Trinitarian Metaphysics: The Difference the Trinity Makes in Evaluating Platonic and Aristotelian Ontologies—And Other Philosophical Proposals Too

by Vern S. Poythress

A presentation at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, at Fort Worth, TX, Nov. 16, 2021, 9:00am. Because of limitations on time, not all parts of this presentation were covered in the oral delivery. The basic ideas of the presentation are now incorporated into a book, Making Sense of the World: How the Trinity Helps to Explain Reality (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2024), especially appendix A.

Abstract

Is there such a thing as a trinitarian metaphysics? Metaphysics can mean more than one thing. Here, what we mean is a structure that is thought to be the deepest and most basic structure of the world.

If we believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, ought that belief to influence our theories concerning the ultimate structure of reality? If so, what are the implications for how we evaluate Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy (or other philosophies)? These systems of philosophy contain attempts to explore what is deepest about the world. But do they mesh well with the doctrine of the Trinity?

Because of the attractions of philosophical reason, the temptation is always there to glue a philosophical ontology onto Christianity as a kind of bottom half. But will it work?

I suggest that it does not. There are several reasons. One is that the competing alternatives in metaphysics are inadequate.

But we can also show positively, in four different ways, how the doctrine of the Trinity leads to metaphysical thinking that is continually shaped by the Trinity.

First, God brings the world into being by his word. God’s speech, which is trinitarian speech, structures the world. God speaks the Word. His speech to the world derives from the Word.

Second, God’s knowledge of all things is trinitarian. His knowledge is prior to the world, not only in being eternal, but in being the foundation for the facts of the world. Consequently, the world, as derivative from God’s knowledge, reflects trinitarian structure.

Third, the structure of pattern and image has its origin in the Trinity—in particular in the relation of the Father to the Son as the image of God (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). This fundamental pattern is reflected in the creation of man in the image of God. And then we can see further, dimmer reflections in other created things. Animals and plants reproduce in a manner analogous to human reproduction, which itself is based on the archetype of the generation of the Son.

Fourth, we can take an approach by means of the attributes of God. In the Western world, philosophical systems that claim to supply ultimate categories usually aim to supply categories each of which is rigid and separable, with precise boundaries and with the capability of being mastered by the human mind. But Christian doctrine implies that such an approach does not work. The attributes of God are inseparable, because of divine simplicity. And the persons are inseparable, because the three are one God. The speech of God is inseparable, because it expresses who God is. The speech of God is unmasterable.

The result is that we must not pick up pagan philosophical tools as if they were merely convenient useful tools. We must do a reconstruction.

—-

We discuss three topics in turn. First, what is metaphysics? Second, what is inadequate about the main metaphysical proposals on the market? Third, what might a trinitarian metaphysics look like? The last of these receive the most attention.

Introduction: what is metaphysics?

What is metaphysics? There is more than one definition.notePeter van Inwagen, and Meghan Sullivan, “Metaphysics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)./note I propose to use the term loosely, to describe investigations and proposals that explore what are the deepest or most foundational structures in the world. What are the most basic constituents of the world?

Any number of philosophies propose a metaphysics. For example, atomism proposes that the world is made up of atoms that bind together. For the sake of time, we omit an extensive list.

Perhaps some examples might help. We can only deal with generalities here.

• Philosophical materialism says that the most basic constituent is matter. In a modern setting, it means matter and energy in motion, and the matter breaks down into elementary particles such as electrons and quarks.
• Philosophical empiricism says that the most basic constituent of the world is items of sense experience.
• Idealism says that the most basic constituent of the world is ideas.

Each of these philosophical systems has a “metaphysics,” a proposal about what is most basic.

What is inadequate about metaphysical proposals?

There are an indefinite number of possibilities for proposals about metaphysics. A full consideration of any one of them could easily expand into a book or a whole series of books. For our purposes, we confine ourselves to some of the main and obvious offerings in the twenty-first century Western world (India, China, Africa, and specifically religious approaches like Islam are outside our focus). And we can only sketch an evaluation.

Each view has certain piecemeal insights. We might easily devote a large amount of time in trying to appreciate them. But for the sake of brevity, we cannot enter into this aspect of investigation.

We propose to evaluate each view in three ways.

(a) Does it cohere with the existence of the trinitarian God? (b) Does it give an adequate account of how it can be known to be true? (c) Does it offer a solid basis for ethics?

Without an ethics that supports truth-telling and honesty, no view can sustain itself plausibly. Moreover, ethics is one point at which we can test an idea according to Jesus’ principle, “Thus you will recognize them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:20). Both proposals for ethical principles and actual behavior can be considered to be the “fruit.” If the fruit is bad, it shows that the root is bad, though it does not yet show specifically what went wrong with the root.

1. Philosophical materialism.

We begin with the metaphysical proposal that is one of the most prominent among intellectuals today, namely philosophical materialism.

What is wrong with it?

(a) It explicitly denies that God exists, because God is not material.

(b) It cannot give an account of itself, because the philosophical idea of philosophical materialism is not material. Alvin Plantinga makes a similar point in his extended interaction with materialistic Darwinism, which is a kind of specific embodiment of materialism.¹ Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

(c) If matter is ultimate, human beings are only clumps of matter, and no ethical commitments can show themselves to be more than personal preferences. The natural endpoint for ethics is the motto, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32).

2. Pantheism.

According to pantheism, all is “God.” Or, in panentheism, all is a part of God.

What is wrong with pantheism?

(a) The Bible teaches a clear distinction between God, who is creator, and the world, which is created. Pantheism and panentheism have a kind of “god,” but it is not the God of the Bible.

