Truth Unites - Is the Filioque True? (With Fred Sanders)

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund and Fred Sanders discuss the filiioque, the doctrine that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Ryan McGraw's What is Covenant Theology?: https://www.amazon.com/What-Covenant-Theology-Promises-Sacraments/dp/1433592770 Fred Sanders The Deep Things of God: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Things-God-Second-Everything/dp/1433556375/ Fred Sanders' The Holy Spirit: https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Introduction-Systematic-Theology/dp/1433561433/   Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

I am a Western theologian. I affirm the Philly Oakway for reasons we can talk about later, but I habitually draw diagrams and make basic explanations that are open to both East and West. Hey, everybody. This video is an interview that I did with Fred Sanders, who's a fantastic theologian on the Trinity. Links to some of his books in the video description. And we're going to focus on the Filiokwe, which if you're not familiar with that, we'll define it, but it's been this hugely divisive issue between the East and the West through our church history. And this interview, hopefully we'll just give you a basic introduction to that. We don't cover every single wrinkle,

but hopefully it'll introduce it and be helpful for people who are interested in that like I am. I also wanted, I'll put a link to this video, or a link to this, I always say that, a link to this book in the video description. What is covenant theology tracing God's promises through the sun, the seed, and sacraments by Ryan McRaw? I just got this, been looking through it this morning.

Some of you have heard of that phrase, like covenant theology, how is that different from dispensationalism? I've gotten questions about that. I wanted to recommend this book because it's very readable, very clear. The last chapter is just Q&A. So chapter six here just goes through like, I don't know, 15 or 20 questions about covenant theology. And it's really helpful.

So covenant theology is just a framework for putting the whole of scripture together in terms of the motif of covenants. And this book talks a lot about the difference that makes for your view of God, for everyday Christian living. Really helpful, readable resource. I get a lot of questions about this, so I wanted to recommend this. Link is in the video description. With that said, let's dive right in. Hey, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I'm here with Fred Sanders, who is a leading theologian on the doctrine of the Trinity, and we're going to do a deep dive onto the filialque, which if you don't know what that is, hopefully you'll understand it better by the time we're done

here. But I'm really excited about this. I've been recommending this book of Fred's for many years. a great introduction to the Trinity called the Deep Things of God. And then he just came out with this book, specifically on the Holy Spirit. And so hopefully you can see that. So we're going to do kind of a deep dive Trinity, but also especially on this issue that's been so divisive in church history, does the Spirit proceed from the Son as well as from the Father. So thanks for taking some time, Fred.

How are you doing today? Yeah, that's good to be. You are doing well today. When did you first get interested in the Trinity? I know that's been a project of yours for so many years. When did it begin? Yeah. You know, it goes all the way back to my conversion, really, at about age 16.

The way I got saved involved, a snowstorm where I was like school was out and I was trapped at home with nothing to do but read the Bible and explore my newfound faith. And so in a very isolated setting, I was just reading through scripture, just loving it, enjoy. it and I hit Ephesians 1 and just had these gigantic thoughts about the scope of this salvation that had been given to us. And kind of in my own poorly educated 16-year-old mind, I put together the idea that the God behind this gospel salvation has to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So in one sense, I have pride of ownership in the Trinity, you know, I made it up myself from scripture. Of course, the snow melted. I eventually got some books and found out that many others before me had connected these dots. Fascinating. So, so,

I'm kind of curious just to ask a little more about that process of becoming a Christian during the snowstorm. Was it was it reading the Bible or what would say a little more about that? Well, so many seeds had been planted. There was a revival in the youth group at the United Methodist Church in my small town in rural Kentucky. And friends of mine from public high school who had been nominally Christian, but you couldn't really tell anything about it. They just identified as Christian. they were experiencing revival and renewal and beginning to actually talk about the Bible and the things of God. And so I got caught up in that and went to the United Methodist Youth Group

several times over the course of a few months. And as I was processing that, that's when the long series of snow days is set in in that winter in Kentucky. Was it a long process of reading? Do you remember a particular moment at which that happened? I don't remember. I had obviously moral issues to deal with God about. But the main way I could tell regeneration had occurred is that I just developed a hunger for the word of God. I just could not get enough of the Bible. And again, I was, you know, you know how you learn things. Nobody's teaching. At some point, I thought, you can only read the Bible in bed. I don't know why that's the rule, but that's the rule. So in order to get enough Bible study, I was going to bed at like 7 p.m. and staying up till 3.

