You Need One to Count to the Trinity

So, if we think about the Trinity in mathematical terms, we do not need to say “three” (as if the persons are individual beings of a divine species). We can always say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. However, if we do not say that God is “one,” then we would be saying little more than polytheists say about their deities.[19] In order to count to the true and Triune God, the essential number is one.

The Divided Community of EFS
While EFS advocates undeniably affirm the exclusive unity of God, their modern revision of the Trinity endangers it. Theology requires, as Sinclair Ferguson has written, that we “point out the logical implications of presuppositions.”[20] EFS logically entails the division of our simple God in more than one way, ignoring Calvin’s warning not to “think God’s simple essence to be torn into three persons.”[21]

First, God’s indivisible unity means that whatever we say of God’s nature is equally true of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that includes His will and authority.[22] By His will and power, Scripture identifies God as God, “I am God, and there is no one like me… My purpose shall stand” (Isa 46:9-10). So, each Person exercises that divine will inseparably from the other two as God.[23] The Son sovereignly “chooses” inseparably from the Father’s “will” (Matt 11:26-27; cf. Jn 5:19-21), while the Holy Spirit works as “he wills” (1 Cor 12:11), which is inseparable from how “God [the Father]… chose” (v. 18; cf. v. 6).[24] Christians have “overwhelmingly affirmed a singular mind and will in God,”[25] for the “divine will is thus the being of God Himself.”[26] John of Damascus said that the Trinity is:

one essence, one divinity, one power, one will, one energy, one beginning, one authority, one dominion, one sovereignty, made known in three perfect subsistences and adored with one adoration.[27]

And John Owen said the same: “acting all by the same will, the same wisdom, the same power. Every person, therefore, is the author of every work of God, and the divine nature is the same undivided principle of all divine operations.”[28]
​
Yet, EFS assumes the Father and Son each have their own wills in a tiered structure of authority. This attributes will to the persons rather than the simple divine nature.[29] However, anyone familiar with debates over the freedom and bondage of man’s will already know that will is a faculty of nature – that is why we argue that the unregenerate are not without wills, but they are bound to their fallen nature, apart from sovereign grace.[30] “There is no safe ‘functional’ subordination,” because it excludes the Son and Spirit from the greater will and power of the Father, functionally denying their equality as God.[31] Herman Witsius (1636-1708) correctly reasoned, “If any person were possessed of greater excellence and dignity than the Son or the Holy Spirit, neither of these persons could be the Most High God.”[32] This imperils other divine attributes as well. EFS entails a gap between the Father’s command and the Son’s obedience which negates eternality. If this were the case, then the Son would have need of learning the Father’s will, which requires He has some ignorance, denying omniscience.[33] How can any of this be true of the three who are one and, therefore, “the same in Deity, Dignity, Eternity, Operation, and Will”?[34] By reducing the unity of will in the Trinity to a cooperative agreement, like a successful divine team, EFS effectively denies simplicity and mimics the reasoning of Monarchians in the past.[35]

You Need One to Count to the Trinity - Credo Magazine