(b) Since each individual “is” God, it would seem that each individual unproblematically knows everything. Then why are there differences in belief? Moreover, the collapse of distinctions in pantheism threatens to collapse the distinctiveness in distinct statements about the world. If all is genuinely one, there is no room for distinctions. Each individual may indeed know everything that is to be known, but what is to be known is only one thing, which is a blank darkness.

(c) Pantheism cannot distinguish between good and evil, because both are a part of the ultimate nature of reality.

3. Skepticism.

Skepticism denies that we can know the ultimate nature of the world. (This position is distinct from the more modest negative observation, “I do not [currently] know what is true.”) The denial within skepticism is itself a kind of minimal theory about the nature of the world. So, in my treatment, skepticism counts as a metaphysical system.

What is wrong with skepticism?

(a) Skepticism denies that God can make himself clearly known, as he has in fact done in nature (general revelation) and Scripture (special revelation).

(b) Skepticism has trouble founding itself. How can it be known that nothing ultimate can be known? It seems to commit us to the claim of having checked out to its own satisfaction what it claims that no one can check out.

(c) Skepticism offers no basis for ethics.

4. Kantianism (with many variations).

Immanuel Kant argues that in a sense metaphysics is impossible. No one can attain to rational knowledge of “the thing in itself,” because our mental and perceptual apparatus has already processed the perceptual input that comes to us. Thus, a rational metaphysical analysis of the thing in itself, as an ultimate constituent of “reality,” is impossible. But Kant still offers us a system. Its starting focus is epistemology, not the thing in itself. But through epistemology Kant tries to establish what can and cannot be known, and on what conditions. So there is still a most ultimate structure within this epistemology. The ultimate structure for the system is not the thing in itself, but the divisions that Kant puts in place as to what can be known. In particular, the noumenal is distinguished from the phenomenal, and pure reason from practical reason. The phenomenal comes to us with the categories of time, space, and causality.

(a) Kant’s system is antagonistic to the Bible, because in his system God belongs to the noumenal. God cannot directly reveal himself in appearances. But this is precisely what he did at Mount Sinai, and what he did in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Moreover, in Kant’s system man virtually takes the place of the Christian God. He “creates” the world as we know it by the imposition of the categories that already exist in his mind.

(b) Kant’s system cannot account for knowledge based on the phenomenal, though it claims to offer an account. The laws of science are particular laws, not just a generic deduction from the principle of causality.² Vern S. Poythress, Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), appendix F1; also Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy: A God-Centered Approach to the Big Questions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), chap. 23. To find these particular laws, the universe (the thing in itself!) must talk back to us, and not merely submit to a general principle already in our minds.

(c) Kant has an ethics, the ethics of the “categorical imperative.” In this respect, it fares better than many other philosophies. But it still has a weakness. It cannot motivate anyone who asks, “Why should not I be selfish and disobey the alleged categorical imperative that is part of my mind?” If the imperative is actually generated by the categories of the human mind, and does not owe its existence to the reality of God who is our creator, it is not clear why we may not simply choose to step away from its allegedly universal claims. I just make myself an exception, whenever I need to. Who can say that I may not?

5. Postmodern contextualism.

Postmodernism has many aspects and many forms. What we have in mind under the label postmodern contextualism³Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), especially chaps. 16, 17, appendices A, B, and I. is only one aspect, which itself has variations. Roughly speaking, postmodern contextualism has at its heart the conviction that claims to human knowledge always come within a linguistic and social and cultural context. And this context makes it impossible to have confident access to universal truth. Truth is, at it were, local to a particular culture or society. More modest forms of contextualism might allow that sciences can arrive at universal truths. But a detailed look at the social contexts of sciences and the social flow of scientific claims to knowledge shows that sciences are the product of scientists, and scientists are social people. Scientific work is always social situated. It cannot be immunized from the relativizing force arising from the analysis of social context.

(a) The social situatedness of human knowledge allegedly means that God, if he exists, is inaccessible. All that we access through human knowledge and human social relations belongs strictly to a human level.

(b) Postmodern contextualism cannot easily account for itself. It builds its insights on linguistics and sociology, which make us more aware of the social influence of language and society. The appeal to social context extends to the social context of knowledge, as is studied by the sociology of knowledge.⁴Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Sociology: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), appendices F and G. Linguistics and sociology, as scientific enterprises, are conditioned by their social contexts. Therefore, postmodern skepticism about accessing truth extends to the truths of linguistics and sociology. And therefore it extends also to the claims of postmodern contextualism itself. It offers no definitive insight, but only one more culturally limited claim.

(c) Ethics has no foundation except in culture, and cultures are plural. There is no appeal outside all cultures that could serve as a basis for condemning the abhorrent practices of some cultures, such as child sacrifice.

6. Platonism.

Platonism has many forms. We may focus on Plato himself (and Socrates, who in the Platonic dialogues tends to serve as Plato’s mouthpiece). Plato says that the most ultimate constituents of the world are the “forms”: the form of the good; then also the form of justice, of beauty, of holiness.

What is the matter with Platonism?

(a) In the Timaeus, Plato himself allows a place for a “demiurge.” The demiurge is a godlike being. He looks at the eternal forms and then fashions particular things in imitation of the forms. But in this system the forms are superior to the demiurge. The demiurge is an inferior being, a counterfeit in comparison to the true God of the Bible.

(b) Is Plato able to account for his own knowledge? In the famous dialogue Meno, Socrates explores the idea of knowledge by reminiscence. In this dialogue it is suggested that we know by remembering. We recover into consciousness the memory of knowledge that the soul had by direct vision in its pre-existence, before being in the body. But this picture puts man in the place of God. Man, as an eternally existing soul, has an eternity akin to God’s eternity. And as one aspect of this eternity, he has an eternal knowledge.