At one point it dawned on me, actually, you could just get up for the day and get ready and start studying the Bible. And it was revolutionary in my spiritual life. Oh, yeah, life-changing realization there. Wow, amazing. So one of the fears that I even have, and so hopefully this will encourage others out there as well is when we get into the doctrine of the Trinity, there's a fear of saying something wrong or accidentally getting into heresy because there's been plenty of times in my Christian life when I thought something. And then a couple of years go by and I realize, oh, actually, I. was totally wrong in this particular understanding about the trinity it's really easy to make mistakes maybe just to could you give us some sort of pastoral advice if someone is afraid to even study or

talk about the trinity because they're afraid of accidentally falling into heresy yeah i mean it's a it's a good it's a healthy concern i mean the thing about the doctrine of the trinity is it's not some little side issue it's not some little you know it's not one of the details that you get way out to at the edges of what's revealed in scripture. It's a claim about the identity of God on the basis of how God's made himself known through his word and in the gospel. So to kind of bring it to the center and say, yeah, this is as important as I thought. This is not, you know, can I remember the names of the 12 disciples or, you know, one of those many things that we should keep track of if we're literate Bible users. It really is a claim about who God is. And so as a result, with a real sobriety, we should treat

is one of the main things, focus on what's plain and evident in scripture about it, and then try to speak as biblically as possible. So a lot of times people will come to me with a question about the Trinity, and they'll say, how can 3 be 1? And I'll have to kind of gradually back them down from, let's start with Bible terms. Notice how you left out all the key nouns, like you're starting with these abstract numerical relations, three and one, even to talk about how three persons can be one being, is again to jump way ahead into, you know, ramified terminology that's not directly what's given to us in the text of Scripture.

So start with like Matthew 2819, baptizing the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So kind of the main plain things and to try to seek a gospel connection as often as possible, that this is the revelation of the life and being of God on the basis of what he's made known. in the Father sending the Son and the Spirit. Well, I'm going to put a link in the video description to both of these two books I mentioned before. And I want to read a couple of these just to give people a flavor from the appendix of the book on the Holy Spirit here. I think you've got about 27 rules for thinking well about the Holy Spirit. And as I read this, I love this book. It kind of, to me, gives the impression of a distilled wisdom.

You know, it's accessible and clear and obviously trying to help the reader, make things, kind of break things down. But it's clear there's so much reflection that stands behind it. And so I think people find this really helpful. But just to give people a flavor, here's rule number four. Don't try to be more spiritual than Jesus and the apostles by forcing a reference to the Holy Spirit into every statement. Jesus and Paul often left the Holy Spirit unmentioned, even where we would expect them to name him. It's helpful. It's wise. Here's another one. Rule 14. The Holy Spirit has a double depth, deepen God and deepen us. As a result of this nearness to us, his peculiar office is to strive

with us, grown with us, be made within range of being grieved. All of this is because of his double depth and not because he is in himself, anything less than almighty, immutable, and impassable. Let me read one more and then I'll ask you about this one. This is number 23, though it is permissible to pray to the Holy Spirit, we should observe Scripture's proportionality and be glad to pray always in the Holy Spirit, only sometimes to him. When we do pray to him, it is also wise to make explicit connections to the other persons of the Trinity. That was helpful to me because I've wondered about that myself, is how much do I pray to each person in the Godhead distinctly? And John Owen has this language about, you know, communing distinctly with the Father, the Son, the Spirit. But I've kind of

wondered about this, and you bring up the good point of proportionality there. So maybe could you say a bit about that one, what could be the danger of praying to the Holy Spirit too much? Yeah, a lot of people do approach this in a sort of a rules-based way. And I, you know, I like rules. I like to obey and believe what has been made known. But the question is like, can I pray to the Holy Spirit? Should I pray to the Holy Spirit? And so, you know, in terms of rules, the rule is you can pray to any person who is God. But it does matter that there's no clear biblical instance of prayer to the Holy Spirit. And there's something there's something behind that. And I think what's behind that is all Christian prayer occurs in the power of the Holy Spirit. You know, Christian prayer is mediated access to God,

the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. And so we always pray in the Spirit in that sense. We can also pick up the word proportionality. If you want long term to kind of norm your Christian devotional life by what's made known in Scripture, then long term, proportions of your prayer life are going to be mainly prayer to the father some prayer to the son and um i think it's pretty clear from from biblical proportions that uh prayer to the holy spirit is uh less frequent so one way to put that is if you decide to develop a boutique devotional life in which you pray mainly to the holy spirit you're not exactly breaking any rules but it's just eccentric to have developed a boutique devotional style that's not aligned with the proportionality of scripture.

Like, what are you up to there? It's really helpful to think of not just what's wrong and right, but what might be eccentric as well as a different category. Because I've, you know, sometimes I've heard people call the Holy Spirit the Cinderella of the Godhead getting left behind because of the focus upon the Father and the Son. But I suppose we could focus too much upon the Holy Spirit and to the neglect of the Father and the Son. Let me ask you this. Let's start getting into the filiocque a little bit, and this has been such a huge issue, but let's just, for anybody who's not already familiar with what this doctrine is, could we just give a brief introduction, theological especially? When we say the filiocque, could you just unpack? What do we mean by that?

