ology The val Augustine and Medie Augustine and Medieval ...the world. And so this motif is one that’s very active in Augustine’s life and thinking, and we’ll see it at play

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Transcript - CH511 Augustine and Medieval Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 18 of 24CH511

Augustine on the Trinity

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Hello again. I’d like to welcome you back and hope that all is going well with you with your ministries, your family life and relationships, and in your preparation both in this class and in the other classes in your course of study. May God richly bless you through the struggles, toils, frustrations, and great rewards of pursuing your education and training so that you might be of ministry for Him and His kingdom.

Studying the past is inspiring when we look at people that God has used mightily in His kingdom, such as Augustine. It causes a great awe in me not merely of the man but also of his Lord and Savior who is our own, and we’re family members, and Augustine is like an elder brother to us. There’s much that we can learn of him as we glean from his acumen and his work and labor in the kingdom.

We’re in the midst of talking about a very, very important subject, and that is the subject of the Trinity. Let’s, as our habit’s been, begin with prayer, and then do some summaries and forge forward as we think about Augustine’s classic work on the Trinity.

My prayer today will be taken from the conclusion of Augustine’s work on the Trinity. It’s as if he came to the end and said, “Alas, I must commit this matter to prayer,” so if you’ll permit me, I’ll pray Augustine’s prayer and then close in prayer along with you. Augustine says, “Prayer is better than argument.” He says, “Our Father, I’ve sought You and I’ve desired to see with my understanding what I believed. I’ve argued and labored much O Lord, the one God, God, the Trinity. Whatever I’ve said in these books that is of Thine, may they acknowledge who are Thine. If anything of my own, may it be pardoned by Thee and by those who are Thine.” And Father, we concur with this prayer, and we ask that through the ministry of the Spirit, by the grace of the Son, we might come to a better understanding of this mystery. We pray that it might help us not only understand You better and Your

Scott T. Carroll, PhD Experience: Professor of Ancient History,

Cornerstone University



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claims on us, but to understand ourselves better as well. Thank You so much for Your grace and love to us. We ask these things in and through the Intercessor. Amen.

It’s good to be back with you, and we’ve been talking about the Trinity. It’s of cardinal importance. The notion of the Trinity, its foundation in the Bible, probably this is an area that creates some of the greatest confusion in the church, and I think in areas that deal, for instance, with the deity of Christ, let’s say, these things in conservative circles are clearly obviously strongly claimed, but when one gets into more difficult areas such as the relationship between the humanity and deity of Christ, then we get on thinner ice, and it becomes much more difficult. What happens in a case such as that is that oftentimes the Christian will insist on the one that can be understood while diminishing or ignoring the item that cannot be understood and are left with a half-truth of sorts.

In the same way, when we contemplate the Trinity, there is certainly mystery that’s involved, and I’m fearful that the church in the postmodern era has little room or tolerance for mystery. There’s been an exaltation and deification of reason to such an extent that if it can’t be scientifically quantified, then it’s unknown, and if it’s unknown, it’s unknowable, and it leads to a kind of disinterest, and there’s a danger with that. I think Augustine’s tension that he holds between faith and reason is healthy. God has made us thinking people, and He’s given us a revelation to understand, and yet at the same time we can go only so far with that. Where the revelation leaves off and our reason is unable to comprehend, then we go into the realm of mystery, and it suffices to leave mystery where mystery is.

There’s much that’s clearly taught in Scripture that has been expounded upon by great teachers that God has graced His church with throughout the age, and Augustine is cornerstone to the thinking about the Trinity. And so by way of introduction, I want to recognize with you the difficulties of these things and the tensions that are held between understanding and not knowing, and yet at the same time I want to encourage you as teachers of the Word, as people of ministry, to be committed to the foundational orthodoxy of Scripture as it’s been defined and understood and passed along by tradition of those who have also knelt and trembled before the Word.

The confusion in the church over the Trinity is apparent to any critical thinker. As one sits in the church, all someone has



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to do is listen to the prayers that are uttered. In hearts of true faith and belief, people pray prayers that show all kinds of misunderstandings about the Godhead, and often this is rooted in just not ignorance in but the unfortunate fact that people have not been rooted and taught. It’s not our place to create a paranoia but instead to gently come along their side to help them understand both the difficulties of these things, but at the same time clearly lay out what Scripture teaches and how those great teachers of the church age have understood these things and how they relate then to conciliar decisions. I sometimes cringe when a prayer will be addressed to the Father thanking Him for His love and then ranging in without a change of persons to talking about His sufferings on the cross and His indwelling presence in our lives. These persons of the Godhead are confused, and people need to be gently taught.