Platonism has another problem. The growth of modern science has undermined the plausibility of Platonism. How? Plato’s program was a program to achieve mastery by reason. And indeed the sciences in their growth have made use of reason. But this growth has undermined confidence in human ability to discern the nature of the forms and the nature of the world, just by use of rationality. This rationality might take the form of direct vision of the forms, or dialectical reasoning in dialogues (Socrates’s method), or discernment of the forms by intense reflection on instances of the forms. Whichever of the variations we consider within ancient Greek philosophy, the Greeks got it wrong. They got wrong the nature of the world. They thought that the heavenly world (sun, moon, and stars) was unchanging, and it is not. They thought that the earth was at the center of a system of heavenly spheres whose motion carried the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. They thought that the world was built up from four “elements,” earth, water, air, and fire.

(c) Plato also has problems in ethics. The dialogue The Symposium has pederasty in the background. The proposals for government summarized in the early part of the Timaeus involve tyranny, deceit, and the destruction of marriage.

The discussion of Platonism is closer to home in Christian circles than some of the other alternatives, because from fairly early in the history of the church⁵And, indeed, even before the first century, we see similar attempts in Philo of Alexandria. various people tried to incorporate pieces of Platonism into Christian thinking. Augustine tried to do it by postulating that Plato’s forms were not independent forms, superior to the demiurge, but rather forms within the mind of God. But there are at least four major difficulties.

One is that the existence of actual distinct forms, each with its own integrity and shape, within the mind of God, is incompatible with the simplicity of God.

The second is that Augustine had to postulate the existence of these forms in the mind of God. He cannot give evidence for it. It just seemed plausible to him, as an explanation for why things in the world can belong to general categories (such as “good”).

The third is that the forms in the mind of God do us no good, because we cannot access them. Our minds are not identical to the mind of God. It may seem plausible to think that God’s mind is organized like ours, because we are made in the image of God. But we do not know the details, except through what God tells us.

The fourth difficulty is the worst. What God tells us, he tells us in the language used in the Bible. This language does not match the theory of forms, either in Plato or in Augustine. There are no “pure” forms, when one actually dips in and looks at the Bible or at human languages in general. (People can to some extent still find echoes of forms, if they come to examine the Bible with the theory of forms already in their minds. They see only what they allow themselves to see.) It is very much more complicated and more beautiful than that.⁶Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009). Augustine’s theory is just like Plato’s theory at one point: both theories used the assumption that by human rationality we could confidently infer the nature of things. Plato thought he could infer that the forms were ultimate. Augustine thought that he could infer that there were forms in God’s mind.

7. Aristotle.

Aristotle differed in a major way from Plato, in that he located forms not in a transcendent, invisible realm, but in the objects in nature that manifest the forms. Each individual horse has form and matter. The form is the form of a horse, which distinguishes horses from other animals. The matter is the distinct material in the composition of the particular horse, matter that differentiates this horse from all the other horses.

What is the matter with Aristotle?

(a) Aristotle in his book Metaphysics discusses a godlike being, the “Prime Mover,” who is also called “the Good” and “Mind” and “God.”⁷Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity, chap. 25. Unfortunately, this prime mover is not the God of the Bible. He/it is eternal, but there are forty-seven or forty-nine other unmoved movers, all of which are eternal. None of them is the creator, but only a causal starting point for the eternal motions of eternal heavenly bodies.

(b) Like Plato, Aristotle has confidence in the ability of human philosophy to sound out the nature of reality by rational reflection. The achievements of modern science have shown the failure of this kind of rational confidence.

(c) The Prime Mover has a loose connection with ethics. Aristotle thinks that the Prime Mover moves other entities because the entities desire it, as the final Good. But the Prime Mover is thought thinking itself: “its thinking is a thinking of thinking.”⁸Ibid., 286; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074b33–35, XII.ix.4. It is empty, as a source of ethics. At a practical level, ethics is related to the purposes of the things in the world. According to Aristotle, each thing, whether a human being, an animal, or a plant, has a purpose, namely to develop its potential into actuality. The purpose is inherent in each thing. In his ethical works, Aristotle postulates that “well-being” is the highest end.⁹Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), §2. This view is contrary to the Christian view, according to which ethics rests on the character of God, and is guided by what God says (as in the Ten Commandments).

The use of Plato and Aristotle in Christian theology and philosophy

The deficiences of Plato and Aristotle in their treatment of God are serious; they amount to blasphemies. In addition, their ethical views are defective. How could Christians have thought that other ideas from their philosophies could be safely adopted? In the end, we may not know. But two possible reasons suggest themselves.

First, for many Christian leaders in the first centuries, it may have seemed that there were no alternatives. One seemed to need some sort of assumptions about the deepest structure of the world in order to discuss some of the big questions. And Plato and Aristotle seemed to be better than some of the other offerings. Second, the adoption of some of their ideas seemed to work. It seemed to promote insight.

So it is worthwhile noting that criticisms can be lodged against even those aspects of Platonism and Aristotelianism that have found their way into Christian theology.¹⁰Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity, parts V and VI; Vern S. Poythress, Logic, Part I.C.

This paper proceeds primarily in a positive direction, by attempting to show that there is an alternative to the metaphysical systems proposed by Western philosophy.

Metaphysics through the word of God

The most obvious way to try to construct a Christian kind of metaphysics is just to read the Bible and see what it says about reality. It is not that hard to come to two preliminary conclusions.

The creator/creature distinction

First, there is a distinction between God the creator and everything that he has created. This distinction is a fundamental contribution of the Bible to the nature of reality. Reality has two levels: God, and everything else. Everything else has been created by God and is sustained and governed by God (Ps. 103:19; Col. 1:15–17).

This distinction goes together with another observation, namely that everything created did not eternally exist, but has come into existence. God alone exists eternally.

