Theopedia

Cornelius Plantinga

Overview

Cornelius “Neal” Plantinga Jr. (born 1946) is an American theologian ordained in the Christian Reformed Church who served as president of Calvin Theological Seminary from 2002 to 2011.1 He is best known outside the seminary for Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (1995) and, within academic Trinitarian theology, for a social model of the Trinity that has drawn sustained critical engagement from Reformed scholarship. He is the brother of the philosopher Alvin Plantinga.1

Life and Ministry

Plantinga was born February 14, 1946, in Jamestown, North Dakota.1 He earned an AB from Calvin College in 1967, a BD from Calvin Theological Seminary in 1971, and a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1982.1 After seminary he was ordained in the Christian Reformed Church and pastored churches in New York and New Jersey through the 1970s.1 He returned to Calvin Theological Seminary to teach systematic theology from 1979 to 1996, served as Dean of the Chapel at Calvin College from 1996 to 2001, and then as president of Calvin Theological Seminary from 2002 to 2011.1 From 2012 to 2024 he was a senior research fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.1 Both Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be and his later Engaging God’s World (2002) were named Christianity Today Book of the Year.1

Theological Contribution

Plantinga proposed a social model of the Trinity, building on Leonard Hodgson’s earlier work.2 Keith Goad’s dissertation on Trinitarian grammar devotes a full chapter to Plantinga’s model, evaluating it against the Cappadocian tradition Plantinga claims as his own precedent.2 Plantinga takes the Athanasian Creed’s two rules, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each God, and yet are not three Gods but one, as his standard for orthodoxy, and adds his own requirement that the term “person” be used in its “full sense”: each person of the Trinity must be “a distinct center of will, knowledge, love, and action.”3

To illustrate how the doctrine should be stated, Plantinga offered three analogies, only the last of which he judged adequate. He rejected the claim that God is like three professors holding the same academic post (“John Cooper is professor of theology at Calvin Seminary, Henry Zwaanstra is professor of theology at Calvin Seminary, and Ted Minnema is professor of theology at Calvin Seminary, and yet they are not three Calvin professors, but only one”), objecting that it affirms threeness at the cost of being “inherently self-contradictory.”4 He likewise rejected an analogy built on three descriptions of one man (the “oldest native Minnesotan teaching philosophy at Calvin College,” the “author of Until Justice and Peace Embrace,” and “the only Michigander who loves the music of a Messiaen” all naming philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff), on the grounds that it fails to confess three real, distinct persons and so amounts to “an analogy not for biblical or even classical trinitarianism but rather for the heresy of modalism.”4 The analogy he judged most promising described a family: “The Cartwright family includes a son Adam, who is tall, silent serious; a son Hoss who is massive, gap-toothed, indelicate; and a son Little Joe, who is a roguish and charming ladies’ man.”5 On Plantinga’s account, three persons who share one generic divine nature and belong to one divine family satisfy both of the Athanasian Creed’s rules, so that “ousia is the common word for the three but that hypostasis is the sign for the specific characteristics or peculiar quality of each.”6

Plantinga argued that the doctrine of simplicity, the teaching that God’s attributes are not separate parts but are identical with his one undivided being, is a borrowed Neo-Platonist commitment rather than a biblical one.2 He built part of his case on his brother Alvin Plantinga’s philosophical critique of Thomas Aquinas: “if God is identical with each of his properties, then each of his properties is identical with each of his properties, so that God has but one property,” reducing God to a “mere abstract object” incapable of acting.7 He read John’s Gospel’s language of the Father and Son being “one” and being “in” one another as describing a mutual indwelling among three distinct centers of consciousness, rather than as describing one simple divine essence.8

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be argues that “sin is culpable disturbance of shalom,” the peace, harmony, and right relatedness God intends for his creation, rather than merely the breaking of isolated rules.9

Historical Significance

Goad’s evaluation of Plantinga’s social model concludes that it introduces three distinct dangers into the doctrine of the Trinity. First, by making the persons alike in kind rather than one in a single, simple essence, the model “fails to provide safeguards that protect the unity of the Godhead,” since three persons who merely share a common set of attributes “do not necessarily operate inseparably, but could logically operate apart from one another.”10 Second, by requiring that “person” carry its full contemporary sense of a separate center of consciousness, will, and desire, the model “fails to protect the proper Creator-creature distinctions,” treating God’s nature the way a class of created beings would be studied rather than preserving God’s unique standing as Creator.10 Third, by explaining exactly how each divine person is one and three in terms of possessed properties, with the Son and Spirit dependent on the Father for those properties, the model “fails to provide proper distinctions that protect the unity and the distinctions,” to the point that the Son does not share the Father’s aseity.10 Goad concludes that Plantinga’s model shows “a strong tendency toward tritheism” for introducing three discrete wills into the Godhead, and “a strong tendency toward a form of Arianism” for making the Son’s deity derivative from the Father’s rather than identical with it.11

Against Plantinga’s reading of John’s “oneness” and “inness” language, Goad argues that the same texts are more naturally read as describing the inseparable operation of Father and Son in the economy of redemption rather than as a claim about how the immanent Trinity is constituted, so that they support Nazianzen’s single, simple essence at least as well as they support Plantinga’s social model.8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. “Cornelius Plantinga,” Wikipedia, accessed September 2, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  2. Keith Wesley Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), chap. 6, “Simplicity, Being, and Persons: A Discrepancy of Definitions,” 231. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 232. ↩

  4. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 234-35. ↩ ↩2

  5. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 235. ↩

  6. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 236. ↩

  7. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 240. ↩

  8. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 260. ↩ ↩2

  9. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 18. ↩

  10. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 262. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. Goad, “Trinitarian Grammars,” 261. ↩