In the summer of 2016, an argument broke out across Christian blogs that surprised many. It wasn’t about politics, or music, or money. It was about the Trinity—and it was between conservative scholars who agreed with each other on nearly everything else.

The question at the centre of it sounds technical: does God have one will, or three? Almost everything hangs on the answer. Lean one way and you end up with three gods sharing a job title. Lean the other and you end up with one God with one will.

That argument hasn’t gone away. It’s now part of a much bigger dispute in academic theology, closely tied to the debate over divine simplicity. Two accounts of God are on the table. One is social Trinitarianism. The other, classical Trinitarianism, is what the church has confessed since the 4th century.

This article makes the case for the classical answer.

What the argument is really about

Start by clearing away a misunderstanding. Nobody in this debate denies the Trinity. Every side confesses the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, equal in power and glory. The argument isn’t about whether God is three-in-one. It’s about the grammar of that oneness—what exactly holds three persons together as one God.

Three questions divide the two camps, and they stand or fall together.

Answer those three and you’ve already chosen your side.

The social Trinity, at its strongest

Let’s state the other view fairly, and at its best.

Social Trinitarianism begins with the three and asks what makes them one. Its answer is love. On this view the persons are three distinct subjects—three centres of consciousness, each with His own mind and His own will—bound into one God by their perfect mutual indwelling (the technical word is perichoresis, meaning each person wholly contains and is contained by the others), by their shared divine nature, and by the Father’s place as the source of the other two.

Its defenders: Jürgen Moltmann, Cornelius Plantinga Jr, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig and JP Moreland. Miroslav Volf and Stanley Grenz have applied the model to church and society.

And the view has genuine attractions:

• It reads the Gospels naturally. The Son prays to the Father. He loves the Father, obeys the Father, speaks to the Father. That sounds like two minds talking.
• It puts love at the heart of God’s being. God isn’t a solitary monarch. He is eternal community.
• It gives the church something to copy. If God is a loving society, human societies have a divine pattern to imitate.

These aren’t silly instincts. But the view cannot be sustained—not historically, not philosophically, and not from the text of Scripture. Here’s how the two accounts compare.

History doesn’t support it

Social Trinitarians often claim they’re recovering the authentic Trinity of the early church, buried under centuries of Latin philosophy. That claim rests almost entirely on one idea, and the idea is false.

The idea is usually called the de Régnon paradigm, after Théodore de Régnon, a French scholar from the late 19th century. It says the Greek East started with the three persons and worked towards unity, while the Latin West started with the one essence and worked towards threeness. On this reading, the Cappadocian fathers become proto-social Trinitarians and Augustine of Hippo becomes the villain who flattened God into a single self.

Careful historical work has dismantled this. Lewis Ayres, in Nicaea and Its Legacy, along with Michel René Barnes, Sarah Coakley and Stephen R. Holmes, has shown the paradigm is a modern overlay imposed on the 4th century. No pro-Nicene theologian “started with the three” in the sense the social view requires.

The clearest case is the one social Trinitarians quote most.

Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus say the same. What makes God one isn’t that the three belong to the same category. It’s that they have one power, one activity, one will, with the Father as the eternal source. That’s a very different answer from “they get on well.”

What the word “person” actually means

Here’s the hinge of the entire debate, and it turns on a single word.

When we say “person” today, we mean a separate self: someone with his own thoughts, his own choices, his own private inner life. If that’s what “person” means, three persons obviously means three selves—and three selves who’re each fully God means three gods. The social conclusion follows almost automatically.

But that’s not what the word meant when the creeds were written. The modern meaning of “person” as a self-conscious individual owes far more to René Descartes and John Locke than to Nicaea. The Greek word was hypostasis; the Latin was persona. Neither meant “a separate mind.”

In classical teaching, a divine person is a subsistent relation. That phrase sounds forbidding, but the idea is simple: the persons are distinguished from one another only by how they relate to one another, and by nothing else at all.

• The Father is the Father because He eternally begets the Son.
• The Son is the Son because He is eternally begotten of the Father.
• The Spirit is the Spirit because He eternally proceeds.

That’s the whole difference. Everything else—the divine essence, the will, the power, the knowledge, the goodness, the glory—is one and identical in all three. Thomas Aquinas put it sharply: only relations of opposition distinguish the persons. Take away the relations and there’s nothing left to tell them apart, because there’s nothing else that’s not shared.