The unique eternal existence of God implies that God is in a deep sense more fundamental than any creature. This fundamental feature about God is an aspect of what we may begin to call Christian metaphysics. [And it differs from every one of the metaphysical offerings that we have surveyed in the history of Western philosophy.]

The Trinity

The next step in Christian metaphysics is to see what the Bible says in greater detail about God. The obvious answer is that there is only one true God (Gen. 1; Deut. 4:35; 6:4; Mark 12:29; 1 Cor. 8:6).

Then if we want to delve deeper, it gets more complicated. We have to deal with the doctrine of the Trinity. God is three persons. The Father is God; the Son is God; the Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son; the Father is not the Spirit; the Son is not the Spirit. It has proved convenient to develop technical terms to summarize the doctrine. We have the terms substance and essence, customarily used to designate the unity of God. And we have the term person (and sometimes subsistence) to designate the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in their distinctiveness and plurality. But the labels are not magical. They are labels that point to the full teaching of the Bible. Their meanings need not be equated, and indeed should not be equated, with any particular element in Greek philosophy.¹¹Poythress, Mystery of the Trinity, chap. 24.

Needless to say, the Trinity does not play a role in the metaphysics of Western philosophical systems.

The kinds of creatures

With the guidance of the Bible, we may also turn out attention to a more detailed survey of the second metaphysical level, the level of the creature. Gen. 1–2 is a good starting point.

According to Gen. 1, after an initial act of creation (verse 1), God acts in complicated ways that result in the coming into being of a more differentiated creation order. There are three major spatial regions: the heaven above, the earth beneath, and the water under the earth (the seas; Ex. 20:4; Gen. 1:10). Within each of these regions God creates creatures of many kinds: the plants (day 3), the heavenly lights (day 4), the sea creatures (day 5), the birds (day 5), the land animals (day 6), and finally mankind (day 6).

We are doing Christian metaphysics, by following what God says. God tells us some of the things that exist. He tells us something about how they are structured. They exist and live in the three regions. And they have some interactions with each other, as when man and animals eat vegetation (Gen. 1:29–30). What God tells us is not all that he knows, but it is a solid beginning.

The foundation for created structure

How did we come to know so much about God and the created order? We came to know by reading the Bible. The Bible is God’s word, and so we can have confidence. We avoid the crisis of skepticism in postmodern contextualism and ancient Greek skepticism, skepticism that arrives from thinking there is no divine source for human knowledge. God designed the Bible to have a fundamental role in our living. So it has primacy in our thinking about the world. What has primacy is not simply a few verses about the unity of God or about the kinds of creatures mentioned in Gen. 1–2. The whole Bible has primacy. So, in a broader sense, we can see that the whole Bible, the entirety of its message, is the metaphysics of God for human beings. As many have observed, it does not mean that the Bible is a technical textbook for chemistry. It does mean that, both in its generalities and in its details, it functions as the foundational statement into which everything else should be fitted.

But we could still have doubts. The Bible is given to us as human beings for our nourishment. It is a practical book. Could it be that God has made a deeper level that is more fundamental metaphysically, but which we could never access in our knowledge (epistemically)?

The answer that the Bible itself gives is complicated. There are several things to observe. First, God has revealed what is the deepest metaphysics by revealing himself. We know that he is one God and three persons. We do not know God comprehensively, in the way that only he himself knows. But we do know him, through Christ (John 17:3). We must not underestimate that knowledge, or consider it inferior to or a mere addendum to details in scientific knowledge that human beings have uncovered in the course of history.

Second, God himself assigns to human beings a task of filling the earth and subduing it (Gen. 1:28), and that includes an intellectual aspect (Gen. 2:19–20). Human beings are supposed to learn not only from what God says in the words he addresses to them, but from looking at the world that God has put around them. There is room in Gen. 1:28 for all the developments in sciences, both now and in the future.¹²Poythress, Redeeming Science, chap. 11. But all that development fits within the fundamental picture that God has given us in Gen. 1.

Third, Gen. 1 itself indicates that there are many mysteries that remain about God’s created things. God speaks to mankind, to tell us about our role. But he also speaks to specify things in the created world, such as “Let there be light” (verse 3). In this case, the particular words happen to be recorded in Genesis. But many other words that God utters in governing the world are not recorded:

He [God] sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.

…

He sends out his words, and melts them [snow and ice]; he makes his wind blow and the waters flow. (Ps. 147:15, 18)

God’s words command the world; the world does not command his words. Therefore, his words are more fundamental. We may conclude that the ultimate metaphysical structure of the world is the word of God that specifies everything in world (Isa. 46:9–11; Lam. 3:37–38; Eph. 1:11).¹³See Pierce Taylor Hibbs, The Speaking Trinity & His Worded World: Why Language is at the Center of Everything(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).

According to John 1:1–3, this governing word of God in turn has its foundation in the eternal Word, the Word “who was God” (verse 1).

Trinitarian foundation

The word of God is trinitarian. According to John 1:1, God the Father speaks the Word eternally. From other passages we learn that the Spirit of God is like the breath of God, going with the word to bring it to its destination (Ezek. 37).¹⁴Vern S. Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity: How Perspectives in Human Knowledge Imitate the Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2018), chap. 8.Because of the coinherence of the persons of the Trinity, God’s speech directed toward the world is also trinitarian, in a derivative way. God speaks through the Word, the Son, in the presence of the Holy Spirit, who in the work of creation “was hovering over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2).

