The Third Person: A Critique of Trinitarian Systems and Cosmological Footings through the Binitarian Pneumatology of the Early Church

We now turn then to the question of the binitarian mindset of the early Church. There have been numerous analyses suggesting potential contours between early binitarianism and trinitarianism. Many contemporary investigations conclude, in one way or another, that the binitarianism evident in the early church was based on a nascent or proto-trintarianism.¹⁹ Many contemporary thought, in one way or another, holds early church binitarianism and orthodox trinitarianism in tension. H. E. W. Turner has put it succinctly: If, however, there is a persistent tendency in the early centuries to interpret the Christian doctrine

of the Godhead in a bi-personal rather than in a tri-personal manner [...] [t]here is no reason to believe that those who worked normally with a Binitarian phrasing in their theology were other than Trinitarian in their religion. There is no traces, for example, of an alternative Twofold Baptismal Formula.²⁰

The question of particular interest to us then, is whether this early iteration of the religion serves as grounds for a critique of post-Nicene trinitarian doctrine.²¹ We have explored how the pneumatology of the early church was premised fundamentally in-between the God-world relationship. The way this played out related almost ubiquitously to the manifestation of the activity of God in the world through (for example) prophecy, apostolic succession, consecration of the individual, and the unity of the church. All of these activities of God are grounded fundamentally, in the early Church's conviction concerning their involvement in the unfolding work and life of God (i.e. Jesus) in and through the world. But all of these activities which delineate the work of the Third person (particularly in light of the radically paradigm shifting ministry of Jesus), are quintessentially bound up in the self-determining, self-defining crisis which vivifies the church's mission.

Here, a clarifying question may be helpful: would one, in the early church, have spoken of (or been able to speak of) the Third Person as existing in a state entirely disassociated from the world; or—to put in another way—in a state of being wholly and completely interior to the inner life of God? It would appear, from diverse—but unified —testimony of the early church concerning the Third Person, that it would have been nearly impossible within this binitarian mindset to divorce the essential nature of the Third Person, from the space it occupied in-between the relationship of God and the church, and consequently between God and the world. In light of this, we should thus return to the notion that the early Church was in some way nascent or proto-Trinitarian. Understood with this phraseology (i.e. nascent or proto-), one might conclude that it was not possible to hold to an explicit orthodox Trinitarian view until after the Council of Nicaea. To which, if we grant then that these early Christians (like the Apostle Paul!) were orthodox, it would be wrong to assume that that they merely prefigured Trinitarian Orthodoxy. We would neither, however, suggest that the Trinitarian theology blossoming out of the third and fourth century is less orthodox because it lacks continuity with early Christian binitarianism. It should be one of the most basic commitments of the Christian (particularly the Trinitarian) that these two seemingly opposed orthodoxies—binitarianism and trinitarianism—are commensurable. So rather, by assuming that the early Christians were in fact orthodox, we should be empowered to turn to their binitarianism as a fecund source for our own trinitarian outlook. The suggestion that the early Church were nascent or proto-Trinitarians carries with it an insipid supercessionism that disqualifies the early Church from being "trinitarian." But the question is not whether the early church would have held to explicit Trinitarian systematics, but rather, was the early church trinitarian by the very nature of its tacit understanding of God, and in their phenomenological religious experience of the binitarian mindset? The suggestion then, is that binitarianism is trinitarianism; to quality the premise: the phenomenological mindset of orthodox early church binitarianism is a legitimate actualization of the Trinitarian systematic theology.

This is tied to one of the ubiquitously undergirding principles of the phenomenology of the Holy Spirit in the early church: if to know the Holy Spirit is to know God acting in material reality then the knowledge of the Holy Spirit cannot be divorced from the experience of God acting in the material world. This plays out in the variety of economic functions outlined above. But its consequence is twofold: first, to reiterate, the Third Person's nearly exhaustive association to experience implicates the essential character of its cosmological function unto its very nature; and, second, that the early church cannot divorce their knowledge of God, from their experience of God vis-à-vis the Third Person. How then, does this implicate us, having introduced a theological system in which the Third Person can be divorced from the experience of God's activity in the world, and—as I will suggest—necessarily will be because of the inherent implications to the internal logic of the given framework?

So, to ask this question in another way: if the fundamental nature of the Third Person does not implicate the God-world relationship, than to what, essentially, do we refer when we talk about the Holy Spirit? This question, it seems, followed the church into pneumatological discussion which ensued in the third and fourth century. And likewise, it is the question on which we turn our analysis to its final subject, the historical mode of Trinitarian systematics.