This article is the first part examining William HaskerAmerican philosopher of religion known for work on open theism, mind-body dualism, and social Trinitarianism.'s view on the Trinity.

• PART 1: PERSON, ESSENCE, CONSTITUTION (you're here)
• PART 2: PROCESSIONS, FATHER, SON, SPIRIT
• PART 3: GOD, TRINITY

William Hasker on the Trinity (Part 1/3)

In my recent study on the Trinity, I have been especially interested in William Hasker's model of the Trinity. I believe it avoids collapsing the Trinity into just one person and also avoids expanding the Trinity into three gods. Working through his model has also helped me formulate what exactly is meant by terms like "person" and "being." In this article series, I will attempt to explain Hasker's particular model of the Trinity, paying special attention to what these fundamental words actually mean. Let's start with "person," "essence," and "constitution."

Person: center of consciousness with the capacity for cognitive, affective, and volitional mental states, as well as the capacity for relationships with other persons.

Hasker adopts a robust conception of the term "person" which is the hallmark of "social trinitarian" views. Persons are not merely faces, modes, or relations, but rational subjects. The respective persons of the Trinity could genuinely think, "I am the Son," "I am the Father," and "I am the Spirit," as distinct consciousnesses. Affirming robust personhood has multiple strengths:

First, such a view can maintain that there is mutual love within the Trinity. If the persons were mere relational aspects, they could not love and be loved by one another. Mutual love has great explanatory power in articulating the rationale for the number of persons. Three is the most elegant and simplest number, which allows for non-selfish, communal love within the Trinity. Hasker wrote:

"If love is in this way fundamental to the structure of reality, it seems fitting, to say the least, to represent the inner life of God as one of loving relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If this is not present—if, as some would have it, God is and must be only a single person—then the only love possible for God in his aloneness is self-love. And while self-love is a right and proper thing, self-love by itself falls far short of the richness that is possible in love directed to persons other than oneself."[1]

Second, we can easily distinguish the experiences of the persons of the Trinity, allowing us to affirm that the Son was crucified, but neither the Father nor the Spirit. This saves us from the heresy of patripassianism ("the Father suffered"), a form of modalism.

Third, a strong affirmation of persons can make sense of much of the gospel narrative concerning the relationship between the Son and the Father. Consider that Jesus stated, "I have come ... to do, not my Will, but the will of Him who sent me," and even cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Such statements cannot easily be taken to merely refer to different relations of a single divine subject of rationality. As Hasker noted:

"...the relationship between Jesus and his heavenly Father is correctly understood as a relationship between Father and Son within the Trinity. But who can doubt that this relationship, as it is portrayed in all four Gospels, is a personal relationship, the sort of relationship that could only exist between persons, as we are understanding the notion of a person?"[1]

The idea that these sorts of interactions and conversations occurred within a single consciousness taking on multiple masks or faces seems to put strain on the text. Affirming robust personhood aids our doctrine of God in affirming mutual-love within the Trinity, avoiding modalism, and remaining faithful to the gospel narrative's presentation of the Father and the Son.

Essence / Nature: A concrete property-instance or "trope."

Nicene Christianity affirms that the Son is "of the same essence as the Father," using the Greek term homoousios. How exactly should we understand this term "essence?" We can first gain an understanding of his view by speaking of what it is not. Hasker rejects the idea that an essence should be conceived of in the Aristotelian sense as an abstract universal, that is, a universal concept or set of attributes. Under this Aristotelian view, adopted by Richard SwinburneBritish philosopher of religion known for analytic arguments in natural theology and a social model of the Trinity., for example, gods or men would be of a "divine" or "human" nature in that they exemplify a set of attributes corresponding to divinity or humanity. However, there is a serious problem with this view. The following three propositions predicate divinity of three persons:

1. The Father is divine
2. The Son is divine.
3. The Spirit is divine.

Notice that a similar claim could be made about three humans:

1. Peter is human
2. James is human
3. John is human

Here, the divine persons exemplify the divinity universal in the same way that three men would exemplify the human universal. The idea captured by the statement that "the Father is divine" may be theologically true, but it is too weak to describe the Trinity, since such a relationship between persons and nature can be equally met by mere humans. Hasker notes that there is "three times as much manhood" in the case of three distinct human men, meaning that they are three separate men. If this were applied to God, Hasker notes, polytheism would be implied.

