Dan Chapa

Steve Hays responded to my posts on the Trinity. ( link ) My response is long, so I will break it into four parts, Steve’s view and my view on Consubstantiality and Steve’s view and my view on Eternal Generation. How does Dan happen to know how the “church at large” understands the Nicene creed? "The creeds are nothing more than a well-ordered arrangement of the facts of Scripture which concern the doctrine of the Trinity. They assert the distinct personality of the Father, Son, and Spirit; their mutual relation as expressed by those terms; their absolute unity as to substance or essence, and their consequent perfect equality; and the subordination of the Son to the Father, and of the Spirit to the Father and the Son, as to the mode of subsistence and operation. These are Scriptural facts, to which the creeds in question add nothing; and it is in this sense they have been accepted by the Church universal." ( Hodge. Vol 1. 6.6 ) From a historical standpoint, your argume...

Steve Hays responded to my posts on the Trinity. ( link ) My response is long, so I will break it into four parts, Steve’s view and my view on Consubstantiality and Steve’s view and my view on Eternal Generation. I didn’t affirm or deny that all members of the Trinity are numerically one in essence. Stafford asserted that Hebrews 1:3 relates to God and Christ’s essence rather than their persons. 1 You responded, not by contradicting him on this point, but by describing the consubstantial identity of the Father with the Son in terms of a numerical distinction: As to Heb 1:3, we need to keep a couple of things in mind: i) To speak of the Son as a “copy” of God is figurative image. A metaphor is an analogy. Every analogy has an element of disanalogy. So the question at issue is to single out the intended point of commonality. Stafford, with wooden literality, acts as if the process of replication is the point of commonality. But x can be a copy of y in another sense: resemblanc...

Steve Hays' post denying eternal procession in the Nicene creed caught my eye. ( link ) Here's our recent exchange ( link ). 1. I don’t regard Wikipedia as the gold standard of theological discourse. Nor do I, but it is popular and common. 2. ”Consubstantial” simply means “of one and the same substance or essence” (OED). Yes, but in the context of the Arian dispute, it carries an additional connotation, since neither side considered multiple divine essences. 3. At a minimum, the purpose of the homoousios clause was to exclude the notion that the Son is merely of “like essence” with the Father, rather than identical essence. True, that's the core. 4. From what I’ve read, there’s a scholarly dispute over the more specialized question of whether homoousios was also meant to denote generic identity or numeric identity. You appealed to Calvin. Here's what he had to say on the subject: While he proclaims his unity, he distinctly sets it before us as existing in three persons...