Augustine, no doubt, faced the same problems and challenges in his life, and we’re in the process of trying to work through to understand where Augustine fits in this development of argument on the Trinity and to then look at this marvelous work of his, a classic on the Trinity, and to understand the component parts, and ultimately to see where they’re honorable and where they fall short and to see what can be redeemable in this great work.

We talked a little bit about the historical backgrounds and development of argument on the Trinity and how these things developed. Augustine lived in a vibrant time of lively debate on theological issues, and, interestingly, he spent his time not with one but with all the hotly debated issues and spent time writing about them and thinking about them and working through systematic responses to them, and this is all done within the context of the role of a pastor and priest. The place of the professional theologian has been relegated in our day and age to the seminary, regrettably. And I say regrettably because when those professors are out of touch with the ministerial needs of the pew, it causes a void between theological formation and practical ministry. And there ought not be that void, as they would readily admit and any reader of the New Testament would see and understand.

Augustine is writing as a theologian, but as a pastor first, and he takes in this work, and we’ve mentioned that the work was written over the course of twenty years. It wasn’t done quickly. It was down slowly and revised, and probably the length of time testifies to the great care and deliberation and also trepidation in terms of getting something out there published, and he was finally forced



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by circumstances to disseminate his work. But it was brewing and stewing the whole time, as many masterworks do, until it reached full gestation at twenty years.

The work itself has two components. It has a theological, part 1, and it has then, which tends to be much more systematic, it is an inquiry into authority and truth. It looks at some historical theological exposition, it looks at the nature of Scripture, because ultimately Augustine as a person who’s interested in debate would want to stand on sound reasoning based on substantial factual evidence, and for him that’s Scripture and tradition. That’s the first component to this great work.

The second is a psychological analysis of the Trinity. He’s saying, “I have developed a biblical, historical understanding of this concept in section 1.” Section 2 then begins to look at its relationship to us as created beings in some way, shape, or form in God’s image, and so he’s very practical that the theology’s not left out there hanging, but instead he takes it and internalizes as his quest for understanding God looks deep within the individual and reaches deep down inside himself. We’ll see that some of this thinking has been shaped by his prior exposure to neo-Platonism, and these things have been used in his life, his background, and training in such a way that he’s able to draw creatively on all these things and pull together a masterwork, not shunning one for another but taking the very best of all and weaving it together.

An analogy that Augustine uses for this methodology is the analogy based on the Hebrew people leaving Egypt. They were given gold and jewels and precious jewelry, and that jewelry given to them by the Egyptians was later used for the glory of God in the building of the tabernacle. In the same way, Augustine would say that we need to be cognizant of those things that the world has given to us, and we need to be always ready to melt them down and to forge them again into service for our Lord and to adorn His church with those items originally intended for the adoration of the world.

And so this motif is one that’s very active in Augustine’s life and thinking, and we’ll see it at play here with his use of neo-Platonism in order to develop the skeletal apparatus for his evaluation of the psychological impact, influence, of the Trinity.

So these are the two components parts or sections, and we have then some bunny trails of sorts, excurses that are made, and when



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we look at those they can gently relate to the theme at hand, but he runs down the trail and explores ramifications to what he’s talking about, and we’ll at some of those as well. So when you tie all this together, it’s somewhat a complicated work, and part of that is the fact that it’s been written over such a long period of time and the cohesion we have to bring to it in order to bring understanding to it.

So let’s begin then with thinking about the nature of the work and the first part of it, this idea of a quest for authority rooted in doctrine and in Scripture. Augustine in this part will try to define what the orthodox faith is in the Trinity. Now faith means the teaching of the church. This will be an important component development in medieval times because faith is not understood as individual assent but is understood as the orthodox and accepted teaching of the church, so one expresses faith by accepting that. And I’d be careful to caution that that’s not necessarily wrong. It’s a both/and scenario, and one can individualize so much that they become a Manichee, but we want to hold tension of the priesthood of the believer but the orthodoxy of the church, and to hold those two in tension.

Augustine then works at defining what the orthodox understanding of faith and the Trinity is, and he begins to insist on a careful distinction between reason and the function of reason and a contemplation of a mystery such as this. He will then begin his exposition of Scripture, and he begins with things that have recently been historically defined in the church, the deity of Christ. He looks at passages on the Son, and in particular he will look at those passages as they relate to the Father, and he’ll see several classifications that are developed. He will see that there are certain passages where the Son is expressing a subordination to the Father. He will see certain passages where the Son expresses co-equality with the Father, and there will be other passages where the Son is expressed in a way that is both subordinate to the Father’s will but also autonomously independent as a person. And so as he’s looking at these things, he’s developing around them a sense of the relationship between the Son and the Father.

