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

It has been the traditional method of inquiry, since the Council of Nicaea and the explicit Trinitarian theological formulations which developed out of the fourth century Western church fathers, to engage in speculation about the "oneness" and "threeness" of God.²² This occurs in a variety of modalities: some following Augustinian-Thomistic lines by explicitly placing priority on the doctrine of unity; some prioritizing threeness following the Greek Fathers; and others (typically of more modern sensitivities) attempting to challenge these traditional categories of trinitarian discourse. Suffice to say, one outcome, to which we have already alluded, is the molding of discourse into dual categories of the theologia and the oikonomia of God across the majority of trinitarian discouse.²³ Clearly, there has been a series of work concerning the interface of these traditional schematics following the astute criticism of Karl Rahner and his Trinitarian paradigm shifting grundaxiom.²⁴ However, instead of following the trajectory set forth by Rahner in his grundaxiom, I would prefer to reframe the question here in a slightly different way.

If it can be said, that essential to the role of the Third Person, is the cosmological function between God and world, than it would seem we lack the necessary groundwork to engage—that is, disassociatively of creation—in speculation about an immanent intra-Trinitarian life. This is one internally irreconcilable contradiction that is, I would suggest, inherent to the classical modality of Trinitarian speculation. By the very nature of engaging in systematic Trinitarian thought, we are indebted to proceed by the mapping of categorical metaphysical properties onto the Trinity as a means of preserving philosophical unity among three distinct (and now in someway "transcendent") persons. If the role of the Third Person of the Trinity is bound up exclusively within the God-world relationship, the way forward via Trinitarian speculation becomes constricted by the internal methodological contradiction that some part of God is bound up with the God-world relationship while, on the other hand, some part of God must remain independent of world—and yet still both parts exist in essential unity.²⁵ In this way, if it is not too presumptuous to suggest, it appears that the binitarian orientation (that is specifically pertaining to one's phenomenological experience) within the early Church possessed fundamental advantages. Without subsuming the Spirit into the theological super-structure of the Trinity, the early church can more easily accomplish two things (that are of particular interest to this analysis), that it appears we, perennially, cannot.

First and foremost, the church has a medium in which to consider, legitimate and justify the activity of God within the world; and one could do this, without having to face the enigmatic consequences of God's ongoing cosmological relationship to the world vis-à-vis God's activity in material reality. But by beginning with the presumption of an anterior intra-Trinitarian life, we, on the other hand, are compelled to wrestle with either the conflation of the unity of God into any one particular or universal action with regard to the material universe; or, the relegation of God's movement within the material universe to purely economic disassociative action. Both require conceptual acrobatics (the former, theological, and the latter, cosmological) to which the prevailing history of literature on the subject attests.

Second, the Church is capable of locating itself within the ongoing and unfolding life and work of God without the need to commence by constructing (or regularly re-constructing) a bridge between the internally consistent, eternally Divine life, and the dynamic, radically contingent, mutability of the material world. As a consequence of the salvific work of Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit, there was no question that the church could see themselves, without hesitation, as the ongoing activity of God (read: Christ) in the world. But, by subsuming the Third Person into the theological super-structure of the Trinity, and consequently reapplying classical categories to a unity that now includes the very Being which we have suggested is defined (at least in part) by the space between God and world, we have utterly expelled ourselves and the world from the life of God.²⁶ As a result, we are compelled to relate our unfolding temporal world to the immanent intra-Trinitarian life analogically, fortitously, gratuitously, or the like. This is to say, that without being able to locate the dynamic nature of our reality within the life of God we must lean heavily on what is essentially speculative epiphenomenology to provide any substantial basis for the connection which exists between who God is in God-self and the ongoing eschatological unfolding of God in the temporal world.

We see that these fundamental advantages, are significantly (but not exhaustively) cosmological in nature. In that, many of the complications discussed above (by the subsumption of the Spirit into the Trinitarian theological super-structure) muddle at best, and debilitate at worst the entity which served the original cosmological function of occupying the space between God and world. It is with this, it should be clear, that we have circled back to our initial point of departure.