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QUESTION: The doctrine of perichoresis states that each Person of the Trinity indwells the other two persons. Is this necessarily so? In theory, could the Father exist without the indwelling of the Son and/or the Holy Spirit. Could the Son exist without the indwelling of the Father and/or the Holy Spirit. And could the Holy Spirit exist without the indwelling of the Father and/or the Son.
T.F. TORRANCE (1903–1958). Thomas Forsyth Torrance, better known as T.F. Torrance, was a Scottish theologian and Presbyterian minister who served for 27 years as a professor of Christian dogmatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is probably best known for his original thoughts related to science and theology, but he is equally respected for his work in systematic theology, such as in trinitarian dogmatics. He is widely regarded as the most significant British theologian of the twentieth century. Torrance earned his masters and doctorate degrees at the University of Edinburgh, and then moved to Basel where he studied under Karl Barth. He was ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1940 and served as a chaplain on the front lines during World War II. After retiring from the University of Edinburgh in 1979, Torrance continued to lecture and publish extensively, including several influential books on the Trinity. These include the 1988 publication of The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church; the 1994 publication of Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement; and the 1996 publication of The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.
READING 1 (Levels of Knowledge): Thus there becomes disclosed the multi-leveled organic structure that characterizes our Christian apprehension of God in which our thought moves from its fundamental base in what God is toward us and has done for us in the Gospel as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to what he is antecedently and eternally in himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that is, from the economic Trinity to the ontological Trinity … First, there is the ground level of religious experience and worship in which we have to do with God’s revealing and saving activity in the Gospel, and are committed to faith in Jesus Christ … Then we come to the theological level, … we learn that the Person of Christ as Lord and Savior, his saving acts and his message of salvation are ultimately one and the same … By forming appropriate intellectual instruments which to lay bare the underlying epistemological patterns of thought, and by tracing the chains of connection throughout the coherent body of theological truth, they feel their way forward to a deeper and more precise knowledge of what God has revealed of himself, even to the extent of reaching a reverent and humble insight into the inner personal relations of his Being … We now come to the third or higher theological level … At this level we are explicitly concerned with the epistemological and ontological structure of our knowledge of the Holy Trinity, moving from a level of economic trinitarian relations in all that God is toward us in His self-revealing and self-giving activity to the level in which we discern the trinitarian relations immanent in God himself which lie behind, and are the sustaining ground of, the relations of the economic Trinity. [The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 88-99]
READING 2 (Fellowship of Love): To the fellowship of love which God establishes with us through the incarnation of his beloved Son in space and time there corresponds an eternal Fellowship of Love within God himself. The Freedom in which God enters into communion with us is grounded in and flows from the Freedom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their love for one another. The Communion which God eternally is in the mutual indwelling of the three Divine Persons within the relations of his one Being, he is toward us and with us and for us in his saving presence and loving activity in history. This is what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely means, that God himself is Love. [The Christian Doctrine of God, p.162]
READING 3 (Perichoresis): The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinctive Persons each with his own incommunicable properties, but they dwell in one another … the Father is not the Father apart from the Son and the Spirit, the Son is not the Son apart from the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Spirit apart from the Father and the Son, for each is who he is in his wholeness as true God of true God in the wholeness of the other two who are each true God of true God, and yet in the mystery of their perichoretic interrelations they are not three Gods but one only God, the Blessed Holy Trinity … the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit always act together in every divine operation whether in creation or redemption, yet in such a way that the distinctive activities of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are always maintained, in accordance with the propriety and otherness of their Persons as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This may be called the ‘perichoretic coactivity of the Holy Trinity.’ … appropriation carried the idea that some attributes and activities common to the whole Trinity may be specially assigned or ‘appropriated’ to one Person rather than another in order to reveal his distinctive hypostatic character. However, since God is Triune, all his acts toward us cannot but be acts of Trinity in Unity and of the Unity in Trinity. [The Christian Doctrine of God, pp.172-200]
READING 4 (Agreed Statement on the Holy Trinity – this reading is from the result of an ecumenical dialogue between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1992): The three Divine Persons are also conjoined through their special relations. Thus the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and abides in the Son, in ineffable ways that are beyond all time, beyond all origin, and beyond all cause. The generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are unknowable mysteries which cannot be explained by recourse to human or creaturely images, although some images (e.g. Light from Light) may provide a way for us to grasp some aspects of the reality to which they are used to refer. They indicate distinctions in relations not partitions or divisions.
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