Hasker instead argues that essence should be understood as particular and individual, the metaphysical concept of a trope. The philosopher Anna-Sofia Maurin provides an analogy for this concept and asks us to imagine touching a hot stove. It is not the concept of temperature that burns you. Rather, it is the particular temperature of that stove. This is the essential difference between a concept and an instance. Additionally, tropes are concrete rather than abstract, meaning that they have causal power. They are not like numbers, sets, or platonic ideals, which, should they really exist, would have no power to affect the world. Rather, they have the potential to effect change in the world and act upon other objects.

Applying the idea: while the category consisting of Peter, James, and John contains three tropes of humanity, the Trinity is a categorical term describing the three divine persons constituted by one, single trope of deity. While an abstract universal is a set of properties, a trope is a concrete, individualized instance of a property. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not possess their own private instance of divinity; they are rather "one and only one trope of deity."

Now that "person" and "essence" have been defined, the next question to ask is about the relationship between the two ideas. How exactly can three persons all be one trope of divinity? Hasker appeals to the concept of constitution:

Constitution: A relationship of the divine persons and essence, distinct from identity.

We will only be able to examine the full definition of constitution once we contrast it from a relationship of identity. Significantly, Hasker does not affirm that the persons are identical to the divine nature. The reason that he denies this is that he believes it entails a collapse in the persons of the Trinity and that "the Father is the Son." Consider what has been called the logical problem of the Trinity:

1. The Father is the divine essence.
2. The Son is the divine essence.
3. Therefore, the Father is the Son.

This conclusion results necessarily from the truth of the first two premises via the law of transitivity. If the Father and Son are both identical to the divine essence, then they must be one another.

"Identity, as this notion is understood by logicians, is a relation that is symmetrical and transitive: if A is identical with B, and B with C, then A is identical with C. So if the Father is an essence in himself, and the Son also is an essence in himself, and yet their essences are identical, it follows inexorably that the Father is identical with the Son, a heretical conclusion that cannot possibly be accepted..."[1]

Instead, Hasker explains the relationship between person and essence in terms of constitution. By way of analogy, Hasker invokes material constitution. Think about a statue made from a lump of gold. It's not correct to say that the gold is identical to the statue. The statue and lump of gold do not share the same properties, since if the statue was hammered into a disc, it would no longer be a statue. However, it would remain a lump of gold. Therefore, it is not that the statue is the lump of gold as a matter of identity; the statue is the lump of gold in that the statue is constituted by the gold. Gold is the underlying reality that constitutes the statue, but they remain conceptually distinct.

"Other examples of constitution are: a mass of water can constitute an ice cube, a piece of colored metal can constitute a stop sign, a piece of paper, when folded, can constitute a toy airplane, and so on and on. In each case, we can say that the constituting object "is" the constituted object, but the "is" here signifies constitution, not identity."[1]

Critically, since God is incorporeal, the material baggage of the analogy must be dropped when applying it to the case of the Trinity. Hasker states:

"...the one concrete divine nature sustains eternally the three distinct life-streams of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that in virtue of this the nature constitutes each of the persons although it is not identical with the persons."[2]

Hasker's formal definition of constitution is certainly the most complicated part of his essay. Since it establishes how we should understand the relationship between person and nature, the definition is of the highest importance. For this article, I will simply summarize the four conditions for object X to constitute object Y:

1. They must share the same parts. In the case of the Trinity, it would be the single "improper" part itself: the divine nature.
2. X must be in a circumstance that allows Y to obtain its primary kind; that is, to obtain what the object is fundamentally. The divine nature must allow the persons to obtain their reality as a divine person.
3. X necessarily results in Y obtaining its primary kind. This essentially adds the quality of necessity to condition 2.
4. It must be possible for X to exist without Y conceptually. While Hasker maintains that metaphysically it is impossible for the divine nature to exist without the persons, they must be conceptually distinct.

Rather than stating that the persons are the essence, Hasker states that the persons are constituted by the essence. It has been argued that if one denies divine simplicity and the numerical identity of person and being, then we must be forced to conclude that the divine nature is somehow "more ultimate" than the persons or that it could exist on its own. Hasker insists that nature and persons are a strict "package deal." Part of his formal definition of constitution is that of metaphysical necessity. There is, therefore, no logical space wherein X could constitute Y and Y not exist without constitution. The divine essence, therefore, cannot exist without or outrank the persons in ultimacy.

In the next article, we will discuss the doctrine of divine processions.