the people who had been standing nearby saw this bizarre occurrence
they burst out laughing and went elsewhere.
Afterward I asked where I might run into the scholars with the 17
sharpest wits who stand in favor of a divine Trinity divided into three
persons. There happened to be three such people present. I asked them,
“How can you divide the divine Trinity into three persons and claim
that each person is individually or by himself God and Lord? Surely your
verbal confession that there is one God is as distant from your thought
as the south is from the north.”
“There is no distance at all,” they replied. “Those three persons have
one essence, and the divine essence is God. In the world, we were tutors
teaching the trinity of persons; the pupil we were responsible for was our
faith. In our faith each divine person plays his own role: God the Father’s
role is to give spiritual credit or blame and to bestow [grace], God the
Son’s role is to intercede and mediate, and God the Holy Spirit’s role is to
put into effect the actual credit or blame and the mediation.”
[ 2 ] So I asked, “What do you mean by ‘divine essence’?”
They said, “We mean omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence,
immensity, eternity, and equality of majesty.”
To this I said, “If that essence makes many gods one God, couldn’t
you add even more? How about a fourth god mentioned by Moses,
Ezekiel, and Job: God Shaddai? The ancient people in Greece and Italy
did something similar. They assigned equal attributes and a similar essence
to their gods, such as Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Juno,
Diana, Minerva; and Mercury and Venus as well. But nonetheless they
couldn’t call all of them one God. In fact, you are three people, and to my
mind you seem academically similar, so you have a similar essence as far as
scholarship goes; but you couldn’t combine yourselves into one scholar.”
They laughed at this, and said, “You’re joking! It is different with the
divine essence. The divine essence is one thing; it doesn’t come in three
parts. It is single and undivided. Partition and division don’t apply to it.”
[ 3 ] When I heard this I retorted, “Then let’s go down into the ring
and fight.—What do you understand a ‘person’ to be?” I asked. “What
does that mean?”
They answered, “The term personmeans that which is not a role of,
or a quality in, someone else, but an entity subsisting on its own. This is
the definition of personused by all—by the leaders of the church and by
us as well.”
“Is this truly your definition of person?”I asked.
§17 god the creator & creation 25