The Father, Son, and Spirit’s Alleged “Participation” in the Divine Being

Or

What Theology Would Like If Someone Were Ignorant of Scholasticism

Dr. James White is in the midst of an intra-Evangelical (and anti-ecumenical) controversy about his clearly provocative claim, where he verbally agrees with those whom he identifies as “the exegetes” who allegedly hold the upper hand because they are “consistent” scholars, when they claim that there is the only God (John 17:3) and that this term only can be read back retroactively with consistency to mean that God the Father only knows the last day but that the Son-Logos of John 1 (in White’s reading) does not know the last day.[1]

In my article: “Nor the Son [knows the last day], but the Father only”, Dr. White’s Exegetical Defense of Arianism, and the Textual Basis for Chalcedonian Christianity,”

I defended Nicaea (AD 325) through Constantinople III (AD 681), demonstrating that Chalcedon understands correctly (like Ephrem the Syrian and Athanasius before it) that Scripture upholds the “Son of Man” (human nature alone) does not know the last day (in his human brain) but not that the eternal Son does not know (in his divine intellect). Dr. James White endorses unnamed exegetes who forego Chalcedonians’ supposed vice or their “easy out” since, for Dr. White, the Son-Logos of Mt/Mk and Jn may well be for Dr. White an ignorant Son. Dr. White has realized that Evangelicals and members of Apostolic Churches simply see and hear in him another Arius, who might as well be one of Dr. White’s unnamed “exegetes” along with the perhaps the two Eusebii (of Nicodemia and Caesarea), given Dr. White’s constant reference to his knowledge of the figures of Church history always disagreeing with official orthodoxy, in whom he delights and to whom he has recently made the point to refer as a justification for his superior knowledge on this question.

Dr. White Throws Down the Gauntlet:

“If You Haven’t Read the Tome of Leo, Then Just Shut Up”

It may be, as in “On the Road Trip with James” (13 October 2022) that Dr. James White has read the Tome of Leo, but he would not seem to have learned much, nor did he learn from the other Ecumenical Councils, over and above which he very much values his own theological prowess, despite the fact that he proves himself thereby to be an accidental tri-theist, since Dr. White doesn’t understand the philosophy cited in the New Testament, nor does he understand enough philosophy to know what ought to be rejected in Hellenistic philosophy, nor enough Scholasticism to know what ought to be useful to avoid heresy. Beginning around minute 7.00ff, Dr. White states the following subordinationist doctrine, unbeknownst to himself, which does explain how his accidental Arianism on Mt 24:36 and Mk 13:32 is most likely due to his wilful ignorance not Ariomaniacal malice. Dr. White, defending himself from the charges of Arianism by dismissing Evangelicals as generally ignorami (who never read the Tome of Leo), tells them to close their ignorant mouths, for – as Dr. White asserts – the following is dogmatically true:

[Christ] is not merely some secondary created creature no matter how exalted. All “the pleroma,” the fullness, of that which makes god, god, “is dwelling in him in bodily form.” He is the creator, he took on human flesh, he has not abandoned that flesh, he is not ceased being the God-man. Now, I wasn’t going to mention this but I would just point out … that just seems honestly to cause some serious problems for people who try to force Aristotle’s Categories on the Christian God and it would seem to cause some problems for people who are today just obliterating the clear distinctions between [sic] Father Son and Spirit; not as to their deity, not as to the fact as each is described as Yahweh, their full participation in the divine being, but the fact that the Bible differentiates between.[2]

Besides Dr. White’s mistaken implication about Aristotle’s Categories as accepted by his human and Scholastic enemies (being unaware apparently of the fact that the Categories were rejected by everyone explicitly as inadequate to describe divine being; from Gregory’s Theological Orations [against the Arian Eunomius], to Augustine’s De Trinitate,[3] through to Thomas Aquinas’s insistence on a Christian God above all categorical items [genera]), Dr. White disparages Scholastic mastery of what he summarizes as “human wisdom” (1 Cor 2:4).

Consequently, Dr. White’s personal connection with the deity and his godly doctrine that (putatively) is Biblically (not rationally) informed, ought to be a standard of Trinitarian orthodoxy since Dr. White has gotten rid of human philosophical hubris. The result: Dr. White believes that he can demonstrate his orthodoxy to Evangelicals and dispossess them of Arian accusations by claiming that the Father “participates” and the Son “participates” and the Holy Spirit “participates” in the divine being. Biblically speaking, this sounds very familiar – as a Bible alone expert like Dr. White surely knows – for (NIV) 2 Peter 1:4 states:

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

The only use of participation in New-Testament Biblical teaching is 2 Peter 1:4. The only participants ever mentioned in the New Testament of the divine nature are human beings. What possibility exists for humans, if they be not participants of the divine nature? Corruption. Dr. White has subjected the Father, Son, and Spirit to participate like Peter, James, and John on Tabor in deity! This is a kind of tri-theism, but a strange one, for the Fathers of Ephesus and Chalcedon designated the error of Nestorius: “Creature-worship” for only one case of such participation. By dividing the humanity from the divinity but by demanding worship to the one-visibly-manifested-person of Jesus in time and history, the Fathers condemned Nestorius for demanding worship of a human nature who only participated in the divine nature (just like Peter, James, and John).