Yeah. So it's the question of whether the spirit in the eternal life of God, so we're not talking about salvation history, but in the being and the life of God, everyone agrees the spirit. proceeds from the father. The question is, does he also proceed from the son as well, or only from the father? Now, it has this fearsome Latin name, filiocque, because the dispute breaks out in the interpretation and use of the Nicene Creed, by which I mean the Nicino-Constantapolitan Crete of 381. That is, not the creed from the original Council of Nicaea 325, but 50 years later or so when it was extended to say more about the Holy Spirit. What was confessed about the Spirit is that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father. There's some other language there in the nemetology of the Nicene Creed, but the key bit is who proceeds from the Father. That is the original

text of the Nicene Creed 381. At some point in the Christian West, people began reciting liturgically the Nicene Creed and saying the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, and adding the phrase, Phileo Kui. Phileas, son, quay is a way of doing an and in Latin. So who proceeds from the father and from the son. At some point, Eastern Christians joined in that worship and noticed that phrase was going on too long. You're supposed to just say, who proceeds from the father? And their Western friends were saying, who proceeds from the father and from the son. I always imagine it must have been like one of those moments when you're praying the Lord's prayer and you're from a sin's church and you're visiting a trespassist church. You know, that oddness.

you experience like wait why are you still talking this is supposed to be short well so that one one level of the question is um should the and from the sun clause is it legitimately uh used in reciting the nicene creed yeah let me jump ahead to this question that i was going to ask you later and just the historical question of it's pretty powerful if that was the original text of and i'm so i don't have to say nicino constantinopolitan too many times and leave out a syllable or ad one i'm going to say the 381 creed. If that's the original text of the creed of 381, that seems like a powerful argument in favor of the East. That, you know, that's a creedal authority. So what would you say to someone who says, well, that should just end the discussion right there. The filiocque is wrong.

You know, we have no right to come in later and change the creed. Yeah, that's a strong argument. And so if you're approaching this canonically, can I use that word? in the sense of church history, not in the sense of the canon of scripture. You've heard you this canonically from rules of how things ought to go in the governance of churches. Then, yeah, for one sector of the Christian church to unilaterally extend or officially add to the creed seems to be in bad form. And so kind of an open and shut case in terms of that sort of, you know, at that level of discussion. Yeah, I would agree with that. And so that matters a lot if you're in a church structure where sort of like the historical, canonical ordering and confession of a creed looms very large.

Theologically, oh, go ahead. No, no, please keep going. Well, theologically, I'll just say that it turns out everyone was always reciting the Nicene Creed of 381 with some sort of interpretive pre-understanding of what's going on when they said. say that the thought the spirit proceeds from the father that one one tradition was thinking from the father by which i mean only from the father that we could call that a monopatrist implicit interpretation of the words of 381 from the father and only from the father exclusively and the other side was thinking from the father by which of course i mean and also from the son yeah yeah okay so that that's that's what i was going to interject and ask you to kind of steal man the western side on the history

historical account of things. Can we also point to church fathers who maybe early on would be in the camp of affirming the filioque to kind of bolster the historical status of that view? Yeah, certainly Augustine is all over the filiocque. It's, you know, page after page of Augustine's on the Trinity is making the argument of the procession of the spirit from the father and the son. So if that's too late for you, you know, Augustine 420 or so, that's before the explicit argument about the filiocque breaks out. But you could go certainly further back than that and find lots of statements about the spirits procession. Yeah. Well, this is going to come up later because I know that, you know, from our Eastern Orthodox friends in the history, there is a lot of charge of heresy for the filiocque throughout church history. And so this is one of the concerns is if we want to attach that level of importance, then what do we do with these major authorities throughout church history who seem to have espoused that theology?

And maybe we can come to that question in just a moment? I want to back up, though, and just try to frame things a little bit with a quote from your book here. This is from page 117 if people are interested. And you say, while there is something very important at the theological core of the controversy, that core is also surrounded by a massive. entrenchment of bad blood, bad behavior, bad arguments, and bad habits. I thought it might be helpful to kind of early on here just try to flag, you know, on the one hand, we'll want to encourage some Christians who may not have a lot of patience for these discussions to say, this is important, we should think about this. On the other hand, there has been a lot of, as you say, bad blood about

this. Could you comment on that a little bit? What has happened and what do we need to be aware of about that as we approach this. Yeah. So there are, there's centuries of conflict and dispute over this. And that's all tied up with the things you would imagine, geopolitically and world historically would go down through the history of Europe for, say,

the last thousand or 1200 years. You know, the kind of keeping together some sort of imperial unity around the Mediterranean basin, across different linguistic barriers, like this is all kinds of things happening there. the authority of the Bishop of Rome in the Western Church over against the Eastern churches, especially when there's military conflict involved, and all of those things are going on. It is true that the disagreement over the Philly Oakway is the primary doctrinal issue of dispute

between Eastern and Western churches. But there's a way of taking this as like the core principle, taking filiokwe is like the one principle from which all differences between east and west can be derived almost geometrically you know almost like you're working a geometric proof in euclidean geometry and like well if spirit proceeds from father and son then what follows from that is and the eastern churches would say everything i hate about the west follows logically and unfolds from this principle and so there's a there are various literatures in the East where think about like the authoritarianism of the Pope or the focus on scripture, the solar scriptura kind of authoritarian focus of the Protestant churches.