Every speech that God utters can be nothing other than trinitarian, because God is trinitarian, and his word harmonizes with and reflects who he is. It follows that the command, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3), and similar commands later on in Gen. 1, express the trinitarian pattern. God the Father speaks the light into existence, according to his eternal plan, which includes within it a plan for light. God the Son is manifested in the word that goes out, which distinguishes the light as a distinct thing. We see the distinction vividly in Gen. 1:4, where the light is contrasted with the darkness. The presence of the Holy Spirit is explicitly mentioned in verse 2. This explicit mention is meant to suggest that the Holy Spirit continues his presence throughout the works recorded in Gen. 1. And indeed, God’s breathing of the breath of life into Adam in 2:7 has thematic connections with the representation of the Spirit as a breath in Ezek. 37. Through the Spirit God gives life (Ps. 104:29–30), and also he gave resurrection life in the resurrection of Christ (Rom. 8:11).

We may infer, then, that the Holy Spirit is immediately present in God’s works of creation in Gen. 1. The Spirit works in applying the word to the coming into being and shaping of light. Light is crafted by the Father, by the Word, and by the Spirit, each in his distinctive way of participation. We may also infer that the creation of light is in harmony with its continued existence. Every instance of light is a response to the word of the Father, through the Son, in the power and breath of the Holy Spirit. Such is the metaphysics of light.

We may note briefly a further metaphysical structuring of light, a structuring that has its roots in the Trinity.¹⁵Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, appendix F. First, when God created light in Gen. 1:3, he created it with its own distinctive existence as light. It contrasts with the darkness. The unity of all instances of light reflects on the level of the creature the unity of God.

Second, God designed and specified different kinds of lights, as we see vividly in the works of the fourth day of creation (Gen. 1:14–19). There is diversity. This diversity reflects an original, an archetype. There is an inner diversity in God, in the persons of the Trinity. This diversity finds special expression in the Son, who is the Word. As the Word, he calls into existence the variations in different things in the world.

Third, God places each thing in the context of relations to other things. The light functions in its meaning in the context of all other created things, and it illumines them.

In creating all things, God specifies in his word the unity of each thing, the diversity of things, and their context and existence and function in relation to other things, both God himself and the things that he has made.

These three—unity, diversity, and context—reflect respectively the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, as is shown elsewhere.¹⁶Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, 389.

A mistake in Plato and Aristotle

We may contrast this trinitarian specification with what happens in both Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s categories, and Aristotle’s essences are conceived of as pure. The diversity and the contextual relations are subordinated to the unity of the form (Plato), or the unity of the essence (Aristotle).

Illustrating by analogy

We may further illustrate the difference between Plato’s or Aristotle’s view on the one hand, and a biblically based view, on the other hand. Consider the word light. God used the word in Gen. 1:3 to specify what he brought into existence. This word has a range of meaning (diversity). It can designate created, visible light, as it does in verse 3. But it may also designate God: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). The two “lights” are not the same. The creator (God as light) is not the creature (created light that we see). At the same time, the two are analogous. If they were not analogous in some way, there would be no meaning in using the same word in both contexts.

Plato and Aristotle (especially Aristotle’s work in the logic of syllogisms) expect that when we want to be penetrating with our use of reason, we must use our terms univocally. Each term must mean exactly one thing, not many. But is it not the case that the deepest reasoning that human beings could do would be reasoning about God? And God gives us a term light, which he himself uses analogically, not univocally. Plato and Aristotle cannot accommodate God, because he breaks the bounds of how they expect reason to function.

The immediate reply might be to say that the use of the word light in 1 John 1:5 is merely metaphorical. We can all see that it is metaphorical, because we already know what the word light normally means. It designates physical light, visible light. The tendency inherited from Greek philosophy is to attempt to reduce analogical relations to univocal truth. We start with the univocal meaning of physical light. Then we work out similarities and differences between physical light on the one hand, and on the other hand what we mean when we say that God is light. The similarities are cases of univocal meaning, and the differences are cases, if you will, of equivocal meaning. Analogy is then construed as a clever combination of some specific elements that are univocally the same, and other specific elements that employ differences. Each difference is a kind of equivocal meaning, in that the one side of the difference has one meaning, and the other side has another meaning, and the two sides are now each understood on their own terms univocally.

This procedure has seemed to make sense to many people. It makes sense especially because Aristotle’s scheme of syllogisms requires univocal meanings for its correct operation.¹⁷Poythress, Logic, chap. 17. But it usually presupposes an implicit metaphysics. It presupposes that the deepest structure of the world is univocal.

Gen. 1:3, however, contradicts this assumption. According to Gen. 1:3, God spoke. “God said, ‘Let there be light.’” We understand this verse by analogy with human instances of speaking. The human instances are analogous. But they are analogous, not identical. We cannot say that we master what it means to say that God spoke. The word speak is not a univocal word. The lack of pure univocism then extends to the effects of God’s speech. That is, it extends to the whole world.

We may see the same thing if we reflect again on 1 John 1:5: “God is light, and in there is no darkness at all.” God is light. He is light even before the creation of the world. The more fundamental pattern, the archetype, is God, not created light. Created light reflects God. It testifies to God. It is not identical with God. That would be pantheism. But it manifests God. God is present in it, showing us in his presence is “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom. 1:20).

It seems to me that there are at least two implications. First, since God is manifested in the light, we cannot actually separate the light, or its meaning, from its source. There is no such thing as physical light that is merely physical, that is merely its own thing, and not also a dependent, created thing, a thing that manifests the presence of its creator. We do not just start with physical light, as if we could understand it as merely physical, and then, only at a later stage, we proceed to think about a metaphorical usage in which we may or may not in some sense meaningfully say that “God is light.” The God-relatedness of light is built in from the start, even if in unbelief we suppress it (Rom. 1:18).

