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“The Word Became Flesh” (John 1:14)
The most notorious test of our rules is our Lord’s incarnation, which we will examine in greater depth in the next two chapters. We might think that surely, here of all places, the Son acts alone. But as Augustine argues, although the Son alone was born of the Virgin Mary, nevertheless it was the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit inseparably. To explain how, we may employ redoublement to consider the action essentially with respect to the whole Trinity and then personally with regard to the mutual relations between the persons. Doing so employs both inseparable operations and appropriation.
Describing the incarnation calls for two manners of speaking. In one way, we see the persons acting in accordance with their distinct modes of acting. The Father sends the Son and prepares a body for him (Gal. 4:4; Heb. 10:5) in keeping with his paternity: the Father does not receive his being from another, so he does not act from another. The Son’s being-sent is in keeping with his filiation, as is his self-emptying by taking the “form of a servant,” his birth from the seed of David according to the flesh (Phil. 2:6–7; Rom. 1:3). Being born as man, the Son displays his filial existence in our flesh. The form his sonship takes in his human existence is perfect devotion, loving obedience, and complete dependence. He thus acts “from” the Father and with reference to him. The Son’s incarnation also includes the Holy Spirit, in keeping with the Spirit’s spiration from both Father and Son. The Spirit thus overshadows Mary and brings her womb to fruition. Just as the Spirit broods over the waters of creation and over the wilderness until they bring forth fruit (Gen. 1:2; Deut. 32:11; Matt. 1:20; Luke 1:35), so he brings the Father’s sending of the Son to fruition. However, if we left our description of the incarnation here, we might be in danger of describing three actors and three actions, thereby transgressing the inseparable operations rule. And while that would certainly be more intuitive for us, it would not for that reason be more faithful to divine teaching.
A second pass over the incarnation enables us to see the incarnation as an indivisible act of the whole Trinity. Though it involves all three actors, the incarnation remains one action rather than three. The Father sent (Rom. 8:3); the Son came (John 6:38); the Spirit effected conception (Luke 1:35)—yet each verb names the same single act of incarnation. While it is true that the Father prepares a body for the Son, it is also true that the Son and the Spirit perform this same act. The same is true of the Spirit overshadowing Mary’s womb; this act belongs equally to the Father and the Son. All things are made through the Son (John 1:3), and since the body prepared for him and conceived in Mary’s womb is a creature, then it is not outside of the singular creative activity belonging to all three divine persons. When Scripture speaks of the Father preparing this body, or the Spirit bringing to fruition Jesus’s conception, these are appropriations.
However, it is not appropriation when Scripture says the “Word became flesh” (John 1:14), or that the Son “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). This is proper to the Son, because only the Son is incarnate. A major reason for this is that the incarnation results in the hypostatic union, which we explore in the next chapter. Though the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all create the humanity of the Son and join it to the Son, only the Son assumes it into his own person. This inseparable act of the Trinity concludes or “terminates” in the person of the Son alone. In a faintly analogous sense, the incarnation of the Son is like a pitch that the whole Trinity throws but only the Son catches. Redoublement captures this twofold aspect of the Son’s assumption of human flesh well: the principle of assumption is the divine nature that belongs to the whole Trinity, specifically as it exists in the Son, who assumes human nature, but the terminus of assumption is the Son alone. Therefore, the Trinity indivisibly creates Christ’s humanity and unites it to the Son, but only the Son assumes it as his own.
Divine Teaching, Again
We may conclude with one final example that sets biblical reasoning within the context of the Trinity’s inseparable operations. When we considered the setting for biblical reasoning in chapter 3, we saw that the inseparable Trinity is responsible for John’s prophecy in the Apocalypse. The whole book comes to John as “the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him” (Rev. 1:1). And each letter to the seven churches is simultaneously spoken by the Holy Spirit (Rev. 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22) and by Jesus (2:1, 8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14). Synthesizing these details with redoublement, we can understand divine teaching as an indivisible work of the whole Trinity (essentially) that allows for an order of working between the persons (personally). The message that comes from the Father through Jesus is simultaneously spoken by the Spirit, so that the text gives no hints about where Jesus’s activity ends and the Spirit’s begins. Nor is there any suggestion that one person’s teaching is different in content or extent from the others’; their teaching is numerically one and identical. Yet there is clearly an order between the persons, which is visible especially in John’s Gospel. The Holy Spirit testifies to Christ just as the Father does (John 15:26). Jesus says of the Spirit, “He will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak from himself, but as much as he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you what is to come” (John 16:13 AT). The Spirit takes “all” that the Son has in common with the Father and declares it to us (16:14–15). Because the Father, Son, and Spirit work indivisibly, the Spirit’s work “makes it impossible to separate the proclaiming Jesus from the proclaimed Christ.… The gap between past and present is abolished.” When we read by the Spirit’s illumination, we see Light from Light in Light. Yet what we see by faith is one glory, not three. The Trinity’s inseparable operations therefore remind us that the God who acts in Scripture is not merely acting in a time long past but performs these same works in the present. Thereby we have fellowship with the apostles through fellowship with the same God: what they have “heard” and “seen,” we now hear and will indeed see (1 John 1:3)."
Jamieson, R. B., and Tyler R. Wittman. Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022.