Some Eastern critics would say all that derives directly from the fili okoi. There's kind of a leap there, right? And the leap is something like you're subordinating the spirit or tying the spirit to the word in two direct a way. And this is going to lead to, I speak as an Easterner in here, an Easterner would say, this is going to lead to rationalism,

legalism, and authoritarianism of various kinds. And lo and behold, that's exactly what we get in the West and what we hate about it. On the Western side, they could say, yeah, but the Eastern Church

is sort of mystical, vague, confusing, loosey-goosey and keeps generating mystics who claim to be in direct touch with God's essence somehow, or the energies around the essence. somehow in a way that seems to circumvent the clear revelation of the sun. And that's exactly what we would expect from people who've got a kind of a free agent maverick

spirit who is not directly related to the sun at the level of the eternal processions. Now, you can spin this out and it has a really unedifying character. This is the kind of thing I'm referring to by the bad blood, bad habits. In the modern period, especially, it takes on a whole other form, which is people begin describing Christianity is so essentially divided that there's not a single doctrine of God, East and West, that there are two doctrines of the Trinity, and you have to pick which doctrine of the Trinity you believe in. So that plays its own role in kind of 20th century pluralism to say that there's no such thing as a Christian doctrine of God, because

filiocque means or entails two different doctrines of the Trinity. Yeah. I think that's out of proportion. Let's talk about that a little bit. Again, this is a later question we can leap ahead to, and that's kind of triaging this question. So, you know, because that would be one way of doing triage with this, which means sort of ranking the importance of something. Someone might say, well, if you get the filiocque wrong, therefore it follows logically that you get the Trinity as a whole wrong, therefore you're not really a Trinitarian. Therefore, you're denying the Christian view of God. You know, it could go like this. or we could try to situate the filiocque as sort of one part of the doctrine of the Trinity or something like this. How would you rank this doctrine?

Where would you kind of situate it in terms of its level of importance? I know that's a broad question, but maybe I can throw that out and let you think about that. Yeah. Yeah, broadly, the second view that you describe where this is a detail or even a detail of a detail within the larger doctrine of the Trinity, I think, is the right way to think about it. I think it matters a lot. but anytime you try to talk about it in any context, including like, you know, on a podcast, you're kind of trying to, you're trying to intuit what level of understanding the audience has, or maybe a better way to say this, how many distinctions into the discussion are the participants in the

discussion? Because you start arguing about some detail that's like four distinctions down the road of discourse. And you realize half your audiences, two distinctions back. and you have to go to that and defend the whole notion of, you know, procession within the life of God. That happens a lot. In some ways, filioque is my least favorite question to get in Q&A when I'm speaking on the Trinity and a church because of these considerations, right? I think there's a real issue here that can take us deeper into pneumatology and that really kind of puts the bow on top of Trinitarianism in a wonderful way. But the problem is you're talking to an audience and you think, well, do I have to go back and narrate fourth century church history? You know, where do I have to

engage this. So I do take it as a detail that needs to be kept in a larger context and considered in proportion. Okay. And would it follow from that for you to say that someone can, people on both sides of this questions are legitimately Christian and we have Christian fellowship with them? Oh yeah. That's pretty easy for me to say. Yeah. Yeah. I am a Western theologian. I affirm the Philly Oakway for reasons we can talk about later, but I habitually draw diagrams and make basic explanations that are open to both east and west. Interesting. Well, yeah, I want to ask more about that as well. Let's, how about this? Hopefully, this is a fair question to throw out at you here. What if we were to try to steal me on each side? So we've talked a little bit about the history, but let's talk about just the theology. And I guess where I

have come down to, in my own thinking about this, that has made me affirm the filial way as well, is just this basic inference from the imminent trinity, or I should say from the economic trinity to the imminent trinity, and to explain those words and feel free to correct me if I'm not explaining this well, but basically we're inferring about God in himself from God's activity and creation and in redemption

and in history and so forth. And so in Luke 24 and in early chapters of Acts and in John 14 to 16, the son sends the spirit. And so there's this move that's made. it's kind of an inference from the economic to the imminent. If we let maybe we can start by just, I don't know if you want to go there or to other considerations, but how would you steal man the best kind of theological argument for the filioke way? And then if you're okay with it, after we do that, we can go the other direction as well.