Now look at historical theology as a natural progression as one system builds upon another, and, of course, the early concern of the earliest Christians was to define the person of Jesus Christ, and we’ve talked much about that. But consequently, a by-product of this would be then what is His exact relationship to the Father? And then as we introduce God, the Holy Spirit, what is the



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relationship of God, the Holy Spirit, to the Son and to the Father?

So Augustine begins with this question of the deity of Christ, and then he turns to look at in the Old Testament the question of theophanies. How do we understand Scripture when it says that no person has seen God at any time and yet throughout the Old Testament we have what appear to be theophanies, appearances of God on earth? What does one do with that visitor who came to Abraham? Were they accompanied by two others? Were they angels? Was one God Himself? What do you do then with the worship of this one? How is that understood in the context of overarching Old Testament theology? That’s an early example.

There are other examples. What happens when the Scripture seems clear that God Himself has appeared to individuals? How do we understand in the New Testament where Jesus Christ is the God-Man? If no person has seen God at any time, then should one conclude from that that Jesus Christ is not, in fact, truly deity? That’s what a Jehovah’s Witness would tell you if you went through the exposition of John and were trying to argue for the deity of Christ, and you would have to respond to that.

So what is the relationship between theophanies and the Godhead, and how do we reconcile these difficult passages?

Augustine will also look at the question of logos. Now remember, Augustine is a rhetorician. He teaches speech, and he’s interested in communication, and so that word logos is packed with meaning. It had a philosophical meaning. It had a meaning that conveyed reason. It conveyed an idea of an intermediary between God the Creator and His creation; in Hellenistic philosophical circles and in Hellenistic Judaism, this word took on rich meaning, as one can see by studying Philo, for instance. Augustine thinks about logos, though, as the spoken word, and he’ll later have an excursion contemplating the idea of the incarnation and how this relates the dynamic of the Trinity.

Another area that Augustine will think about in relationship to theophanies is the whole question of miracles. How does God intervene in the human realm? How are the laws of nature and the natural order disrupted? How does God do that, and through what means does He do that? And these intimately relate to His intervention in the course of human history, and they are expressions of His person and understanding His person.



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This then leads in this first part to an excursion that Augustine makes on the incarnation and on redemption, but he then gets back on track, and he summarizes this section by trying to establish the co-equality of the persons of the Trinity and describing them as having a communion. That’s a great word, communion. The Greek word koinonia, which you may be familiar with, means fellowship or to share in common, and this idea of sharing in common as expressed in the Eucharist and seen in the interrelationship of the persons of the Trinity is one of great interest. How are they one God? How are we, in fact, monotheistic, and yet at the same time, how do we hold to three in one? He introduces the important role of the Holy Spirit here, and this will be coming out of circles of debate in the church at this very time, establishing the deity of the Spirit.

I believe, and this is my own rationalization, I admit, but that clearly the issue of the person of Christ was first and foremost because of His entrance into the material realm, and it relates to the theophany, His incarnation, and so the church was focused on defining this logos in human form and helping us to understand His teaching about Himself as it relates to the Father. At that very time in the late second century, you may be aware that there was a movement called the Montanist movement, which was a movement that resisted clerical hierarchical developments in Asia Minor and instead insisted that the church be led by Spirit-filled individuals.

There are parallels perhaps with even movements today, but the idea of the tension was against the tendency of the church to grow bureaucratically and this movement’s insistence on the indwelling power of the Spirit at work in engifted believers. Consequently, because of various abuses that developed within this movement, the movement was seen as schismatic, if not heretical, depending on the branches. But certainly it was schismatic, and there was a reluctance to work much with developing a systematic theology of the Holy Spirit as much as anything in response to that, but their plate was full dealing with the person of Christ nevertheless.

So Augustine incorporates all three together, and he begins to develop this systematic argument for the Trinity, this idea of a communion of three in one, insisting on the important role of the Holy Spirit. This whole issue of the role of the Holy Spirit, there’s a question that arises, and that is what is the relationship between the Spirit and the Son and the Spirit and the Father?



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Augustine will live at a time where there are people in Greece, Greek fathers, who have been thinking for many decades about these issues, and a number of fantastic works were being produced that were contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous with Augustine. Unfortunately, Augustine didn’t have Greek down well enough to take advantage of those works, and there will be shortcomings in his own systematic development of the Trinity as a result of that. So my caution to you students is learn Greek. But besides that learn Latin too. Besides that fact, Augustine will make for a major divergence here from the development in the Greek church, and it will be one that separates a distinction on the Trinity, East from West. And it has to do with the relationship of the Spirit to the Son and to the Father. Did the Spirit merely proceed from the Son, as Jesus promised His disciples that He would send the Paraclete? Or did the Spirit descend both from the Father and from the Son?

