . . . With him, essence, in the case of God, is not abstract but concrete. . . . If God is personal, his essence is personal, that is concrete” (pp. 72-73).
    “For Augustine, then, the trinitarian problem is how this one God, ‘unus Deus’ can be three or a ‘trinitas’” (p. 73), which he assumed to be a fact. Repeatedly, he declared “that one God and trinity are the same thing[,] . . . one divine Being, not three beings” (p. 73).
    Although the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three, they are not three beings. They are three “persons.” However, they are not “persons” in the normal sense of the word. They are “persons” in the sense of being three “distinctions.” They are three “modes or relations of the one essence or being of God” (p. 75). Augustine is presenting a Sabellian trinity. Unlike Sabellius, who started with the “premise of an evolution in God from unity to trinity” (p. 74), Augustine started from the premise of God being three and proceeded to one.
    The key difference between Sabellianism and Athanasianism is that Sabellianism declares that God is one Being, and Athanasianism declares that God is three Beings. “Hence Sabellianism is monistic, while Athanasianism is trinitarian” (p. 75). Thus, Augustine’s description of the Trinity is Sabellianism, a heresy that the Church had earlier condemned, and not Athanasianism.
    Augustine writes, “‘The Trinity is one God; three, but not three Gods. Three what, then? I reply: The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit’” (p. 75). He continues, “‘If you ask: “three what?” number ceases. When you have numbered, you cannot tell what you have numbered. Only in their relations to each other do they suggest number, not in their essential existence. I have no name to give the three, save the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, one Almighty, and so one beginning’” (p. 75). Thus, he exposes his monism. “The only numbering, he declares, that can apply to God is that of his essence, which is one” (p. 75). Therefore, he “did not regard the ‘three’ as real and distinct existences or individuals” (p. 75). With this, the Sabellians agree.
    “God, for Augustine, is one Being and so one Person, not three Persons. These three are unus Deus, that is, one Personal Being. The three persons so-called are merely three relative forms under which the one God is manifested in the revelation of himself to men” (p. 76). However, he did not “regarded these forms or relations as superficial or transitory” (p. 76), which separated him from the Sabellians. To him, the Trinity “is the essential mode of the Divine existence” (p. 76), with which the Athanasians agree.
    Augustine “regards trinity as an ultimate fact in God” (p. 76). So essential is this notion of the trinity that he saw “the whole universe as, in some sense, trinitarian” (p. 76). Such shows “the essentially Sabellian character of Augustine’s view” (p. 76).
    Whereas “Athanasius describes the relations which exist between three divine Beings. Augustine describes the relations or modes of existence of one Being, manifesting himself under different forms and names” (p. 77). Again, Augustine’s description is Sabellian. For Augustine, the “personal forms are three, but the personal centre, the personality itself, is one” (p. 77), which Athanasius declared to be Sabellianism.
    Furthermore, “Augustine declares that ‘when the Trinity is spoken of number fails.’ ‘Three’ is but a metaphor. Number only applies strictly to God as one. Athanasius reverses this. His position is that number applies properly rather to the Trinity. He insists on the numbering of the persons as essential to the truth against Sabellius” (p. 77). Thus, Augustine and Athanasius sharply disagree on the Trinity.
    According to Augustine, “Jehovah of the Old Testament is at the same time the one God and the Trinity” (p. 78). Moreover, “whenever God appears as a single person (Father, Son, or Holy Spirit), or when any act is performed in the person of either, the whole Trinity is concerned. Thus though the Son only was incarnate, the whole Trinity wrought the incarnation, so that the Son is made to bear a part in his own incarnation. In the same way it was the Son as Christ that died, but the Father also was actively concerned in it, — a view that is perilously close to the old Patripassianism. Everything that Christ did in the flesh, the Father did also” (pp. 78-79). (According to Patripassianism, God the Father also suffered in the sufferings of Jesus Christ.)
    Whereas Athanasius never confounded the Father or the Son with the Trinity, Augustine frequently did. Furthermore, for Athanasius,  the Trinity was always plural; for Augustine, it was singular.
    Unlike the Athanasian Trinity in which the Son is subordinated to the Father, the Augustinian Trinity has no such subordination. The elimination of subordination is a significant and great difference between the two Trinities.
    Augustine’s Trinitarianism eliminates the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit as Athanasius conceived them. “For Augustine generation did not involve any real derivation or dependence. The Son is as truly and absolutely God as the Father. God is as self-existent and eternal in the Son and Holy Spirit as in the Father. Each form or mode of the Divine Being involves the whole Divine Being. Subordination, therefore, is impossible” (p. 82) The three persons, or relations as Augustine called them, “can have no essential significance. They are not beings or essences, but only qualities of beings” (p. 82).
    According to Augustine’s doctrine, “Jesus Christ is absolute Deity, the whole of God. He is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, nay, he is in fact the whole Trinity, for God is trinity; one is three and three is one, and so absolutely that the Trinity is properly addressed as a singular being” (p. 82).
    An outcome of Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity was that it “tended to break down the Christian Athanasian doctrine of mediatorship.” An essential part of the Athanasian argument against Arius was that the redemption of man was “by a mediating being who partakes of divine as well as human nature” (p. 83). However, in “Augustine’s day the Atonement was not discussed. The doctrine of a Divine Redeemer was thrown into the background” (p. 83). Moreover, “Augustine’s view of him as essentially the absolute God led inevitably to a confusion of his mediatorial function with the other functions of the Godhead. The one God in Trinity was made the agent in the atonement as in all other divine activities” (p. 83).