Second, because God is the archetype for light, we may reverse the usual thinking about metaphor. It may be common to think that the rock-bottom kind of light is physical light. Therefore, the statement that God is light is a metaphor. But we may say instead that God is the rock-bottom light. He is the original light. What he is, as light, is the archetype or pattern for the creation of physical light. So physical light is a metaphor for God as light. God is the archetype, and physical light is a reflection, a derivation, which we call an ectype.

We will return to this idea of an archetype and ectypes later in our discussion.

We can arrive at a similar result by employing John Frame’s triad of perspectives for lordship, the perspectives of authority, control, and presence, a triad reflective of the Trinity.¹⁸John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), 15–18; Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, chap. 14. God the Father manifests his authority in the plan to create light. God the Son, as the Word, controls the specifications for light. God the Holy Spirit is present in the light that we experience. The metaphysics of light involves taking into account the distinctive structuring of light through the work of the trinitarian God.

Metaphysics through the knowledge of God

We may take a second path for developing Christian metaphysics by considering the knowledge of God. God knows everything. God plans everything. His knowledge is prior to the world itself. It is prior in the sense of time, because he knows everything from before the foundation of the world. But it is also prior ontologically, we might say, because his knowledge leads to the existence of the world, rather than being causally dependent on the world (as if he had to inform himself, based on looking out at a world about which he had imperfect knowledge).

Of course, we as human beings are not God. We do not know everything that God knows, nor do we know it in the same way he does. But we are made in the image of God. God’s knowledge is the standard for our knowledge.

So what is God’s knowledge like? We can know something about God because he has told us. He has told us that he is one God. So his knowledge is unified. He has also told us that he is three persons. In particular, Matt. 11:27 says:

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

The Father knows the Son. This knowledge is clearly foundational for any kind of knowledge about which we might reflect. This divine knowledge is eternal knowledge. The Father knows the Son eternally. Since the Son is God, in knowing the Son the Father knows all things. Likewise, the Son knows all things in knowing the Father. The knowledge mentioned in this verse is not said to be mere knowledge of facts. God knows all facts. But his knowledge is personal knowledge. The Father knows the Son, not simply facts about the Son. Matt. 11:27 makes no explicit mention of the Holy Spirit. But by the doctrine of coinherence, we infer that the Holy Spirit is present and active in divine knowledge. This presence is confirmed by his presence in all human knowledge: “But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand” (Job 32:8).

We may also see the Spirit’s participation in divine knowledge more directly, in 1 Cor. 2:10: “For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” This searching work of the Spirit affirms that the knowledge of the Spirit is personal knowledge that is comprehensive. It includes all “the depths of God.” The Spirit’s comprehensive knowledge offers the secure basis for the derivative knowledge of divine things that is given to Paul and his fellow proclaimers of the gospel (verses 12–13). The Spirit is also necessary for ordinary Christians to have spiritual knowledge (verses 14–16).

The knowledge of each person of the Trinity clearly exists in the context of the mystery of the Trinity. The Father, in knowing the Son (Matt. 11:27), personally knows as the Father. The object of his knowledge is the Son. There is a personal differentiation in the knowledge. At the same time, the knowledge is unified, because there is only one God, who knows all things. Unity in knowledge is expressed by the fact that the Father knows one unified person, namely the Son. Differentiation is expressed in the personal difference between the Father’s person and his knowledge of the Son, on the one hand, and the Son’s person and his knowledge of the Father, on the other. These are explicitly differentiated in Matt. 11:27. Likewise, the Spirit is explicitly differentiated from the “depths of God” by the key clause, which says that he “searches.”

We may, in fact, distinguish three aspects in the knowledge of God. First, there is unity in knowledge, corresponding to the unity of God who is one God. Unity is also expressed in the unity of a single distinct person, such as the person of the Father. Second, there is diversity of knowledge, corresponding to the distinction between the Son and the Father. Third, there is a trinitarian context of all knowledge. We might say that the mode in which the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father is the mode of the context of the Holy Spirit, who searches the depths of God. The knowledge that the Father has of the Son is always and in all ways in relation to the third person. This third person, the Spirit, is neither the knower (the Father) nor the known (the Son), but is present in and with them. In the mystery of an eternal activity, he actively searches. We might say that he is, as it were, the knowing process itself.

Now, what may we infer? We may further reflect on an implication of the doctrine of divine simplicity, or else the doctrine of coinherence of the persons of the Trinity. These two doctrine are correlative. Both affirm the unity of God. This unity is more than an externally imposed or superficial unity. No knowledge by any of the persons of the Trinity can be separated from the knowledge of the other persons. As an inference from simplicity, we conclude that the principle of unity applies not only to the knowledge of God as a holistic knowledge of all things, but to particular things that God knows.

What do we have in mind? God knows the Son. That is holistic. God also knows about every detail of the life of David: “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar” (Ps. 139:2). He knows each word that David will speak: “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold O Lord, you know it altogether” (verse 4). One such word would be the word tongue, in this very verse.¹⁹Technically, the English expression “on my tongue” translates one Hebrew word, composed of three morphemes. God also knows the Hebrew morpheme for “tongue.” Let us take it as an example.

God’s knowledge of the word tongue is not separable from the Father’s knowing the Son. We conclude that God’s knowledge of tongue has the fundamental features that belong to trinitarian knowledge. It is unified knowledge. There is diversity and distinction in knowledge. The Father knows the word tongue distinctively. The Son knows tongue distinctively, in a mode distinct from the Father. Moreover, the distinctions extend, as it were, “inside” the word tongue. David’s employment in verse 4 is only one instance. The word can be used not only to designate the physical organ inside the mouth (Job 41:1), but in more extended ways. In verse 4, David considers the role of the tongue and its movements in producing words that come from his mouth. The words are not physically in or on his tongue, but the word tongue metonymically represents what David himself is just about to say, using his tongue and other organs. There are distinctive uses of the word, and at the same time it is the same word in all these uses. David’s use in verse 4 appears in the context of these other uses, and in the context of the other verses in Ps. 139.