Yeah. So, so to me, the simplest, most straightforward argument for the filiocque is if you take the original language of the creed of 381, the spirit proceeds from the, father sometimes this sounds a little too subtle so i have to kind of do it slowly um notice that the the one who is identified as the origin of the spirit is identified as the father and father is a relational term yeah you know in implying son that there's a father-son relation and that's why we call the first person father so the son is sort of already in there relationally speaking in the origin of the spirit from the father and i think that's why

a Western church could add the interpretive clause and from the spirit and not think they were adding anything to what they had just said. They didn't say, I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Holy Spirit Proceder maker, you know, or from the breather or from the source of the spirit. The Creed of 381 explicitly says that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. And of course, that's language from John 15 or 14. So to me, that's that's. That's, that's. the view and and the the meat of that is when you're doing pneumatology the doctrine of the spirit all the way up in the being of god in the divine life you're never dealing with the holy spirit who is in any way alien from the sun that the spirit is of the sun and i'm using of with

maximal ambiguity there right the spirit is the spirit of the sun in the deepest depths of the godhead um the next step is to treat that of as a relation of origin right and to say that the spirit is from the son as well as from the father it also maps nicely onto salvation history and the way you just mentioned that when um in the fullness of time on the basis of the finished work of christ the spirit is sent in this new way of being present as the spirit of pentecost um that spirit is explicitly sent from the father and from the son okay yeah I was going to ask about that if that's a valid, at least as something that might imply or make plausible to filiokwe. But so, yeah, okay.

All right. Now, now what about in the other direction? What would you say if you were to try to steal man the best theological argument against the filiokea, how would you begin to think about that? Yeah. So the Eastern Church, especially if you get back into the Greek fathers, Nazianzus and people like that, they, they, they, they, they, insist that there's a distinction in the way the sun comes from the father and the way the spirit comes from the father and um they mainly get to that by arguing for um the mode of the procession the way in which the person comes forth is different so the son comes forth by begetting generation

filiation and the spirit comes forth by procession breathing um and i always draw this i think in the book I draw this as a diagram with the little, you know, the little hash marks that show angles are not congruent or lines are not congruent in geometry. So like one hash mark for the son's procession, or coming forth, and two for the spirit. And someone like Nazianzus is entirely satisfied if you confess that difference. They are different persons because they are different, they come from the father in different ways. I mean, the Eastern Church then just is, um, doesn't want to say anything more explicit about the eternal relation of the sun and the spirit except to deny that it's a relation of origin okay what let let's uh this comes up in the book as a possible way of reproachment trying to be sort of ecumenical here and see are there ways forward you know because this is one of the big to me this is a fascinating question is there are there ways forward after after these differences have come about and have become so entrenched and one of the things you talk about is the little phrase through the sun. And you mentioned that this was championed even by Maximus the confessor. And then you talk about the discussion of it in some of the Protestants like Peter Van Maestricht and Turriton, Francis Turriton, would lay that out for us. How might that phrase be a possible avenue forward? Yeah. Yeah. And so Maximus the Confessor is picking that up from some earlier Greek fathers where you do find this statement through the son that the spirit proceeds from the father

but through the son so that the procession of the spirit in the eternal life of god is um uh is somehow characterized or implicated by the presence of the son and that's what you know when i was when i was talking about how the spirit proceeds from the father and father entails or implies son um that's kind of what i'm getting at right you don't want to you don't want to get in a situation where the spirit is alien to the sun. No one's no one east or west wants to make some kind of statement like the spirit as if the spirit and the sun just met at the Jordan or something you know at the baptism Jesus when the dev descended like no clearly their unity goes back into the eternal life of god um so through the sun is a a possible way forward um you'd have to de-escalate a lot of the

the sort of learned habits of fighting about this um But yeah, it's a possibility. It also preserves something that the the West is willing to say. The West is willing to say that the spirit proceeds principally from the father and also from the sun. And so you can imagine if you were an Easterner, you know, having trouble warming up to how the Westerners talk.

If Western are willing to concede that we don't want to say the spirit proceeds only from the father, but we're willing to concede that the spirit proceeds principally from the father. Yeah. I like the language you just used of de-escalating learned habits of fighting. And I don't know, I think about like if we were to make a metaphor of like when I'm as a dad, I'm trying to help my my kids reconcile after a quarrel has broken out or something like this. There is something to this process of de-escalating where ecumenism is not necessarily compromise. if we're willing to look at something from a fresh angle with a view to the truth and say,

hey, where maybe did we overstep? And sometimes there's been misunderstandings that have plagued the division. So maybe in this final kind of wing of our conversation, we can talk about this from sort of an ecumenical standpoint and see ways of moving forward. I mean, what would you say, if someone is approaching this and they're saying, okay, I'm open to considering a de-escalation of some of the entrenched disagreements, what might some of those de-escalations look like? What are the kinds of things we might want to be having on our radar screen as we're trying to see how can we kind of hang together? Because if we want to all be Christians together on either side of this, we've got to find