Creedal development in the West added a phrase in the sixth century, and it became very widespread by the ninth century, called the Filioque, and it expressed a belief that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son and these things were defended in Spain against Arianism and tied in as a way of insisting on the deity of the Spirit over against the claims of the Arians, but this will be a major divergence between the East and the West.

An expression in Augustine’s work on the Trinity 6.10.12 said, “So both, each are in each and all in each and all in all and all are one.” This leads to an interesting problem. What then are the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity and the persons of the Godhead, and it has to do with our poverty of language that I think Augustine in his prayer expresses his frustration. Augustine, the rhetorician who’s interested in having the precise word to describe something. This is perhaps seen in his length of his labor over twenty years, that the language be just right, but in the end, our language falls short. It comes up empty. It’s unable to get at expressing with complete adequacy some of these things, and you must realize, and I’m sure you do, those of you who don’t come from an English-speaking context, that it depends on what kind of language you speak whether you have the, I would call, the freight. If you’ve got the stuff to be able to communicate some of the sophistications of these concepts. So here Augustine thinks about this, and he’s thinking about language and the impoverishment, the bankruptcy of our own language. His in that case was Latin, and its inability to get at some of these technical distinctions.



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This is particularly problematic when you then begin to compare Latin with Greek, and then, remember, you’ve got other movements within the church at this time. You’ve got the Syrians and you’ve got the Armenians. You’ve got actions in Egypt speaking Coptic and Persia and Germanic people and so forth, and when you’re trying to get at a creedal formation that is precise, very frequently one language doesn’t have the kind of terminology that the other language has. Now this leads to one of two decisions. Either someone can transliterate the term from the source language and adopt and adapt that term as the theological hook, so to speak, to hang your hat on, or you can try to find an equivalent for it in your own language, but frequently they’re not exact equivalents and what happens is a word will bring with it some other baggage. This happened to be the case in Augustine’s time with the Trinity and the question of Greek versus Latin, and there were inadequacies in both languages, but then when you tried to interface them, the Latin could not do what the Greek did. And so terms had to take a step away from some of the other baggage that come with it so as to be adaptable to express some of the subtleties that were necessary to express and define in the question of the Trinity.

As a footnote to this and a point of caution, there is a tendency, and it has happened historically where the important terms are merely transliterated and brought across into another language, and what appears, to me, happens in a case like that is that they are one step removed from their original meaning. They get a loose meaning, and the meaning has to be created in the mind of the person speaking the other language with this new term. Eventually you end up with terminology that you realize is important but lacks the kind of bite and meaning that it would have otherwise had if it were translated.

It’s ironic that, for instance, with the transition to the Vernacular Bible in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, I perceive a general reluctance to leave certain Latin terms in the West because they had such a profound impact and they carried the weight of theological discussions and were seen as so important that there was a great reluctance to leave those things, and they were carried over into English. But I would say today as we look back at those terms, there’s a great deal of confusion because those Latinized terms still carry the language, and there is a loss of meanings of sort. Sometimes this is unintentional; sometimes it’s intentional, like with the word baptism, for instance. So we’re lost with a lot of theological terms that can distance the pew one step further way from the actual definition of that term.



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As Augustine was trying to get a language to describe the Trinity, clearly he chose not to take the Greek words over into Latin, and he built his foundation on other Latin theologians such as Tertullian and others, Cyprian, who had labored much at getting at some precise terminology, religious terminology or theological terminology. The problem is that the Greek and the Latin didn’t directly interface, and so in Greek when we talk about God being of one substance, the way of saying that in Greek, ousia, can imply a nonmaterial metaphysical essence of being. The Latin was left with a word like substance, which fell short of that and had materialistic overtones, so consequently the word that was gradually used to get at that was the notion of essence, that God is of one essence.

At the same time, there are three distinct beings in the Godhead, and the Greek used a common philosophical term of hypostases, and although it had its own baggage with it, the Latin was unable to approximate that and was left with persona, the different persons, which could lend itself to some confusion, but nevertheless, via Augustine, the language of essence and person are the ways of describing in our English language the idea of unity and yet the idea of Trinity in the Godhead. Augustine said in 7.6.2 of his work on the Trinity, “God is one according to essence and three according to relation.” And so this idea of person.

