Theopedia

Essence

Definition

Essence is what a thing is, the common nature that answers the question “what is it?”, as distinct from how many individuals share it or who any one of them is. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share one and the same divine essence: not three separate instances of a shared kind, the way three human beings each have their own instance of human nature, but three persons who each have the whole, undivided essence.1 The same essence/person distinction lets Christ be one person who has two essences, or natures, divine and human, without either being diminished.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that “there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”1 “Of one substance” makes the divine essence singular and shared, not a kind multiplied across three instances; “each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided” rules out picturing the essence as something split into three portions, one per person. Each of the three has all of it, and there remains only the one essence, not three.

Historical Development

Nicene homoousios (325)

The Council of Nicaea confessed the Son “very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father,”3 against Arius, who taught that the Son was a created being rather than one who shared the Father’s own essence. The council’s chosen term, homoousios (“same essence”), was picked over the Arian-acceptable alternative homoiousios (“similar essence”): the Arians “were willing to admit that the Father, Son, and Spirit were ὁμοιούσιοι, but refused to admit that they were ὁμοούσιοι.”2 The difference is not cosmetic. Homoiousios would mean a kind shared by separate individuals, the way Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are all human; read that way, the creed would teach three Gods rather than one.2 Homoousios instead asserts numerical identity: “the same numerical, infinite, indivisible essence subsists in the three persons of the Trinity.”2 The council made the same point another way, defining the Son’s generation as being “of the very essence of the Father” (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ πατρός).2

Terminological instability before the Cappadocian settlement

The vocabulary for essence took longer to settle than the doctrine did. Latin translators rendered ὁμοούσιος as consubstantialis, using “substance” for “essence,” and this alone produced open disagreement among orthodox writers who agreed on the doctrine itself: Jerome, writing to Damasus, called it “profane to affirm that there are three substances in God,” while Hilary “said… more than a hundred times that there are three substances in God.”4 The two were not actually divided over the Trinity, only using “substance” in different senses, one for the shared essence and one for the three individual subsistences.4 The Cappadocian fathers resolved the confusion by fixing ousia (“essence”) for what is one in God and hypostasis (“person”) for what is three, “solidify[ing] the essence as a single, simple ousia” and settling the Trinity’s technical vocabulary.5 In the West, Tertullian had already proposed a comparable fix on his own terms, settling on essentia and substantia for God’s being and persona or subsistentia for the persons, vocabulary Augustine and the Reformers kept; Calvin himself defined “person” simply as “subsistence in God’s essence.”6

Reformed scholastic reception

Reformed orthodoxy inherited this settled terminology and used it to guard the doctrine against errors on both sides. Van Mastricht states that the Trinity of persons does not contradict God’s oneness, “for in these three persons there is only one essence, one existence, one subsistence; we count three only in the modes of subsisting. These modes do not mean three gods, but rather, three who are one God.”7 Turretin pressed the same grammar against the Socinians, who denied divine simplicity in order to undercut the Trinity: since composition requires “more than one real entity,” treating three persons plus one shared nature as four components would produce “a sort of ‘quaternity’” rather than a Trinity. Turretin held instead that there is “numerically one divine essence with three hypostases (persons),” and that the persons “are modes distinguishing indeed the persons from each other, but not composing… since they have one common essence.”8

Opposing Views

Arianism. Denies that the Son (and, on the fuller subordinationist pattern, the Spirit) shares the Father’s own essence, treating either as a lesser or created nature rather than the numerically same divine essence: the very claim Nicaea’s homoousios was framed to exclude.2

Tritheism. Reads “one essence” as a shared kind rather than one numerically identical essence, the confusion the Nicene fathers foreclosed by choosing ὁμοούσιος over ὁμοιούσιος. On that reading, Father, Son, and Spirit would be three Gods of one kind, the way Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are three men of one kind.2

Modalism. Runs the opposite direction, treating “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” as successive roles or appearances of one subject rather than really distinct persons who each have the whole essence.

Objections and Responses

If each of the three persons has “the whole divine essence,” doesn’t that mean the essence is either divided three ways or that God is three essences rather than one? Neither. Turretin’s rule is that the persons “are modes distinguishing indeed the persons from each other, but not composing,” precisely because “they have one common essence.”8 A mode of subsisting is not a part of a whole, the way a body and soul are parts of a person, so three such modes do not add up to three essences any more than they add a fourth thing beyond the three persons.8 The confession’s own wording makes the same point directly: each person has “the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”1

Does calling the persons “modes of subsisting” collapse into modalism, which also speaks of God taking different “modes”? The two claims share a word but not a meaning. Modalism’s “modes” are successive roles the one God plays, so that the same subject is Father at one time, Son at another, and Spirit at a third, with none really distinct from the others. Van Mastricht’s “modes of subsisting” are eternal and simultaneous rather than sequential: they distinguish three subsistences that are, at every moment, really Father, Son, and Spirit, each possessing the one essence they share without remainder.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 471. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Archibald Alexander Hodge, “Chapter VII. Creeds and Confessions,” in Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 116-117, quoting the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed from Philip Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom. ↩

  4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), bk. 1, chap. 13, 112-113. ↩ ↩2

  5. Keith Wesley Goad, “Gregory’s Grammar for the Trinity,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 148, summarizing John McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001). ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩

  7. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 8, “The Unity of God,” 209. ↩ ↩2

  8. Francis Turretin, quoted in Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin and Classical Theism,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 128-129, citing Institutes of Elenctic Theology 3.7.5-9. ↩ ↩2 ↩3