One Person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Spirit

The Text

Verse 4 stated the method by what it forbids: neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance. Verses 5–6 state the same method by what it affirms. First the distinction — alia est persona Patris, alia Filii, alia Spiritus Sancti, one person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Spirit. Then, on the hinge of a single sed — “but” — the unity: one Godhead, equal glory, coeternal majesty.

Those last two phrases are the most consequential words introduced so far. Aequalis gloria and coaeterna maiestas — equal glory and coeternal majesty — are the two adjectives the rest of Part I will pound, attribute by attribute, for twenty more verses. Everything from “the Father uncreate, the Son uncreate” through “none is greater or less than another” is the working-out of aequalis and coaeterna. The creed has just set down the two struts that carry the whole Trinitarian arch: the persons are equal (none ranked above another in glory) and coeternal (none earlier than another in being). Note also what the creed refuses to say. It says one … another … another — never first … second … third. The persons are numbered nowhere in this creed. They are distinguished and never ranked, and that refusal is itself a doctrine.

Translation Notes

alia est enim persona Patris, alia Filii, alia Spiritus Sancti — “for there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Spirit.” The repeated alia … alia … alia is the grammar of distinction without hierarchy: another, and another, and another, three times, with no ordinal anywhere. Enim (“for”) makes the verse the ground of verse 4’s first prohibition — you may not confound the persons precisely because each is genuinely alia, other than the others. The distinction is by relation of origin (Father, Son, Spirit are who they are toward one another), not by any difference of rank or nature.

sed — “but.” One small adversative carries the entire weight of the doctrine. Everything before it is distinction; everything after it is unity; the sed is the via media itself, the pivot on which “neither confounding nor dividing” actually turns.

Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti una est divinitas — “the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is one.” The creed shifts its term for the divine being from substantia (verse 4) to divinitas (the Godhead, the deity itself). The variation is deliberate range, not inconsistency: substantia, divinitas, and later Deus and Dominus are the one reality named from several angles, so that no single word can be seized and made to do less than the whole.

aequalis gloria — “equal glory.” Aequalis is the load-bearing adjective of anti-subordinationism: not similar, not comparable, not appropriately ordered, but equal. Gloria renders the biblical weight of God’s manifest splendor (Hebrew kavod, Greek doxa). The persons do not share a graded glory; the glory is one and equal.

coaeterna maiestas — “coeternal majesty.” The co- prefix (Augustine’s and the Latin tradition’s) means together-eternal — not three eternities, and not one eternity that the Son and Spirit entered late. Maiestas is sovereign greatness, the majesty the Te Deum will sing as “the Father, of an infinite Majesty.” Against Arius’s “there was when he was not,” coaeterna says: there never was.

Historical Context

By c. 500 the two adjectives this verse introduces were the hard-won spoils of the longest doctrinal war the church had fought.

The Gallic-Spanish creedal tradition. The Athanasian Creed did not invent its phrasing. The balanced “one … another … another / but one Godhead” pattern, and the aequalis/coaeternus vocabulary, run through the Western creedal documents the Quicumque draws on — the Fides Damasi, the creeds associated with the Councils of Toledo, the Augustinian De fide tradition of southern Gaul. The creed is the catechetical distillation of a regional teaching tradition, not one author’s invention.

The anti-Arian payload. Every word of verse 6 is aimed. Arius had taught that the Son was made, had a beginning, and possessed a derived and therefore lesser glory; the Holy Spirit fared worse in the hands of the Pneumatomachi (“Spirit-fighters”). Aequalis gloria denies the gradation; coaeterna maiestas denies the beginning. The Council of Constantinople (381) had secured the Spirit’s full deity in the Nicene Creed’s “who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified”; the Athanasian Creed restates that victory in two adjectives and then proves them, attribute by attribute, for the rest of Part I.

