The Value of Numbers

Numbering Names

Ten years ago I wrote a book, enGendered, which took some first steps (for me, that is), of finding the ground of gender in the Trinity. For Christians, the Creator of gender reveals Themself as a Tri-unity, and creating man and woman in His (or Their, saying “Let us…”) image. At moments, to illustrate the ever-present principles we derive from the Holy Relations: equality and asymmetry, I referred to Triune Persons as the First, Second and Third.  One critical reviewer found this naming objectionable because “more is lost than gained.”

To this criticism I have a ready defense. Because using ordinal numbers to refer to the Persons (as a temporary substitute for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or the other Biblical labels) goes back to the greatest of the early theologians.

Consulting ‘the father’

Tertullian became a Christian in 197AD in Carthage, and the energy released from that conversion created a prolific author and defender of the Christian faith. They sometimes just called him, “the father.” He originated the term “Trinity” (in Latin: Trinitas). In fact, he was the first to fully use the concept of “person” in thinking about God’s threeness, the first to identify God as “one Substance in three Persons,” and the first to describe Their mutual indwelling, calling it coinherence. He basically laid down the vocabulary of Trinitarian theology for the next thousand years.

Anyway, Tertullian also so employed ordinal numbers. He used First, Second, Third, to describe the Persons of the Trinity at times, just like I did (only He was much smarter). He did this for two reasons. One, to combat modalists, who characterized God as One (good) but just operating in three different modes, like He just wears three different hats at different times (bad). There really are three Persons, Tertullian insisted, First, Second, and Third.

The other reason Tertullian used these was to capture how the Bible portrays God’s asymmetry within Themself. There is an order among the Persons: The Son is second to the Father, and the Holy Spirit is third from God and the Son. The Second’s eternal generation shapes the way They act in our world, in the First sending the Second, for example, or the Second promoting the First in His teaching. The Third’s procession from the First and Second shapes His witness to the love between Them. Some critics of Tertullian wonder how far, in combatting modalism, he veers toward subordinationism. But the theologian’s ordering does not make One “sub-ordinate” to Another in a way that assaults Their equality.

Counting on Asymmetry

We are helped to understand this relational God by the people in relation whom He created in His image. Women and men are equal persons when it comes to their value and dignity and importance to God’s work. But they love each other differently. Tertullian also notes, like enGendered does, how the Bible sometimes mixes singulars and plurals in speaking of God. Thus, the Divine Persons of God share the same essence. We can tell from this that the order of the Divine Persons does not create an inequality between Them, as They are all three God.

The critic of my book (and, I suppose, of Tertullian) found the ancillary naming by number to be a loss to God’s personal-ness. Certainly, the ordinal number naming is less personal, but when done for the purpose of showing one of the ways our families transcribe the Trinity, in analogizing in a manner we can understand (e.g., “a first among equals”), it actually makes God more personal to us. This is no esoteric rambling. When we affirm equality and asymmetry in close intergendered relationships, we are founding ourselves on the deep structure of Identity in Whose image we are fashioned. This knowledge frees us to find our way in relationship.

Glory be the First, Second and Third, the Three in One Who fills all things.