Although a protestant, I have a lot of respect for Cornelius Van Til. His presuppositional methodology proved a necessary stepping stone in the fully fleshing out of the Orthodox transcendental apologetic by people such as Jay Dyer and Fr. Deacon Ananias. Van Til, Bahnsen, and John Frame were my introductions to presuppositional apologetics, and I will be forever grateful to them, despite their theological faults.

His ( Van Til’s ) presuppositional argument concerning the one and the many is not perfect, yet is is useful in debating atheists and pointing them toward a generic, monadic conception of theism — perhaps even the personalism with which the historic Church concerns itself. Why I call it monadic is an issue that will be discussed later, but the point still stands. One could argue that this position is an improvement upon a non-theistic position — providing greater justification for the Aristotelian categories and the preconditions for knowledge.

While this seems logical and in the tradition of the Fathers, Van Til’s framing of the trinity and the structure of inter-trinitarian life, in the tradition of Calvinistic interpretation, leads to many problems both apologetic and theological, these not being contained in the patristic corpus.

Calvin’s breaking from historical Christianity saw many new doctrine’s introduced into western Christendom. Most notably being his new trinitarian conception.

Old John was the first person in all of Christian history to teach that the three Persons of the Holy Trinity were autotheos ( άυτόθεος ) or God in and of themselves. Cappadocian theology, the standard of doctrine accepted at the second Ecumenical Council, teaches that both The Son and The Spirit receive their divine existence from the Person of The Father — The Son via eternal generation or ‘begetting’, and The Spirit via procession.

As St. Gregory of Nyssa explains:

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“When we inquire, then, whence this good gift came to us, we find by the guidance of the Scriptures that it was from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet although we set forth Three Persons and three names, we do not consider that we have had bestowed upon us three lives, one from each Person separately; but the same life is wrought in us by the Father, and prepared by the Son, and depends on the will of the Holy Spirit. Since then the Holy Trinity fulfils every operation in a manner similar to that of which I have spoken, not by separate action according to the number of the Persons, but so that there is one motion and disposition of the good will which is communicated from the Father through the Son to the Spirit (for as we do not call those whose operation gives one life three Givers of life, neither do we call those who are contemplated in one goodness three Good beings, nor speak of them in the plural by any of their other attributes); so neither can we call those who exercise this Divine and superintending power and operation towards ourselves and all creation, conjointly and inseparably, by their mutual action, three Gods.”¹

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In other words, while absolutely eternal, they are dependent upon The Father for their existence. He is the sole cause or arche of divine life. Calvin denies this, much to the chagrin of Calvinists everywhere, who are hesitant given the historical reality of monarchia, to accept this brow beating fact.

The Monadic Essence

The reason Calvin eventually formulates this doctrine is because of his reliance on the western, Augustinian, and neo-Platonic trinitarian model so common among the Latins. For western theology broadly, the ordo trinitas, begins with the abstract and unknowable “one”, identified with the essence, as opposed to the Cappadocian doctrine of próta o patéras, or from The Father.

Augustine, who is regarded in terms of trinitarian theology as a proto-Calvinist, laid the groundwork for the later western trinitarian developments of Aquinas in his De Trinitate. He argues that trinitarian unity arises from a presupposed and prior divine essence and that this essence is what defines the Trinity itself: “the divinity, …the Godhead itself…is the unity of the Trinity.”²

Whereas the Cappadocians had previously argued the point of unity in the Trinity starts with the person of The Father, Augustine and his tradition developed the idea that a generic, monadic essence is where the persons derive their unity from.

The persons not only derive their unity from the ousia, they also derive their origin. We see a common trend among western trinitarianism that seems, in their rejection of The Father as the sole cause of the Godhead, to suggest the persons being spirated or derivitive of the ousia.

Since the previously unifying principle of The Father as possessing aseity has been done away with, it so to makes sense that the previously existing principle of causation by The Father alone is also forgotten.

Not only has it been forgotten, it has been tossed aside in favor of a spirating, neo-Platonic ousia which tosses the Cappadocian doctrine of sole arche in the wastebasket.

It is simply incredible what a seemingly small change in the unitive precept can do to your theology.

Since the essence is the starting point and unifying principal in Augustinian and post-Augustinian theology, it makes sense why, in the historical development, that what became most prominent was “the term ousia, not hypostasis, as the expression of the ultimate character and the causal principle (αρχη) in God’s being.”³

So also it makes sense why we get such strange and contradictory developments in western trinitarian theology.