    Following Augustine’s lead, Mediaeval Theology so confused Christ with God the Father that Christ ceased representing Divine mercy and intercession and came to represent Divine justice and punishment. In art, Christ’s face changed from benignant and compassionate to harsh and severe. Augustine’s Trinitarianism led to “a thinly-disguised Patripassianism and Monophysitism” (p. 84). — Christ became the God-man.  (Monophysitism claims that Christ has a single inseparable nature that is at once divine and human rather than having two distinct but unified natures.) God Himself was the Redeemer, not another mediating being. Thus, the mediator and God were confounded together. God descended to Mary’s womb; He endured weariness, hunger, and death. The Creator of man redeemed man with His own blood. Such a description is Patripassians and monistic. Consequently, the whole notion of a mediator, the Messiah, between God and man vanished “into the crude materialism of the early heretics” (p. 85).
    Also, out of the Augustinian Trinity comes the notion that “God is made to send himself, to be born, to suffer and die, and this to save men from the effects of his own wrath” (p. 85). The “God-man is both the Being to be propitiated and the Being that propitiates” (p. 85).
    Another effect of Augustine’s Trinitarianism “was to break down the monotheistic view of God. . . . [M]onotheism lies at the basis of Athanasianism. . . .  Monotheism, or theism, in the philosophical sense, holds that God is a single personal being. It emphasizes personality as the true centre and test of all spiritual substance. . . . Theism holds that God, in whose moral image we are, is such a self-conscious Being. Pantheism, on the contrary, makes self-consciousness, or personality, only a quality or accident of substance, so that there may be only one spiritual substance and yet many persons” (pp. 86-87).
    Augustine relied on the philosophy of the New Platonists to develop his Trinity. The three hypostases are “placed at the head of the New Platonic pantheon, and united by a pantheistic evolution in one eternal substance” (p. 88).
    Although Augustinian Trinitarianism retains the terminology of Athanasian Trinitarianism, the terms are given new meaning. They are “cast in pantheistic form” (p. 88). Thus, “Deity, though one essence, exists by a process of evolution in three hypostases, which have indeed a shadowy sort of personality,” (p. 88) but they are not regarded as distinct personal beings.
    However, Augustine does not “say that the one God exists in three real hypostases, which, in Christian trinitarian language, meant three individual persons” (p. 90). In any event, “his Trinitarianism is monistic. . . . His Trinity is not tripersonal, and hence must be, in spite of himself, unipersonal, unless he drops into the open pit of extreme pantheism and makes God . . . unconscious of himself or of the world that is evolved from Him” (p 91). His pantheistic philosophy makes “the one only true God and the Trinity . . . absolutely the same. This is not monotheism; it is a pantheistic monism” (p. 92).
    Augustine’s great difficulty “was that he did not know what to do with the problem of personality” (p. 92). He bounced between theism and pantheism. This led to the amazing assumption “that in God essence and person are not coincident, so that God may be and is one Being and yet three real persons” (p. 92).
    Another effect of Augustinian Trinitarianism is that it changed “the Athanasian homoousianism from generic to numerical unity of essence” (p. 92).  Augustine changed the Nicene Creed from “three personal beings metaphysically united in a Platonic universal into one being manifested under three modes of personal existence” (p. 92). As a result, he inverted the Trinity. “Its apex became its base. Trinity became unity. Trinitarianism became tri-unitarianism” (p. 92). By that, he changed God into one Being of three persons. Although Augustine refused to come to this logical conclusion, his followers did. Thus, God became “numerically one in essence, yet is three in personal agency; therefore essence and person in God are not coincident” (p. 93).
    The Athanasian Creed was derived from Augustinian Trinitarianism. One clause reads, “We worship one God in trinity, and trinity in unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.” “This language assumes that the substance or Being is one, while the persons are three” (p. 93). However, like Augustine, it plays on the term “person.” It declares that God is one personal being. Also, it states, “There are not three Gods, but one God.” Thus, the Athanasian Creed is nothing more than concealed Sabellianism. “[I]ts Sabellianism is veiled under the assumption that God may be one Being and yet be three persons, but its real position is that God is one Being, whatever explanation be given of the three persons. Thus its Trinitarianism is only a disguise” (p. 93). Accordingly, Augustinian Trinitarianism gave “a monistic and pantheistic direction to trinitarian dogma” (p. 94).
    Besides his doctrine of the Trinity, “his doctrines of original sin, irresistible grace, the sacraments, and the physical punishments and sufferings of lost souls” (p. 69) also grew from his materialistic philosophy. Free will is simply voluntariness, “which itself is the result of a gracious Divine efficiency” (p. 69). His doctrine of human dependency approaches Stoic fatalism. Furthermore, man’s will has the power to do evil, but it cannot do good except with God’s aid.
    In summary, Augustinian Trinitarianism is based on Stoic, New Platonic immanence. According to the Augustinian Trinitarianism, God “is essentially one; yet He is a trinity, but not a trinity of real personal beings; the personal centre is one. The three persons, so-called, are not subsistences or individuals; they are modes of the one divine existence” (p. 81). Consequently, it is just a form of Modal Trinitarianism that is closely related to the heresy Sabellianism.
    When Trinitarians attempt to explain or expound upon the Trinity, they are at high risk of crashing into the Scylla of Sabellianism or of being swept away in the Charybdis of tritheism. Augustine crashed into the rock of Sabellianism.

Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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