some ways of thinking about that. So anyway, can you reflect a little bit about what that might look like in terms of where can we make those de-escalations? Yeah, yeah, that's good. And I do want to say there is a real difference of opinion here. They can't both be true. You know, there's a there's there's a real cliff that I'm not trying to paper over any of those real differences. I'm just trying to put them in context, put them in the right place and unlearn some of these bad habits. So I think, of course, the polemical literature, the controversial literature on this subject is is really quite vast. It's kind of astonishing once you get into it. And some of the patterns of argument have to do with drawing out implications. So for instance, there's a way of saying, if you think that the spirit comes from the father and to the son, then you turn the spirit into another son or a grandson, and then you turn God the father into God the grandfather. You know, you can, you kind of see how this logic plays out. And it's kind of built into the controversial way some of the church fathers tend to argue. But the whole that turns

the father into a grandfather or the spirit into a grandson way of arguing is several steps down, you know, the logical entailments. You can move back from that. and say we're gathered around the Bible. We're both trying to figure out how to do justice to certain passages of scripture that are difficult to interpret and relate to each other. And we're both trying to preserve certain values. So the West is especially concerned to preserve the value of an eternal relation between the sun and the spirit that goes all the way back into the life of God. They're not going to be satisfied by making like a distinction between the essence of God and the energies of God and moving the relation between the sun and the spirit down to the energies. They want it to be all the way back in the life of God.

And the East wants to make sure that the spirit is not sort of subordinated to the sun in some kind of a way. And so there can be ways of there can be ways of comparing each other's interpretive strategies for securing those shared values. you know and so the disagreement then is at that level if you if you make that move with scripture i see that you are trying to secure a value that we both share i just think you're getting at it the wrong way that's like the kind of the level of the disagreement who are some of the figures early on um that both east and west look to as authorities whether they be church fathers or just other ecclesial or early figures um that can help us i mean if someone wanted to make some progress in this who Who would be some of the early theologians that you think? Because this might be one way of

reproachment is to recognize that some of the concerns on each side are reflected by some of these early Christians. Are there any particular texts or people you think we especially should have on our mind? Yeah, I give a certain priority here to the Greek fathers. So I love the Latin tradition and I'm a big fan of Augustine. But Augustine himself will let you know he's inheriting, you know, by his point in the early fifth century when he's working on the Trinity, he's inheriting what the Catholic or ecumenical teachers have always taught. And he's got in mind there, he's got a certain reception of, say, Gregory Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria is kind of feeding into the Western tradition by the time you're talking about this. So, yeah, I think the Cappadocians

are great on this, Basil of Caesarea. Gregory of Nazianzus give you a certain core of claims about the doctrine of the spirit in a trinatory. in context. Augustine's almost a no-fly zone if what you're trying to do is de-escalate. Like, you know, you can't, you sort of have to get to Augustine and the introduction of him as an ecumenically helpful voice because he's so obviously filioquist that, you know, it'd be like introducing Fodius on the eastern side end and saying, Fodius is a great shared resource. Well, no, Fodius has got a definite take on this. We may, we may be able to start early, year and went our way through to constructing an Augustine Fodias discussion where we are specific

about what the difference is. Yeah. A couple final questions here wrapping up. So from some of our Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends, they may view us as Protestants talking about this almost as though we're sort of listening in on a conversation that's not even our territory. And we're just sort of borrowing from their traditions. And obviously we can learn so much from our friends in these traditions. But one of the things you talk about in the book is that in some respects, Protestants who affirm the filiocque have some possible avenues of ecumenism that Roman Catholics, who affirm the filiocque, don't have. And whether you want to comment on that specific claim, maybe you could just say a little bit about Protestants and our place in this whole conversation.

And maybe first about the legitimacy of Protestants for having a place in the conversation at all, but also what what's our angle of approaches Protestants that might enable us to to take a particularly ecumenical approach yeah well um make two points about that one i want to start with kind of the substance of the theology um the protestant scholastics i'm thinking about like the lyden synopsis or petrus van mastic or turritin um these protestant scholastics in the 16th 17th century they develop their doctrine of the trinity uh in a way that's clearly related to kind of the toomist high medieval scholastic way. They're drawing lots of influence from that. They're not there's not a sharp disagreement. But when they get to some of

the ways Thomas and company construct the doctrine of the Trinity, they're a little standoffish. They'll say like, well, there's this psychological analogy where the the spirit is sort of the will or the love that proceeds from the one principle of the father and and his understanding. They say it's helpful. I can see where it starts out in scripture, but we're just not that committed to it. So they explicitly back off of having the fully ramified construction of the doctrine of the eminent Trinity in that way. So it gives them a little bit of flexibility in the actual doctrinal matters is what I'm saying there. So it's kind of a really brief overview. But the synopsis of a pure theology and Petrus Fund Master are both pretty explicit about this, like learning from the more scholastic way of putting it. But not being radically committed to it. That gives them some room to move doctrinally. From the outside, sort of the authority questions and the interpretation of canonical decisions and down through church history, obviously 16th century Protestants are looking at the disagreement with the East. And when the East comes in and says, we really dislike the way the Pope