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“The Latins think of personality as a mode of nature; the Greeks think of nature as the content of the person”⁴

—Vladimir Lossky

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For Calvin, since God is identified directly with the absolutely simple ousia ( essence ), there can be no partitions or derivitives, so to speak, of the one generic monad. This leads him to conclude that the only way The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be consubstantial and not “subordinate”, is through them all possessing the ousia in and of themselves without any derivation. In other words, autotheos.

The question may be raised as to how this would not constitute three seperate gods?

If each person is of themselves and independent, and they are all eternal, how is the Calvinist not a tritheist? For in their rejection of the Cappadocians, they replace what had previously been a shared unity in the hypostasis of The Father with that of a generic “communion” between three disunified persons.

To take this further, in the neo-platonising of the western doctrine of the trinity, we have the unifying principal, the abstract ousia, as being a sort of generic first principle or Aristotelian prime mover. It may be conceived of as a sort of entity in and of itself — not eternally possessed and communicated to Son and Spirit by The Father, but in a way alongside or even behind the three persons. Such a doctrine Calvin had inherited partially from his papal forerunners — its consequences being deadly.

There are many Calvinist theologians who have come to this very same conclusion and sought after an answer, some more coherent in their approach then others. One of those is Cornelius Van Til himself.

Van Til’s Response

Van Til realized that there existed a problem with Calvin’s trinitarian theology and sought to reconcile it with the traditional patristic doctrine of personhood as primary. In doing so, however, we see an overpersonalisation of the doctrine of the trinity that will, as we will see, make Van Til actually a proponent of a quadrinity.

He recognized that the tri-hypostatic autotheos was an untenable and incoherent position in terms of the trinity. He saw that this idea of an abstract divine nature hiding behind the persons was a gigantic problem for the coherency of the trinity and therefore the Christian faith as a whole. In his mind he thought that the problem was had in that of the abstraction negating the personhood.

In attempting to reconcile this, he did not seek a return to the second Ecumenical Council nor the Orthodox Church, he sought to create out of thin air his idea of a 4th person in the trinity, that is a personalized essence.

“For Van Til, God is not simply a unity of persons; he is a person” says John Frame, a student yet critic of Van til.⁵ God is not even unified via an abstract essence, as Calvinists had taught prior, now God is pure personhood in a reductionist sense.

As Van Til himself states:

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“…Over against all other beings, that is over against created beings, we must therefore hold that God’s being presents an absolute numerical identity. And even within the the ontological Trinity we must maintain that God is numerically one. He is one person. We we say that we believe in a personal God we do not merely mean that we believe in a God to whom the adjective “personality” may be attached. God is not an essence that has personality; He is absolute personality. Yet, within the being of the one person we are permitted and compelled by Scripture to make the distinction between a specific or generic type of being, and three personal subsistences.”⁶

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Not the person of The Father, but the persons of The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, and the personified essence — a strange sort of quasi-Sabellianism and quad-theism synthesized together.

Later theologians who trained under Frame consistently talk about the personal essence, describing it ( or “him” ) as “God in his unity.” Quite the stellar admission, I might add, concerning the nature of this doctrine. God is, according to them, deriving it ( unity ) from the presuppositions of this dictum, not unified in terms the three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but absolutely unified separately in the “person” of the essence. This constitutes an admitted tritheism on behalf of Calvin.

While attempting to solve the problem of the one and the many, Van Til and his sucessors utterly fail at doing trinitarian theology, leading them outside the realm of all classical conceptions.

While such an idea is unheard of in the history of Christian thought, it nonetheless provides a shocking and important development in the history of trinitarian thought.

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“[T]he power of Truth, from the other side, responds to the powerlessness of man on this side. Transcendent Truth crosses the gulf, arrives on our side of it and reveals Itself— Himself—in the person of Christ, the God-man. In Him transcendent Truth becomes immanent in man. The God-man reveals the truth in and through Himself. He reveals it, not through thought or reason, but by the life that is His. He not only has the truth, He is Himself the Truth. In Him, Being and Truth are one. Therefore He, in His person, not only defines Truth but shows the way to it: he who abides in Him will know the Truth, and the Truth will make him free (cf. John 8:32) from sin, falsehood, and death.”⁷

—St. Justin Popovich

1. Nyssa, On Not Three Gods: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF) Series II Volume 5, p. 334 ↩︎
2. Augustine, On the Trinity, 1.8.15 ↩︎
3. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, p. 88 ↩︎
4. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 58 ↩︎
5. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought, p. 65 ↩︎
6. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, p. 213 ↩︎
7. Popovich, The Theory of Knowledge of St. Isaac the Syrian, p. 68 ↩︎