A few fellow Christian theologians have been discussing the concept of split Trinity over the blogsphere, so I thought of offering a hopefully helpful contribution. The topic is whether Marva Dawn's comment that a split in the Trinity occured in Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross is theologically plausible. Friends like Isaac Hopper has already offered a response from a biblical perspective, and Adam Couchman and Jeff Rudy from a patristic perspective, so I intentionally avoided overlapping with their focus. What is provide here, though, is more of a personal theological musing.
Jesus’ cry of dereliction is not an enacted line from a movie script. There was a real feeling of abandonment. The sorrow must have been greater than that of his Gethsemane experience. At the cross were literal sweat from genuine exhaustion and literal blood causing genuine pain. They were not make-ups and props that could be removed after the show. But still, the reality of Jesus’ agony and his subsequent cry does not provide sufficient fundaments in affirming a Trinitarian split.
Firstly, split Trinity, I think, falls in two interrelated errors that spring from the failure to maintain the distinction between the economic Trinity and the ontological Trinity. The first error is in absolutizing the IS in Rahner’s dictum “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa,” so that there is perceived a complete identicality between the two. With this, what happens with the Persons in the economy of salvation is thought to be transpiring in the ontological Trinity as well. There is, to a certain level, truth in such an identicality, because the Act of God is grounded in the very Being of God. (Or the Doing of God is grounded in the Being of God). The problem, however, is in complete and utter identicality, so that what is epistemologically given is all there is ontologically, or what is revealed is all there is about God. Consequently, Jesus’ cry of dereliction, in particular, does not only reveal something about God’s Being, but is all there is about God’s Being. Connected to this first error is the error of absolute parallelization from below, or projecting and imposing deductions from the economic Trinity to the immanent Trinity.
Secondly, to teach that the Trinity was split in the passion of Christ actually evidences a pneumatological insufficiency in theological formulation. If, as Augustine taught, the Spirit is the vinculum caritatis (bond of love) between the Father and the Son, the proposition that the Father deserted the Son on the cross is not primarily a patriological statement, but a statement about the absence of the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is the bond of love, split Trinity would literally imply the dismantling of the Triune Communion of Love!
Actually, by the same reasoning employed in affirming split Trinity at Calvary, why not just move the split thirty-three years earlier, when the Son was born and began dwelling on earth?
The greatest implication of espousing split Trinity is the unmaking of God. Corollary to holding a split, division or partition in the Trinity is the principle that change has fundamentally happened in the Being of God—a change that is not merely Privation or Addition, but a complete Opposition. God is Love. If the Father ontologically abandoned the Son in the cross, the Lover became Unlover (Father), the Beloved became Unbeloved (Son), and the Love became Unlove (Holy Spirit)! But this could not be. If the cross is the perfect enactment and portrayal of the Love of the Triune God for the world, then it is an impious aversion to hold the breaking of the Communion of Love that God is, precisely where and when God’s Love IS.
So how should be understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction? Two doctrines should be balanced: appropriation and perichoresis.
According to the doctrine of appropriation, there are distinct and unique offices that each of the Three Persons of the Trinity have in the economy of salvation. For instance, only the Son is incarnate. Only the Son is both consubstantial with the Father and with humanity; the Holy is consubstantial only with the Father, but not with us. As such, the act of being crucified is a unique Work of the Person of the Son. So far so good, but the importance of hypostatic distinction and salvific agency should be balanced with the doctrine or perichoresis, which teaches that the three Persons interpenetrate at the level of both Being and Act (ontology and economy). As such, distinction in Act does not mean distinction in Will and Purpose. There is only One movement of salvation –accomplished in a double movement (1) from the Father through the Son in the Spirit and (2) in the Spirit through the Son to the Father – and enacted by three Persons with their distinct agency in the economy. As such, distinction does not imply split in Being, in Will, in Purpose or in Love.
