Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue for the necessity of orthodox Christianity (1) to clarify the meaning of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father and the Son, and subsequently, because of contemporary denials, (2) to confess the doctrine as classically conceived because the traditional model of the Trinity more consistently coheres with God’s revelation of himself in Scripture’s redemptive-historical storyline. Chapter 1 introduces this project. In chapter 2, I present historical arguments concerning the Holy Spirit’s procession from patristic writers, medieval scholastic authors, and Reformed orthodox scholars. The historical support for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s procession within orthodoxy underscores its classical nature. In chapter 3, I present biblical evidence for the Holy Spirit’s eternal procession, focusing on John 14–17. I follow Augustine’s hermeneutical rules for interpreting the Son’s eternal relation to the Father and applying them, mutatis mutandis, to the Holy Spirit to the Father and Son. In chapter 4, I offer a theological interpretation of the Holy Spirit's four visible missions surrounding Christ’s incarnation, originally identified by Thomas Aquinas. By strictly adhering to a divine processions-missions schema, I trace how the divine missions reveal the Third Person’s unique mode of subsistence. In chapter 5, I transpose Amandus Polanus’s (1561–1610) eighteen axioms on the Trinity and apply the axioms fittingly to the Holy Spirit’s procession. As a significant theological figure who consolidated orthodox teaching during the period of Reformed Scholasticism, I submit that Polanus’s dogmatic writing helps clarify contemporary theological discourse on the Holy Spirit’s procession. In chapter 6, I explain Aquinas’s view of the Holy Spirit’s thirdness within a framework of God’s life as a circular movement based on Romans 8. In chapter 7, I present revisionist proposals of the divine persons’ relations in God and argue for a traditional model for the procession of the Holy Spirit with Polanus as my representative voice of classical theism. I contend that the doctrine of God’s processions as historically confessed in the Western tradition better preserves God’s singular, undivided divine nature and the Trinity of divine persons.