The archetypal “context” for all the Father’s knowledge is the context of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit searching the depths of God. But by simplicity this context is not separable for the context of God’s knowledge of the word tongue in verse 4. And the context includes God’s knowledge of other instances of the same word, and of other words that God through David has assembled around verse 4.

In sum, we have arrived at a confirmation of what we earlier observed by starting with the reality of God speaking. God’s speaking is a trinitarian speaking, and leads naturally to our becoming aware of trinitarian structure forming the world that he makes. Likewise, reflection on the trinitarian structure of God’s knowledge leads to our becoming aware of the trinitarian structure of his knowledge of particular items of knowledge, whether those items are words like tongue or things in the world. He knows when a sparrow falls to the ground (Matt. 10:29).

Metaphysics through divine pattern

Time is too short for us to develop fully a third route to metaphysics. We will only sketch it. In the third route we begin with the revelation that the eternal Son is the eternal image of the Father: “He [the beloved Son] is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Heb. 1:3 indicates the same thing in somewhat different terms: “He [the Son] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, ….”

This third route starts, then, with the idea of a pattern and its image. The archetypal pattern is found in God the Father. The eternal image, or ectype, is found in God the Son. This structure is the ultimate foundation for the language concerning archetype and ectype, [which we used earlier].

When we look carefully at the Col. 1:15, we can see that the structure that it describes confirms what we found in the immediately previous approach, in which we started with the knowledge of God. For one thing, we find that the verse underlines the unity that is in God. The Son has the same nature as the Father, to use the language of Heb. 1:3. The image is the image of the original, and it matches the original. At the same time, the image is distinct from the original. There is in fact an order that the two verses suggest. The original pattern is original in relation to the image, which reflects it. Similarly, the Son is the Son of the Father, who begets him. The Word is the speech of God, who speaks him. Each of these three formulations is one way of talking about the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son.²⁰Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, chap. 24.

We shall leave to other works the discussion of the fact that, in the context of imaging, the Holy Spirit pre-eminently expresses the glory of God in the relation between the Archetype and the Image.²¹Ibid., chaps. 8 and 11.

The created image

We still have to consider how this trinitarian structure might impact the nature of created things. For this purpose, we begin with the creation of mankind. Gen. 1:26–27 indicates that man is made in the image of God. Gen. 1 is written long before Col. 1:15 and Heb. 1:3 reveal that the Son is the image. But the truth about the Son is the truth even before it is revealed. We may infer, then, that the Son is the image of the Father even before creation. This image is the pattern in turn for the imaging relation that God brings into existence with the creation of human beings. In other words, human beings are ectypal images. The archetypal pattern is the Father. The Son is the ectype of this pattern. But his status as image is archetypal in relation to the creation of mankind. Human beings are ectypal images of the Son. And the process in which God creates a human being is an ectype of the eternal generation of the Son, as image.

Human beings are one and many. They share a common human nature, in reflection of the truth that the Son shares the nature of God with the Father. Each human being is distinct from the others. Each human being exists in relation to the others, and in relation to God who made him.

So there are these fundamental features: the unity, the diversity, and the relationality of human beings. These three do not exist in isolation from each other. The unity means that each human being is human. But to be human includes being distinct from other human beings. And it includes being in relation to other human beings. Likewise, being human includes being distinct from God and being in relation to God. Conversely, being a distinct and contrastive human being includes being a human being in one’s own unity, and being in relation. The three are inseparably together. This inseparability, naturally, imitates on the level of the creature the inseparability of the persons of the Trinity.

Human beings uniquely have the image of God, in contrast to plants and animals. Gen. 1 indicates that plants and animals are made according to their kinds, and they reproduce according to their kinds. The human race is a distinct “kind.” But it is defined not merely in relation to Adam as a prototype, but in relation to God as the archetype.

Plants and animals nevertheless have a tantalizing affinity with human beings in at least one respect. They reproduce. And when they reproduce, they produce offspring like themselves—according to their kind.

It is easy to see that, in this respect, they reflect some of the features of the human race. And, as we have seen, the human race reflects, on the level of the creature, some of the structure belonging to the Trinity.

Let us consider horses. There is a unity not only to each individual horse, but to the collectivity of horses as a “kind.” There is both unity and diversity. And there is relationality. The three aspects belong inseparably together.

Rocks and stars do not reproduce in the way that plants and animals do. But in a diminished way, they too have their “kinds.” Unity and diversity and relationality are woven into the fabric of created things.

[[Omit for lack of time:

Metaphysics through the attributes of God

Finally, I may briefly suggest that the same conclusion might follow from a consideration of the attributes of God, especially his simplicity.

To say that God is simple implies more than that he is one God. It also implies that his unity cannot be broken down. God does not have parts. And his attributes are not parts. All his attributes are inseparable from each other.

Theologians over the centuries have wrestled with how do deal with the metaphysics of the attributes. If there is no distinction in any way between two attributes, such as a distinction in meaning, then we do not know what any of the attributes means, and it threatens to undermine the knowledge of God. On the other hand, if we strongly distinguish them, to the point of separation, we undermine the simplicity of God. I think that this is a mystery that we will never solve.²²Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2020), chap. 43.

We might nevertheless venture to observe that some attributes can be associated more pre-eminently with one person of the Trinity. The authority of God is easily associated with God the Father. The Father, as the source of the plan of the world, is pre-eminent in authority. The control of God is easily associated with God the Son, who executes the plan of God and in that execution exerts control over the world. The presence of God is easily associated with God the Holy Spirit, who expresses the presence of God during the time of creation (Gen. 1:2) and in the time of redemption, as he dwells in our hearts (John 14:17; Rom. 8:9). ²³John M. Frame, “A Primer on Perspectivalism (Revised 2008)”.