arrogated authority to himself and unilaterally excommunicated us and demoted us to second-class Christians. And the early Protestants, of course, are going to say, We too dislike that about how things have gone in history. And so we could draw a little circle around ourselves in the club of people who think Western papal authoritarianism went too far, overreached its mandate, and demoted us to second-class Christians on a number of issues. So there's that way of kind of drawing the lines, which I think is interesting. Yeah. When I think about this, the word institutional always comes up in my mind because it seems as though a lot of the claims against us that we sort of don't have a right in this conversation are assuming a kind of tight and institutional view of the nature of the church, whereas Protestants love to think more organically about the church and recognize the church in multiple institutions. Do you think that's a valid way for Protestants to think?

I mean, there's something to that, and this gets to the detailed nature of the dispute over the filiocque, right? This is not a, this is not an obvious thing right on the surface of scripture or something that just keeps coming up all the time when you're just, you know, making normal Christian sentences. And what I mean by that is you're going to need a fairly institutionalized kind of placeholder or receptacle for theology, just because we're not walking around with this in RAM all the time. And so that is, I think, where this becomes such a difficult conversation. Yeah, Protestants in various ways, you know, get to this. And in their larger books on theology, you're going to get to this question of the procession of the spirit and the eternal life of God. But it hasn't made its way into like, we don't have the same kind of magisterium with extensive published documents that were accountable for in a centralized way. two final questions the last one will be about recommended reading before that just i think earlier you'd mentioned your own personal uh stance on the fili okway and i had it in the back of my mind to kind of come back to that and give you a chance just to flesh that out a little more um what would you like to say to finish

off with in terms of why you think this doctrine is important why it matters and what ultimately uh convinces you about it yeah it's the um it's it's the eternal relation between the sun and the spirit I think that this really helps with. When you draw the little triangle diagram and you have the father and the son coming from one way and the spirit coming from another way, you've got this conspicuous gap on that line you want to draw between the sun and the Holy Spirit. And I just value being able to affirm that there's a relation of origin there, that the spirit is the spirit of the sun in this strong genetic sense, that the spirit is from the son as well as from the father.

I find that a really solid foundation for then reading through into the history of salvation and saying, oh, that explains why the spirit is manifested in the following ways. Yeah, I want to say one other thing about the economic eminent Trinity framework that you raised. I've written probably too much about this already, but it's helpful in terms of, it can be a particular modern way of describing how God makes his eternal being, know in his known in the history of salvation. So it's valuable. I will say that the first people who began talking that way in the 19th and 20th century had kind of a low view of verbal propositional revelation. And so there was a tendency in a lot of modern theology to say God can only make known

what's eternally true of him through sort of pantomime like in actual history. And so you're sort of forced to say what occurs between the persons of the Trinity in the outflowing of salvation history. has to be like a transcript of the eternal life of God. And so I don't think that. I think, you know, when Jesus says the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, that's verbal propositional revelation. And I'm taking that as what God has made known about himself. It frees me up from having to say every possible configuration of behavior

between Father, Son, and Spirit and Salvation History is kind of a map or a diagram of the eternal life of God. Okay, I lied too. one, I'm going to sneak in an extra question. I do have some friends who either question or deny the doctrine of the Trinity, and there is this kind of move. Now I'm seeing where a lot of people, this, the Trinity is under fire in certain quarters that I'm aware of. So maybe you could just say a word about what is it about the doctrine of the Trinity that you find most enhances your, because you mentioned this at the very beginning. And I feel like I'd be remiss if we didn't unpack this just a little bit of your awareness of the doctrine of the Trinity is interwoven with the very nature of the gospel

itself as you're reading the pages of scripture. Could you just say a word about that? Like, what is it about the doctrine of the Trinity that enhances your own personal understanding of what it actually means to be a Christian? I know that's a broad question, but I would benefit from hearing you reflect upon that. I think other people would too. Yeah, there are various shorthand ways of putting what the gospel is, but, you know, big picture. It's that in the fullness of time, the father sends the son and the spirit, you know, to bring about reconciliation. And so that's clearly got a Trinitarian outline to it. It means that in the accomplishing of salvation, that which God always was, an eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is

made over to us or put into action in order to bring about our salvation. It also entails that the order of revelation, God has made known in the fullness of time a great depth of who he is. So God was always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but didn't make that clearly evident until the history of salvation moves into the mode of fulfillment. And when the promise is fulfilled, then the Father sends the Son and the Spirit. So there's a, there's a Trinitarian structure to Salvation history, which I think God intends to be a fuller revelation of who he is. And it's, you know, it's need to know information. It's like God didn't clearly announce back in Genesis that he was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