The co- compounds and the worshipping church. Coaeternus and coaequalis were not academic coinages; they passed immediately into Latin hymnody and the Office (the creed itself was sung at Prime). When later English hymnody sings “co-equal, co-eternal,” it is quoting, in translation, the exact diction this verse fixed — doctrine that became, almost at once, song.

Lines of Interpretation

The doctrine is universally held. The disputed question is sharp and, at the moment, unusually live: how does the equality of the persons (aequalis gloria) relate to the order among them — the Father as the one from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds? Does the order of origin imply any ordering of authority, or does aequalis exclude it entirely?

Patristic

Tradition: Athanasius; the Cappadocians; Augustine, On the Trinity (esp. Books I–IV)

The Fathers held taxis (order) and equality together without strain: there is an order of origin — the Father is the unbegotten source, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding — but the order of origin is not an order of rank. Augustine’s rule: the Son is equal to the Father in the form of God and less than the Father in the form of a servant (Phil. 2) — the inequality belongs to the incarnate economy, never to the eternal Godhead. Aequalis gloria is precisely this.

Strengths

• Holds order and equality together without collapsing either — the persons are distinct in origin, undivided and unranked in glory
• Locates every “subordination” language of Scripture in the incarnate economy, exactly where the New Testament puts it

Weaknesses

• The distinction between order-of-origin and order-of-rank is subtle and is repeatedly lost in transmission, in every century
• The patristic settlement assumes the technical relation-of-origin framework; cut loose from it, “the Father is the source” slides toward gradation

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I qq. 42, 33

Aquinas grounds the equality in divine simplicity: the one undivided essence is wholly possessed by each person, so there can be no more or less of Godhead, glory, or eternity in any of them. The persons differ only by relation of opposition (paternity, filiation, procession); since the essence is not divided, equality is not a balance struck between three but a consequence of there being one entire Godhead in each.

Strengths

• Derives aequalis gloria from divine simplicity itself — equality is not asserted but entailed
• Makes the order-of-origin purely relational, with no remainder of rank

Weaknesses

• The argument’s force depends on a metaphysics of simplicity that modern theology often no longer shares, leaving the equality looking merely asserted to readers outside that frame
• So thoroughly relational an account can make the distinctions feel thin to the worshipper, who meets the persons as Father, Son, and Spirit, not as subsistent relations

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.13; the Reformed confessions; B. B. Warfield

Calvin’s autotheos — the Son is God of himself with respect to his essence — is, at root, a defense of aequalis gloria: the Son’s deity is not a lesser, derived deity but the one entire Godhead, underivably his. Warfield later pressed this into a near-denial of any eternal “order,” precisely to protect equality from any subordinationist reading.

Strengths

• The autotheos tradition is a powerful guard on aequalis: there is no junior partner in the Godhead
• Keeps the equality tethered to worship and to the doctrine of God’s self-revelation in Christ — the God we meet in the Son is God without remainder

Weaknesses

• Pressed to the Warfieldian extreme, the near-erasure of order-of-origin strains the patristic and creedal grammar (the Father is the unbegotten, the Son is begotten)
• The internal Reformed disagreement on this very point shows the verse’s tension is not resolved even within one tradition

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the Cappadocians; John of Damascus; modern Orthodox theology (Lossky, Zizioulas)

The East holds aequalis gloria firmly while giving the Father’s monarchia — his being the personal source (aitia, “cause”) of the Son and Spirit — a more prominent role than the West typically does. The persons are fully equal in glory and majesty; the Father is nonetheless the fountain of the Godhead, the principle of unity, without being “greater” in deity.