All three attributes, authority, control, and presence, belong to the one God, and therefore to each of the persons of the Trinity. Nevertheless, we can also observe differentiation. This observation suggests that we think of the distinction between two attributes as being analogous to or reflective of the distinction between two persons of the Trinity. Consequently, we have both unity in all the attributes, based on the unity of the one God that the attributes describe, and diversity between any two attributes, based on the diversity of persons.

We can also do it another way. God is absolute. He has no needs. Therefore, he has no need of anything outside himself to manifest the diversity of his attributes to us. Since the diversity we experience needs no ultimate source outside of God, it is a diversity that comes from God and that reflects God. That is, it reflects diversity that is already in God. We must only be careful to affirm that this diversity is not a diversity of parts (which would countradict simplicity). It is a diversity of persons. It is incomprehensible.

Finally, the diversity of God with respect to his own descriptions of himself is the archetype for the diversity with respect to his descriptions of the world, and the diversity of his plan for each thing in the world. The diversity in his plan is reflected in the diversity of the things and events and relations in the world. Therefore, the world reflects the structure of the Trinity, both the unity of the God and the diversity of persons. It reflects also the coinherence of the persons. Specifically, the coinherence of the persons is reflected in the coinherence of the attributes of God. The attributes are inseparable. Each is a perspective on God, and therefore also (by simplicity) a perspective on all the attributes of God. The coinherence in attributes is then also manifested in the unity and coherence of God’s plan, as a plan that also plans the diversity of things and events in the world.

The relation between metaphysical approaches

All of these approaches to Christian metaphysics may be viewed as implications of one another. In particular, the doctrine of simplicity implies the simplicity of God’s word, his speech. It implies the simplicity of his knowledge. It implies the simplicity of his patterns. And of course, it implies the simplicity of his attributes.

The multiplicity of approaches to metaphysics also derives from God. The Bible supplies three main analogies for explicating distinctive relations among the persons of the Trinity. The three are the analogy with communication, the analogy with a family, and the analogy with reflections. These three lead respectively to the three successive explications of Christian metaphysics. The derivation from attributes is most closely related to the analogy with communication, because the attributes of God are labeled with words, which are instances of communication.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have presented observations about the metaphysics of reality. God is trinitarian. God’s word, his knowledge, and his patterning therefore reflect trinitarian structure. His attributes reflect trinitarian structure. Therefore, the world, utterly distinct from God, expresses trinitarian structure. This metaphysics is distinctive trinitarian. It is incompatible with Platonic metaphysics. It is incompatible with Aristotelian metaphysics. It is incompatible with Kantian dimensionalism.²⁴We cannot expound these claims more fully in this paper. But we may at least hint. In all three major philosophies, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, verbal expression is utterly subordinate to thought. Thus, there is an essentially unitarian conception of the function of language. (Not God speaking his word.) Second, knowledge, to be true, must be utterly identical across persons. This is a unitarian conception of knowledge. Third, a pattern and an embodiment of the pattern do not intrinsically require a relation that interpenetrates both. Fourth, qualities and descriptive terms are separable in meaning. The anti-trinitarian slant of these philosophies does not exist here and there, but throughout. It is incompatible with anything and everything except itself. God rules the world, and God is trinitarian. The world expresses the character of God, and nothing else. It cannot express anything else, because God is absolute and the world is utterly dependent.

I suggest that some items lodged in the history of theology need to be rethought.

Notes

• 1
  Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• 2
  Vern S. Poythress, Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), appendix F1; also Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy: A God-Centered Approach to the Big Questions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), chap. 23.
• 3
  Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), especially chaps. 16, 17, appendices A, B, and I.
• 4
  Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Sociology: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), appendices F and G.
• 5
  And, indeed, even before the first century, we see similar attempts in Philo of Alexandria.
• 6
  Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
• 7
  Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity, chap. 25.
• 8
  Ibid., 286; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074b33–35, XII.ix.4.
• 9
  Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), §2.
• 10
  Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity, parts V and VI; Vern S. Poythress, Logic, Part I.C.
• 11
  Poythress, Mystery of the Trinity, chap. 24.
• 12
  Poythress, Redeeming Science, chap. 11.
• 13
  See Pierce Taylor Hibbs, The Speaking Trinity & His Worded World: Why Language is at the Center of Everything(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).
• 14
  Vern S. Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity: How Perspectives in Human Knowledge Imitate the Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2018), chap. 8.
• 15
  Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, appendix F.
• 16
  Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, 389.
• 17
  Poythress, Logic, chap. 17.
• 18
  John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), 15–18; Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, chap. 14.
• 19
  Technically, the English expression “on my tongue” translates one Hebrew word, composed of three morphemes. God also knows the Hebrew morpheme for “tongue.”
• 20
  Poythress, Knowing and the Trinity, chap. 24.
• 21
  Ibid., chaps. 8 and 11.
• 22
  Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2020), chap. 43.
• 23
  John M. Frame, “A Primer on Perspectivalism (Revised 2008)”.
• 24
  We cannot expound these claims more fully in this paper. But we may at least hint. In all three major philosophies, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, verbal expression is utterly subordinate to thought. Thus, there is an essentially unitarian conception of the function of language. (Not God speaking his word.) Second, knowledge, to be true, must be utterly identical across persons. This is a unitarian conception of knowledge. Third, a pattern and an embodiment of the pattern do not intrinsically require a relation that interpenetrates both. Fourth, qualities and descriptive terms are separable in meaning. The anti-trinitarian slant of these philosophies does not exist here and there, but throughout.