Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit

The Text

This single line is the creed’s engine. Everything from verse 8 (“the Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, the Holy Spirit uncreate”) through verse 18 (“not three Lords, but one Lord”) is this one sentence run, attribute by attribute, through uncreatedness, immeasurability, eternity, omnipotence, deity, and lordship. The creed is about to repeat itself eleven times, and verse 7 is the rule that licenses the repetition: qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis et Spiritus Sanctus — of whatever kind the Father is, of exactly that kind is the Son, and exactly that kind is the Spirit.

The word the verse refuses is as important as the words it uses. It does not say the Son is like the Father (similis). The fourth-century Homoian party would have signed like; that was the whole point of their compromise — a Son similar to the Father, as similar as a creature can be. Qualis … talis shuts that door. It is not resemblance but identity of kind: there is no quality of deity the Father has that the Son and the Spirit have in a lesser degree, a derived measure, or a borrowed form. Whatever it is to be God, the Father is that, the Son is that, the Spirit is that — talis, talis, the same.

Translation Notes

qualis … talis — “such as … such.” These are the standard Latin correlatives of kind or quality: qualis asks or states “of what sort,” talis answers “of that sort.” Their pairing asserts not similarity but sameness of nature. English “such as … such” is exact and, unusually, loses nothing. The 1979 paraphrase “what the Father is, the Son is” is faithful in sense though it trades the formulaic ring for plainness.

the elided verb. Latin can omit est, and the creed does so in every clause: qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis et Spiritus Sanctus. The bareness is rhetorical. Stripped of its verbs the line becomes a chant — which is what it was: this creed was sung at Prime, and verse 7 is built to be the refrain-rule the chanting mind can carry.

what the verse does not divide. This is the creed’s assertion of the common divine nature — what is true of all three because each is wholly God. It is not yet a statement about what is proper to each person (the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding — that comes in verses 21–24), nor about the works appropriated to each in salvation. Verse 7 establishes the floor on which those later distinctions stand: the persons differ in relation of origin and in mission, never in quale — never in the kind of deity they are.

Historical Context

Verse 7 is a fifth-century Latin refusal of a fourth-century Greek compromise.

Against homoios. When the Nicene homoousios (“of one substance”) proved politically costly through the mid-fourth century, a series of imperial councils floated softer formulas. The most successful was the Homoian: the Son is like (homoios) the Father, “according to the Scriptures,” with the dangerous word substance dropped entirely. Like could be signed by almost anyone, which is exactly why it settled nothing. The Athanasian Creed’s qualis … talis is the Latin West’s flat rejection of like: not homoios but full identity of kind, the attribute-level form of what homoousios secured at the level of substance.

The litany as method. The eleven-verse repetition that verse 7 sets up is not redundancy; it is the creed’s chosen pedagogy. The Quicumque is, in genre, closer to a psalmus or chanted instruction than to a conciliar decree. Its parallelism is mnemonic (a monastic community could hold it by heart), doxological (it is praise, not lecture), and polemical (it forecloses the Arian move attribute by attribute, leaving no predicate of deity unclaimed for the Son and the Spirit). The form is the argument.

The Augustinian floor. Behind the verse stands Augustine’s rule of inseparable operations: the works of the Trinity toward the world are undivided, because the nature is one. Qualis … talis is that rule stated as a confession. Augustine also supplied the counterweight the creed assumes but does not here state — that the inseparable works are nonetheless done by the persons in their proper order — and the whole later history of this verse is the church holding those two truths together.

Lines of Interpretation

The doctrine is uncontested. The live question is one of balance: does the creed’s relentless symmetry, recited eleven times, flatten the persons into interchangeable instances of a generic deity — losing the Father who is not the Son, the Son who alone became flesh, the Spirit who alone is poured out?

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, On the Trinity (the rule of inseparable operations); the Cappadocians (common nature, distinct hypostatic properties)

The Fathers held the symmetry and the distinction together. The external works of God are inseparable (every divine act is the act of the one God), yet they terminate distinctly — it is the Son, not the Father, who is incarnate; the Spirit, not the Son, who is poured out at Pentecost. Qualis … talis states the first truth; the relations of origin and the missions state the second; neither cancels the other.

Strengths

• Secures the full deity of each person against every graded Christology, with no predicate of God left unclaimed
• Holds, in principle, the exact balance — one nature, distinct persons and missions — that the verse alone could seem to threaten

Weaknesses

• The verse, taken without the patristic counterweight, can be heard as bare sameness, and frequently is
• “Inseparable operations” is so easily over-read that distinct missions can vanish, leaving a functionally modalist piety

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 39 (appropriation)

The Schoolmen named the device that protects the verse from flattening: appropriation. Because the nature is one (qualis … talis), every attribute is common to all three; yet Scripture and the liturgy appropriate certain attributes to certain persons by fittingness — power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, goodness to the Spirit — not because they are not common, but because appropriating them illumines the proper relations. Appropriation lets the church speak distinctly of the persons without dividing the substance.