Here, instead of being a Nestorian heretic, or an Arian monopatrist, Dr. White embraces a theological construct whereby the Father, Son, and Spirit, are divine because they have a connection to godhead partially. Participation (koinônia, symmetochê) in Greek and English implies a “part” or something less than total possession of the thing itself, as the said thing properly possesses for itself. But participation means that I have contact with something belonging to another and only in some way siphoned off or plugged into by the participant to a limited degree. Dr. White’s solution, eschewing the carefully crafted language of thousands of Christians continuously over hundreds of years, is to entrust to himself orthodoxy above these others: The Father participates in deity, as the Son, as too the Spirit, and as do we who are “participants of the divine nature.”

Had Dr. White spent time in Hellenistic philosophy and literature, as did St. Paul with pagan poetry, Stoic arguments for the existence of God and against homosexuality, and herein Peter’s epistle where it obliquely cites a philosophical phraseology that is native to Plato[4] and imitated by the Stoics, then Dr. White would have known why anti-Arians, Chalcedonians, and Schoolmen do not believe that the three persons of the Trinity participate in deity, since that means deity is properly God and the three persons only can participate by a non-native connectedness to the deity, just like you and I might be connected by grace to the deity.

Finally, I turn another of Dr. James White’s hurried attempts to escape from his inadvertent Arianism. In his 14 October 2022: “Just Too Long for a Twitter Thread,” Dr. White ends his damage control article by stating:

The means by which Jesus “makes Himself of no reputation” is by taking on a perfect human nature (see also my discussion of this with my friend Abdullah Kunde in our debate in New South Whales from eleven years ago), not by a diminishment of His divine nature. Or, as Mike Riccardi wrote in MSJ, Spring 2019, 103, it does not consist “in the shedding of His divine attributes or prerogatives but in the veiling of the rightful expression of His divine glory.”

Sadly, due to Dr. White’s dubious understanding of Greek philosophical and Scholastic theological terminology, he has not only diminished the divine nature of the Son-Logos in his previous podcast, but his recent “On the road trip with James” (no. 4) reduces the nature of all three persons to participants in deity. Instead of sounding like the Bible, Dr. White looks to have taken his theology more from the contemporary singer Joan Osborne:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?

Eternal Memory, Nicaea, down with the Arian madman!

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[1] ^{[Dr. White:]} What we are being told is, um,  … “^{[The Chalcedonian Christian:]} Well… when it says: ‘Nor the son,’ ^{(Mark 13:23)} you have to take the fully developed later definitions of Christology ^{[namely, Chalcedon (AD 451) & Constantinople III (AD 680)]}, read them back in here, and do “partitive exegesis” and, so, and that’s the easy way to do, the easy out to Mt 24:36 ^{[namely, the “Father only” knows]} is to say: “Well that’s the humanity,” um, “and not the deity.” That’s the easy way out and that’s normally how people try to respond to the critics and the critics go: “Can you show me that from the text?” Especially since it says: ^{[NKJV Matthew 24:36]}But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (oudeis oiden, oude huios, ei mê ho patêr monos). But the “Father only” but you are saying: “It’s not the Father only, it’s the Father and the Son and the Spirit,” right? That’s what you are saying. So, you don’t believe “the monos” part and there are people on the other side that are sharp enough to catch you on that because you are gonna have to use of “monos” ^{[viz., “only”]} in John chapter 17; it’s this consistency thing; I know it’s a bit of pain but it’s this consistency thing. So, if you want to say in order to protect my formulations, um, I’m gonna go beyond what the text say and I’m gonna say this is speaking on the son in his human incarnation and I’m gonna just ignore the use of the term monos.

[2] https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/road-trip/on-the-road-trip-with-james-4/.

[3] This does not negate his assertion of two terms, relation and action, as alone appropriate concepts to apply to God.

[4] See Plato, Phaedrus:

[230a] when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things. And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them, as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is participated by nature (θείας τινὸς καὶ ἀτύφου μοίρας φύσει μετέχον). But, my friend, while we were talking, is not this the tree to which you were leading us?

This concept is developed in Stoicism (Chrysippus, fragmenta logica et physica, 441) into a participation (tên koinônian) of material and the nature of a divine body (tên physin tou theiou sômatos) by means of “spirit” (pneuma) (a light kind of active matter). Otherwise, we would be forced to believe that 2 Peter 1:4 is terminology invented from nowhere and nobody knows what it means since the only like concepts come from two philosophical sources that are “pagan wisdom” and therefore somehow mean that 2 Peter cannot be using philosophical concepts based upon Dr. White’s disparaging of it as “human wisdom.”

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