and we should remember that because that's going to come in handy later. It's when the father sends the Son and the Holy Spirit that the ramifications of that, you know, that the depth of ingression that has into the divine life and how it's made known to us really becomes evident. I'm so tempted to sneak in more questions, but I don't want to tax your patience here because that's... And I just want to say one thing about being standoffish about the economic imminent Trinity thing is if you start thinking, well, the son, the son of the son of the son of the the father and the sons both send to the Holy Spirit, therefore necessarily the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. I do think missions reveal processions in that way, but I don't want to be going through the whole history of salvation saying, well, the Spirit sends the Son into the wilderness to be

tempted. So that must also map on somehow, right? I don't want to, I'm interpreting what God does and what God says together. Yeah. Okay. I was in a discussion on this in many years ago, and this whole question of how is the gospel, um, sort of embedded together with the doctrine of the Trinity. How do they flow into each other and so forth? And the doctrine of atonement came up to me and I thought we really would have, if you had a unipersonal God, you'd have to go back to Jesus dying on the cross and

reconfigure some things that are pretty foundational to what is happening in the work of atonement. So that might be another area. But um, let me, uh, I, as I've promised, I won't keep extending this further though. I love talking with you and appreciate your, your work. Maybe a good final question would just be tell us some good resources for people who want to read more about this controversy specifically or the Doctor of the Trinity in general. I remember as I was reading through this, you're drawing from a lot of especially great classical Protestants that I think a lot of viewers of my YouTube channel don't really know as much about some of these classical Protestants. So just give us some recommended reading here that people can go to the next step with. Yeah. Yeah. And it's great that these things exist in English translation.

now because for all for all these decades you know people have said well protestants don't really talk about that right and i say oh boy do they ever they're just in gigantic latin books from the 17th century so even to propose to somebody that to be a deep protestant you have to learn latin still sounds strange to people right like wouldn't that be to be a good catholic no a lot of our best most profound and carefully thought out work is in these big books fortunately some of them are now in in English finally. So Petrus van Maastricht, the what's a kind of a terrible title, the theoretical practical theology. Volume two is on faith in the triune God. And it's just, it's fantastic. It's, it must be six or 700 pages long. The Trinity parts at the end, but the whole book's just great. Petrus van Mastricht. It's,

if people can handle it, like that's my number one recommendation. And it is fairly readable. If you've read someone like Turret, this is much easier than that and way more devotional. He's got an openness to scripture. You know, Turton admits he's being polemical. You know, he's in there for the fight. And he's very clarifying when you want him to do that. Fun Maastricht is a much more holistic approach to interpreting scripture for spiritual impact. It's theoretical, practical, is the gist of the title there.

I would also recommend the synopsis of a purer theology, what has the nickname, the Leiden synopsis. It's from 1625. It's extremely Calvinist. What they mean by purer is they kicked out the Armenians. And so that's kind of what brings it together. It's a two-volume work that's in print from the Davenant press now. And it's got three disputations on the Trinity in it that are really solid stuff. One of those three is on the spirit in particular. So yeah, Petters from Master's in the line synopsis. Who, who, there was someone in the book you read, you drew from that was fascinating that I was not all that familiar with though.

I'd seen his name. I think it was a brockel, William Obrackel or something like this. Oh yeah, yeah, Wilhelmus Obrackel. What's the name of his book? It's a four volume thing. A Christian's reasonable service. Was that it? Christian's reasonable service.

Yeah. Um, it's even, it's even easier. Yep. So it's wonderful that it exists in English now. And, um, yeah, Wilhelmus, Aubrifice. Brockle, B-R-A-K-E-L, yeah. I'll put some information. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, I would just say the other book I'd recommend sort of at a scholarly level is a book on the Philly Oakway from 2010 from Oxford Press. I actually have never heard this man's name said out loud. Seikinsky maybe, Schikensky, S-I-E-C-I-N-S-K-I. It's kind of the, it's more or less the state of the art for a good scholarly overview of the Philly Oakway. He's a great scholar, and I only learned. how to pronounce his name because I had the privilege of interviewing him on my channel as well.

Oh yeah. So I can verify it is Sachinsky. Sitchinsky. Ed Sachinsky and if people are interested in that book, they can check out my interview with him where we spent about a third of it on this question of the Fili Okway so people can check that out as well. But that great book. Yeah, I'll put some information about all these books in the video description. Make sure and check them out. Fred, thank you so much for your work on this and for the chance to talk today. Grateful for you and your scholarship and all your, all your, all your work for the kingdom of God. And thanks for watching everybody. We will put information about all

these resources in the video description, and we will see you next time.