Strengths

• Provides the precise grammar for honoring both the common nature and the proper persons — the verse and its counterweight in one tool
• Disciplines popular piety: it explains why we may rightly speak of “the Father’s power” without implying the Son is less powerful

Weaknesses

• Appropriation is subtle and is constantly mistaken for division (people hear “wisdom belongs to the Son” as “the Father is less wise”)
• In careless use it can become a license for exactly the cafeteria-Trinity the verse forbids

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.13; John Owen, Communion with God

The Reformed hold the inseparable unity of operation firmly. Owen’s distinctive and pastorally rich refinement bears directly on this verse: the believer holds distinct communion with each person — with the Father in his love, the Son in his grace, the Spirit in his comfort — precisely because each is fully and identically God (qualis … talis), so that communion with any is communion with God entire. Owen recovers the distinctness of the persons in the Christian’s experience without the least breach of the symmetry.

Strengths

• Owen shows the verse is not the enemy of distinct devotion but its ground — you may attend to each person because each is wholly God
• Keeps the doctrine experiential and pastoral, not merely metaphysical

Weaknesses

• “Distinct communion” can slide, in less careful hands, toward three objects of devotion rather than one God in three persons
• The strong stress on inseparable operation, isolated from Owen’s balance, can again flatten the missions

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the Cappadocians; John of Damascus; the essence/energies distinction

The East affirms the common nature and characteristically guards the persons by the distinct hypostatic properties (unbegottenness, begottenness, procession) and, in the Palamite tradition, by the distinction of the one essence from the divine energies in which God is communicated. The worry the East presses at the Western symmetry is that qualis … talis, abstracted from the persons, can drift toward a deity contemplated as nature rather than encountered as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Strengths

• Keeps the persons irreducibly concrete; the symmetry never floats free of the Three actually named in Scripture and prayer
• The essence/energies distinction supplies a way to say God is wholly given and wholly beyond — without grading the persons

Weaknesses

• The essence/energies distinction is unreceived in the West and itself contested; it solves the Western worry with a move the West does not grant
• A strong “persons-first” reading can underplay exactly the common-nature truth verse 7 exists to assert

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Rahner, The Trinity; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1; the recovery of the distinct missions

Rahner’s complaint lands on this verse’s failure mode: a symmetry recited until the persons are interchangeable produces, in practice, the modalism the creed formally forbids — a “God” behind the Three whom the Three merely express. His Grundaxiom (the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity) re-anchors the symmetry in the distinct missions: the Father who sends is not the Son who is sent is not the Spirit who is poured out, and those distinctions are not lost in the unity of nature but revealed through it.

Strengths

• Diagnoses precisely how the verse, mishandled, yields functional modalism — the very error verse 4 prohibited
• Recovers the missions as the place where the symmetry is displayed, not erased — economic distinctness grounded in identity of nature

Weaknesses

• Pressed hard, the mission-emphasis can collapse the immanent Trinity into the economic, making God’s triunity a function of salvation history rather than its eternal ground
• The corrective sometimes so foregrounds difference that the verse’s own assertion — talis, talis, the same — is muted

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s whole experiential theology depends on this verse being true and on its not meaning interchangeability — and he holds both without strain. The Wesleyan ordo salutis assigns the believer distinct dealings with each person: the Father’s prevenient and pardoning love, the Son’s atoning merit pleaded in justification (Sermon 5), the Spirit’s direct inward witness in assurance (Sermon 10–11, The Witness of the Spirit; Romans 8:16). These are not the same touch under three names. And yet — this is where verse 7 does its work — each touch is the touch of the whole God, because qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis Spiritus Sanctus. The Spirit who witnesses is not a lesser comfort than the Father who pardons; he is God, in the full kind of God’s deity, or the assurance Wesley preached would be a created feeling rather than God’s own testimony.

Wesley read Owen and the Puritans, and the structure of Communion with God — distinct fellowship with each person grounded in the identical Godhead of each — is recognizably the shape of Wesleyan devotion. It is also why Wesley’s reticence about the word “person” (Sermon 55) never threatened his piety: he did not need the technical term, because he already had the substance — the conviction that whichever person of the Trinity meets the soul at a given moment of the via salutis, it is the one God, entire, who is meeting it.