That summarizes the first half of this book that you’re reading now, and we kind of moved to the second part, and I’ll briefly give an overview of it, and it’s his psychological analogies that he draws from this. On an apologetic standpoint, frequently we find ourselves in dialogue, and someone may ask, How would you describe for me the idea of the Trinity? We’re left trying to find analogies in the material realm, and Augustine will point to some that were commonly used in his day, and we’ve talked briefly about this, and he shatters them. And the irony is that they’re the same ones that are used today.

This idea that the Trinity’s like water. It can be of steam. It can be liquid, and it can be solid, but Augustine would say not all three at once.

Other analogies like this seem to fall short, and being someone who’s given to wanting to be precise on this issue, particularly because of the kinds of heresies and abuses that were being disseminated, Augustine looked away from the material realm and looked within the individual. Now Augustine’s works are very



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psychological anyways. His Confessions, we’ve talked about this, but look at how he looks at the person, the individual, and here’s his starting point. He says, “Man is made in the image of God.” We talked about this a little bit, that image is not an exact image, but it’s translated regrettably image and likeness, better idea as Augustine understood, image, but in not exact likeness. We are not gods. We’re like God, and so as Augustine’s thinking, in fact, this mystery of our image is an enigma, and that would be the term coined by Augustine. It’s an obscure image rather than an exact image. And so he thinks that in this obscure image we find clues about what God is like and yet at the same time help us to understand how we should be like where theology and practical ministry kiss and are wedded.

So he looks through and points out the inaccuracies of human analogy in the material realm, and he looks within the psyche, the soul, and he finds various levels of trinity. For instance, he says, “It’s a propositional fact. God is love.” And so he finds an analogy in love of a Trinity. He says that there is the person that loves. There is the object of that love, and there’s love itself. And so these three are three that are equal, they share together as one thing, and yet they’re all separate and it’s not material, by the way.

He also looked at the ideas he tried to draw this out, and he said that “love is kind of like knowledge.” And he looked at the identity of essence, of love equaling the whole mind and that they’re all-encompassing and yet at the same time, each can be separate, and yet you even have this notion of one begetting the other, which kind of gets at this very difficult language in the New Testament. What does it mean that the Son was begotten or the Spirit proceeds? And so it was his way of approximating that with this analogy.

Then in the midst of this, there’s another excursion on the incarnation, the Word and the incarnation. It’s probably because he’s thinking about the love of God, of God entering into the human realm, and ultimately if you think of the logos, God with us, Emmanuel, how profound that is, and for the rhetorician to stand silently,

to kneel silently before that thought, and here it enters again.

But his second analogy as he returns back to his argument here, love is the first, his second is that psychological analogy of the Trinity



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is that the Trinity is kind of like the relationship between memory, understanding, and will, and he would see determination or will as love because ultimately will that is redeemed and redeemable is a will focused on loving one’s neighbor and loving God. And so as he looks at the relationship between memory, understanding, and will, he sees again this kind of Trinitarian relationship, yet as one essence and yet as three separate persons, so to speak.

The relationship between memory and understanding, at least, is something that Augustine had thought about before because it’s again closely related to the question of language. In his Confessions he would think about whether one can remember without knowing language, and he contemplates these things as he’s thinking about and internalizing them, as he’s thinking about revelation in Scripture and teaching.

A third analogy is, and this is kind of more material, but it’s the idea of seeing. You have an object seen. You have vision itself, and you have the attention of the mind. Some of these things are rather profound as he’s thinking about the relationship between our thinking process and the actual physical operations of our eyes. And some of his theories here are startling as he’s given over to try to find explanation for these things.

Now, look, the point is this, you might see these things as unnecessary, but he’s trying to find, particularly, and I think these things are in order of significance, he tries to find in love within us the enigma of God. He thinks about then God’s great love to us and our mandate to love one another. He tries to find in the thinking processes of the spirit and soul this notion of Trinity as he’s thinking ‘in what way can I see in God’s created order deep within the recesses of the immaterial part of a person? How can I see God?’ Understanding the passage, “Let Us make humans in our image,” as being God talking to the other members of the Trinity and perhaps to His angels as well. The human is created, very much so, after the pattern of this Trinitarian relationship.

What are the conclusions of these things? This is kind of a summary of those great works. The conclusions are that this sets a foundation for Trinitarian thinking in the Middle Ages. It’s systematized by Thomas Aquinas, but he lays the foundations for Western thought and for the thought of the church on this very,


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very important issue. Enjoy reading it, and I look forward next time to talking with you about another classic work, The City of God. Blessings. Bye-bye.

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ology The val Augustine and Medie Augustine and Medieval ...the world. And so this motif is one that’s very active in Augustine’s life and thinking, and we’ll see it at play