The Historic Doctrine of the Trinity

The Godhead The Trinity Three Persons Oneness/Modalism Questions and Answers William Branham in the latter stages of his ministry (1958-1965) could not accept the concept of three persons in the Godhead. This appears to have been the result of both his lazy theology and his desire to be seen as a prophet that was restoring long forgotten truths to the church. Now we find in the Scripture that many people teaches that, "three personalities in the Godhead." So, you cannot have a personality without being a person. It takes a person to make a personality. ...You cannot be a person without being a personality. And if you're a personality, you are one personality to yourself. You're a separate, individual being." However, William Branham's rejection of this concept is not based on scripture, it is not based on sound reasoning and it is not based on what the church has historically taught. He simply rejected it out of hand because he did not take the time to understand the concept. What does "person" mean We have been asked the questions: God in 3 persons... What the definition of a person is... or what is your concept? if William Branham had asked that question and really pursued with those that actually understood the concept, he would have learned the following: "Person" does not mean "Individual" The words which we render ‘Person’ (ὑπόστασις, πρόσωπον, persona) are of a still later date, and at first exhibited a remarkable fluidity of signification. Thus ὑπόστασις was used at one time to denote what is common to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, what we should call the Divine ‘substance,’ at another it was used to distinguish between the Three; so that in one sense there is one ὑπόστασις in the Holy Trinity, in the other there are three. With regard to the word ‘Person,’ the student must necessarily be always on his guard against the supposition that ‘Person’ means ‘individual,’ as when we say that three different men are three ‘persons’; or that ‘Trinity’ involves tritheism, or three Gods. These technical expressions are but methods of denoting the teaching found in the New Testament that there are distinctions in the Godhead, and that, while God is One, yet He is not a mere Monad. These technical terms are not found in the apostolic or sub-apostolic writers; with regard to the second of them, it may be remembered that the idea of personality was hardly formulated in any sense till shortly before the Christian era; and its application to theology came in a good deal later. The word "person" does have some problems Theologians recognize that the word "person", particularly in its current meaning in the English language does create problems. Both [Karl] Barth and [Karl] Rahner held that “person” (from Lat. persona), the traditional term in the so-called Western church for the divine Three, had become seriously misleading. While originally designating a theater mask and then a role and hence an identity, in contemporary usage “person” (→ Self) had come to denote a subjective center of consciousness. With that understanding of “person,” the claim that God is three persons stands in grave danger of degenerating into tritheism. Barth proposed as an alternative the phrase “mode of being” (Seinsweise); Rahner proposed “mode of subsisting” (Subsistenzweise). Even in the KJV English of 400 years ago, the word "person" carried a different meaning than today: Today we think of a person as an individual human being with his or her own character, history, and consciousness. “Respect for persons” is regarded as a basic principle of sound democracy and true religion. But we then read in the KJV that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34), and this idea is repeated in one form or another in a dozen passages of the Old and New Testaments. The Greek word which the KJV translates as “respecter of persons” means “one who accepts the face”; the Latin equivalent is acceptor personae, that is, “one who accepts the mask worn by an actor or the character he assumed.” When the KJV was published, the English word “person” was still close to this primary meaning of the Latin word persona, mask. It referred to people’s outward appearance or circumstances—physical presence, dress, wealth, position—rather than to their intrinsic worth or inner springs of conscious, self-determining being. “God is no respecter of persons” or similar wording in Acts 10:34 and elsewhere means that God does not regard mere externals. There is little doubt that the formula “one essence, three persons” creates problems, but any alternative formulation only multiplies the difficulties. Augustine was dissatisfied with the term persona but found no preferable alternative: “We say … three persons, not that we would say this, but that we would not be silent” (De Trinitate, V, 9); “… not because Scripture does so, but because Scripture does not forbid” (VII, 4). But Western Latin theology has used the formula “one substance, three persons” ever since Tertullian. Eastern or Greek theology had translation problems with the Latin formula (in Greek, the Latin persona becomes prosōpon which means “mask” and thus seems to deny essential identity) so Basil the Great and the Cappadocians, distinguishing two terms that until then had also been used confusedly, spoke of three hypostases in one ousia. The Latin translation, however, was una essentia, tres substantiae (“one essence, three substances”) which implied tritheism. Apprehensive lest three “persons” might imply three “substances,” Anselm affirms “three I do not know what” (Monologium, c, 78). Aquinas equates “person” with a relation that is “its own mode of being” (Summa Theologiae, I, W. 29, Art. 4). Calvin defines person as “a ‘subsistence’ in the Divine essence … distinguished … by an incommunicable quality” (Institutes, Book I, XIII, 6). To this day Eastern theologians (cf. for example Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church) insist that the Greek term hypostasis best fits the meaning of “person”; Roman Catholic theologians, on the other hand, find it unserviceable as a clear alternative to pagan polytheism and to bare monotheism. Nevertheless their mutual recognition of theological intention serves to override semantic differences.