Strengths

• Keeps the persons concrete and the relations of origin vivid, resisting an abstract equality that floats free of the Father, Son, and Spirit Scripture actually names
• Insists the “cause” is personal, not a gradation of nature — equality preserved

Weaknesses

• “Cause” language, pressed without the strictest care, edges toward exactly the gradation aequalis gloria forbids — a recurring East–West friction
• The verse’s own diction (aequalis, coaeterna, and later none is greater or less) is more flatly egalitarian than the strong-monarchy reading comfortably bears

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: the Eternal Functional Subordination debate (Grudem, Ware vs. Giles, Trueman, Butner); feminist and egalitarian trinitarian appropriations

This verse is the precise center of a still-unsettled contemporary dispute. One side (often called Eternal Functional Subordination, or Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission) holds that the Son is eternally equal in essence yet eternally submits in role to the Father; the other side argues that any eternal relation of authority-and-submission imports rank into the immanent Trinity and so violates aequalis gloria. The 2016 exchange brought the question into wide view; it remains genuinely open, and it is fed (on more than one side) by extra-theological concerns about gender and authority that the verse itself does not address.

Strengths

• The subordinationist-leaning side rightly presses the New Testament’s real language of the Son’s obedience and the taxis of the persons — it is not nothing, and a flat egalitarianism that erases all order also strains the text
• The anti-subordinationist side rightly insists that aequalis gloria and “none is greater or less” mean what they say, and that the immanent Trinity is not an authority structure
• The debate has driven a serious retrieval of patristic and conciliar sources by all parties

Weaknesses

• Both sides are vulnerable to letting contemporary disputes about human authority set the questions put to the eternal Godhead — the opposite of the creed’s own discipline
• “Eternal submission in role” is hard to state without some gradation of glory creeping in, which the verse forbids; a total erasure of order is hard to square with the creed’s own relations of origin (verses 21–24). The verse judges the over-reach of both sides

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of this verse is verbatim catholic and admits no softening. The Methodist Articles of Religion, Article I — “three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity” — is aequalis gloria, coaeterna maiestas in English: equal power, equal eternity, equal Godhead. Article II names the Son “the very and eternal God, of one substance with the Father.” Wesley trimmed thirty-nine Articles to twenty-five and cut what he judged speculative; he did not touch the equality and coeternity of the persons, because his entire soteriology rests on them.

The dependence is specific. Wesley’s gospel is that the Son who justifies (Sermon 5, Justification by Faith) and the Spirit who sanctifies (Sermon 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation) are fully God — not a high God who saves at a distance through two lesser agents. If the Son’s glory were less than the Father’s, justification would be the work of a creature; if the Spirit’s majesty were not coeternal, sanctification would be a created influence rather than God himself remaking the heart. Aequalis gloria is the reason the Wesleyan ordo salutis can promise what it promises: the whole work of salvation is the work of the whole God.

Wesley’s reticence about the word “person” (Sermon 55) never extended to the equality; on the contrary, the equality is what he most insisted the unlearned must hold, even if they never use the technical vocabulary. And he refused to let the order of origin become an order of rank — the practical Arianism of treating Jesus as God’s noble deputy, or the practical binitarianism of treating the Spirit as God’s impersonal influence, are exactly the reductions his preaching of assurance (the Spirit’s own witness, Romans 8) was built to prevent.

Charles Wesley made the verse a refrain. His Trinity hymns guard equality and coeternity by the very compounds the creed fixed: co-equal, co-eternal, the “essential One, adored / in co-eternal Three.” Where the creed proves aequalis gloria attribute by attribute, Charles simply sings it — and the singing, for the Wesleyan tradition, was always the surer catechesis.

Hymnody

This verse, unlike the warning clauses, has flowed straight into the church’s song, because its two key words became hymnic commonplaces almost on contact.

The Te Deum — the creed’s companion at the Office — sings verse 6 directly: “the Father, of an infinite Majesty; thine adorable, true, and only Son; also the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” Maiestas is in the text, and the Te Deum gives the Son and the Spirit the same adoration in the same breath as the Father — aequalis gloria enacted in the church’s oldest Trinitarian canticle.

“Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” closes on “God in three Persons” held within one “Lord God Almighty” — distinction and equal Godhead in a single line. “Come, thou Almighty King” ends “to thee, great One in Three, / eternal praises be” — coaeterna maiestas as doxology. “Of the Father’s love begotten” sings the Son “evermore and evermore” — coeternity in a refrain a child can hold.

The densest witness is Wesleyan. Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Trinity (1767) and “Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord” — “supreme, essential One, adored / in co-eternal Three” — are this verse turned to praise: equal and co-eternal are not explained but sung, which is, the Wesleys judged, how the doctrine is actually kept by a congregation. There is no hymn titled for this verse and there does not need to be: every “co-equal, co-eternal” in the hymnal is its echo.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The practical cash value of aequalis gloria, coaeterna maiestas is that there is no junior member of the Godhead — and most congregations, left to their instincts, quietly install one.

Name the org-chart God. The functional theology of many pews is not Nicene; it is a corporation. There is God the Father, the distant executive upstairs who really runs things; Jesus, the approachable middle manager who handles the human-facing work; and the Holy Spirit, something like office morale — a force, an atmosphere, a lowercase influence. Every level of that picture is forbidden by this verse. The Son is not the Father’s deputy; the Spirit is not the Father’s energy. The glory is equal; the majesty is coeternal. The pastoral task is to name the org-chart for what it is — a polite, modern, practical Arianism — and to refuse it, not by argument but by restoring the church’s actual address to God: we pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and each preposition lands on the one God in equal glory.

Recover the forgotten Spirit. The most common breach of this verse in Protestant practice is not denying the Son’s deity but quietly demoting the Spirit’s — a functional binitarianism in which the Spirit is invoked at benedictions and otherwise treated as a vague good feeling. Aequalis gloria will not allow it. The Spirit who convicts, regenerates, assures, and sanctifies is God in the full majesty of God, and the Wesleyan doctrine of assurance depends on exactly that: it is God himself, not a created influence, who bears witness with our spirit. A church that recovers the Spirit’s equal glory recovers its own confidence in prayer.

Let coeternity preach the gospel. Coaeterna maiestas is not abstract. It means there was never a God who was not Father, Son, and Spirit — that the self-giving love among the persons is not a later development God took up when creation needed saving, but the eternal fact of who God is. The cross does not make God loving; it shows, in time, the love that the coeternal majesty always was. That is the deepest pastoral payload of the verse: the love that meets you in Christ is not God’s emergency measure but God’s eternal nature, and a love that old is a love that holds. The congregation does not need to parse coaeternus to be carried by it; they need only be told that the God who loves them is the God who has always, from before all worlds, been love among the Three — and then sent to the Gloria, where they have been confessing it all along.

Further Reading

• John 1:1–18 — the Word was God, in the beginning, with God
• John 17:5 — the glory I had with you before the world existed (the coeternal glory)
• Philippians 2:6–11 — the form of God and the form of a servant (Augustine’s interpretive key)
• John 14:9, 26; 16:13–15 — the Son revealing the Father, the Spirit equal in the divine work
• 2 Corinthians 13:14 — the apostolic benediction, the three named in one blessing
• Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians; Letters to Serapion (on the Spirit’s deity)
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations 29–31
• Augustine, On the Trinity, esp. Books I–IV
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I qq. 33, 42
• John Calvin, Institutes I.13; B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity”
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Articles I–II
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermons 5, 43, 55
• Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity (1767); “Hail, holy, holy, holy Lord”
• Te Deum laudamus (the Office canticle — “the Father, of an infinite Majesty”)
• Karl Rahner, The Trinity (1967)
• Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son (IVP Academic, 2012) and Jesus and the Father (Zondervan, 2006)
• Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, contributions to the Eternal Functional Subordination debate (with the responses of Giles, Trueman, and Butner) — read alongside one another
• D. Glenn Butner Jr., The Son Who Learned Obedience (Pickwick, 2018)
• Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford, 2004)