Charles Wesley turned the verse into a structural principle of his hymnody. The classic Wesleyan Trinity hymn moves stanza by stanza — to the Father, to the Son, to the Spirit, then to the Triune God — and gives identical glory in each stanza. That stanza form is verse 7 sung: distinct address, equal and identical praise. Where the creed proves qualis … talis by litany, Charles enacts it by strophe, and the congregation learns the doctrine in its body before it could state it with its mind.

Hymnody

Verse 7 is not the subject of a hymn; it is the architecture of an entire hymn-genre. The stanza-per-person Trinity hymn is qualis … talis in strophic form.

“Come, thou Almighty King” (anon., 1757) is the clearest case: stanza 1 to the Father (“Almighty King”), stanza 2 to the Son (“incarnate Word”), stanza 3 to the Spirit (“holy Comforter”), stanza 4 to “the great One in Three” — each stanza ascribing the same eternity, the same praise, the same glory. The hymn does not argue identity of nature; it performs it, by giving each person, in turn, exactly what it gave the others.

The Te Deum does the same in its central section: “the Father, of an infinite Majesty; thine adorable, true, and only Son; also the Holy Ghost the Comforter” — three parallel clauses, one undivided adoration.

The Wesleyan corpus is built on the pattern. Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Trinity (1767) and hymns like “Maker, in whom we live” run the strophic qualis … talis: a stanza to each, a stanza to the Three, the praise never graded down. There is, fittingly, no single great hymn about the symmetry — because the symmetry is the rule by which the church has written all her Trinity hymns. To sing the Trinity at all, in the church’s settled practice, is already to obey verse 7.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The pastoral problem this verse exists to solve is the cafeteria Trinity — and almost every congregation runs one.

Name the menu. People do not usually deny the deity of any person; they quietly prefer one and live off it. The moralist keeps the stern Father and a thin sense of grace. The sentimentalist keeps gentle Jesus and loses the holiness. The experientialist keeps the Spirit and floats free of the Son’s cross and the Father’s law. Each has chosen a favorite from the menu and is, in effect, worshipping a third of God with great sincerity. Verse 7 closes the cafeteria. Qualis … talis: there is no economy version of God available at the Son counter and a premium version at the Father’s. Whichever person you are dealing with at a given hour of your life — the Father you pray to, the Son you trust in, the Spirit who is convicting you now — you are dealing with God in the full kind of God’s deity, not a fraction and not a preference. You cannot trade down, and you were never asked to choose.

Turn the symmetry into comfort, not abstraction. The cash value of talis, talis is pastoral, not speculative. When a believer can feel only the Spirit’s conviction and not the Father’s love, the verse promises that the God convicting him is the same God, in the same Godhead, who loves him — there is no kinder member to appeal to over the head of a harsher one, because there is no harsher one; it is one God, equally and identically God in each. When grief makes the Father feel absent, the Christ who wept at the tomb is talis — that very God, present. The verse does not ask the suffering to solve a metaphysical puzzle; it assures them that the God they can reach is the whole God, never a junior representative.

Practice the symmetry in the liturgy. The congregation already obeys verse 7 every week and does not know it: the Gloria gives the Father, the Son, and the Spirit the same glory, in the same breath, with no comparative anywhere; the threefold benediction blesses with one undivided blessing; the stanza-per-person hymns ascribe identical praise to each in turn. The pastoral task is not to add a lecture on identity of nature. It is to point, once, at the Gloria the people are already singing and say: hear what you just did — you gave the Spirit exactly the glory you gave the Father. That is the catholic faith. You have been keeping verse 7 every Sunday of your life.

Further Reading

• John 5:19–23 — the Son does what the Father does, and is to be honored as the Father is
• John 14:9–11 — whoever has seen me has seen the Father
• John 16:13–15 — all that the Father has is mine … he [the Spirit] will take what is mine
• 1 Corinthians 12:4–6 — the same God working all, in Spirit, Lord, and Father
• Athanasius, Letters to Serapion — the Spirit’s full deity, the symmetry extended to the Spirit
• Augustine, On the Trinity, esp. Books I–IV (inseparable operations)
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration 31 (on the Spirit)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 39 (appropriation)
• John Calvin, Institutes I.13
• John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (1657)
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Articles I–II
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermons 10–11 (“The Witness of the Spirit”), 55 (“On the Trinity”)
• Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity (1767); “Come, thou Almighty King” (as a model of the strophic pattern)
• Te Deum laudamus
• Karl Rahner, The Trinity (Herder & Herder, 1967)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §§8–12
• Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford, 2004)