A Linguistic Perspective On Divine Persons -- By: Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 83:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: A Linguistic Perspective On Divine Persons
Author: Pierce Taylor Hibbs


A Linguistic Perspective On Divine Persons

Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Pierce Taylor Hibbs is Associate Director for Theological Curriculum and Instruction in the Theological English Department at Westminster Theological Seminary.

This article offers a linguistic perspective on how we define divine persons. A divine person is one who speaks bearing a divine incommunicable property. After presenting this definition in relation to Tertullian and a figure of Reformed Orthodoxy (Charles Hodge), the author surveys selected passages in the Old and New Testaments, showing that God is often presented as the divine, authoritative, three-in-one speaker. In light of this, defining divine persons from a linguistic perspective aligns with the biblical witness. The author ends by addressing potential objections.

There are no truly simple questions in theology, but there are many that appear to be. The “simple” question that has preoccupied me for some years is this: What is a divine person? For any informed theological reader in our time, a panoply of responses inundates the mind: “subsisting relation,” “real relation,” “mode of being,” “mode of subsisting,” “center of relationship,” “oppositional relation,” and so on.1 The surge of trinitarian theology over the last few decades reminds us that there is no lexical shortage. Undoubtedly, the global church has deepened its awareness of the divine persons and is ever working to defend and further articulate how the three persons constitute one God.2 Yet, even in the midst of all of the debates—quandaries over the nature of analogical language, skirmishes among social and classical trinitarians—it

can be easy to behave as if our understanding has reached its climax at certain points of dogmatics.3 But, as John Murray wrote many years ago, “However epochal have been the advances made at certain periods and however great the contributions of particular men, we may not suppose that theological construction ever reaches definitive finality.”4 In this spirit, I ask two questions, the first intellectual and the second practical: (1) Has our understanding of divine persons adequately accounted for the way in which God is portrayed in Scripture as the three-in-one divine speaker? (2) Does the terminology we currently employ in our definitions of divine personhood help us to better worship and commune with the Trinity?

Perhaps we could answer these questions afresh if we ta...

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