Once you see this, the social argument loses its engine. It assumes the three persons need three minds. But “person” never meant “mind” in the first place. The social case rests on a word that changed its meaning somewhere around the 17th century.

Why one nature means one will

Now the central claim, and it follows from a principle so ordinary we use it every day without noticing: will follows nature.

Willing is something a nature does. A human being wills humanly because he has a human nature. A dog doesn’t deliberate about tomorrow because dogs don’t have that kind of nature. The capacity to will belongs to what a thing is, not to who it is.

Apply that to God and the conclusion is immediate. There’s one divine essence. Therefore there’s one divine will. Father, Son and Spirit each possesses that one will wholly and entirely, each according to His own relation—the Father willing paternally, the Son filially, the Spirit as the one who proceeds. Not one third each. One will, undivided, wholly in each.

Social Trinitarianism reverses the principle. It attaches will to person rather than to nature. Three persons then yield three wills—and three wills mean three agents who could, in principle, want different things. Three agents who’re each fully God are three gods, no matter how firmly anyone denies it or how perfectly they agree. Agreement is not unity of being. Two people can agree; that doesn’t make them one person.

Alongside this sits a second classical rule, expressed in an old Latin phrase: opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt—the outward works of the Trinity are undivided. God isn’t a committee that assigns tasks. Creation isn’t the Father’s project with help from the others. Every work of God towards the world is the work of the one God, done by the one power, though we rightly attribute it especially to one person. This is why the classical view can say, without any strain at all:

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

But didn’t Jesus pray to the Father?

This is the strongest objection: If there is only one divine will, who is speaking to whom in John 17?

The answer was settled long ago, and it’s not a dodge. At the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, the church confessed Christ has two wills—one divine and one human—because He has two natures. Notice what that confession assumes. It assumes the very principle we have been defending: wills track natures. Christ has two natures, so He has two wills. God has one nature, so God has one will.

So when the Son prays, obeys, submits and asks, He does so as the Word made flesh, according to His real human will. The prayer isn’t theatre. The obedience isn’t pretend. It’s simply not evidence of a second will inside the Godhead. It’s evidence of a second nature in Christ.

With that in hand, the disputed passages resolve cleanly.

The 2016 flashpoint

Which brings us back to that blog war—because the fault line doesn’t run between orthodoxy and liberalism. It runs straight through the conservative camp.

The trigger was a teaching usually called Eternal Functional Subordination, defended by Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware. It holds the Son eternally submits to the Father in authority, though not in essence.

Liam Goligher and Carl Trueman objected publicly. Fred Sanders, Scott R. Swain, Michael Allen, Matthew Barrett and Mark Jones followed. Their objection wasn’t tribal; it was structural:

• Authority requires wills. An eternal relationship of command and obedience needs one who commands and one who obeys—which means two wills, which means the social view, which means three gods.
• Their own words showed the problem. Bruce Ware had described the persons as distinct centres of consciousness. Wayne Grudem had openly doubted eternal generation—the teaching that the Father eternally gives the Son his whole being. In the classical account, that is the very thing that tells the persons apart.
• Drop eternal generation and a gap opens. If the persons are not distinguished by where they come from, something else has to do the job. Authority is the only option left. That is how a doctrine of God quietly turns into a chain of command.

To be fair to both men, they later clarified their position and affirmed eternal generation more plainly. But the episode showed how easily the social instinct slips in through a side door, dressed in conservative clothes.

Simplicity is what holds it all together

Underneath everything is the doctrine of divine simplicity: God is not made of parts. He isn’t assembled. His attributes aren’t components bolted together, and the persons aren’t pieces of God. As James E Dolezal, Steven J Duby and Matthew Barrett argue at length, this isn’t Greek philosophy smuggled into the Bible. It’s simply what it means for God to be God rather than a very large creature.

Let simplicity go and only two doors remain open:

• Composition. God becomes a thing made up of other things—and then those things, not God, are ultimate.
• Committee. God becomes three agents in permanent agreement—and that’s tritheism with good manners.

Keep simplicity, and Father, Son and Spirit are the one simple God subsisting in three relations. The oneness isn’t a partnership. It is being.

Order without inequality

One last objection deserves an answer: does one will flatten the persons into sameness?

No. There’s real order in God—the tradition calls it taxis. The Father is first, not greater. The Son is begotten, not made, and not lesser. John Calvin defended this with a striking term: the Son is autotheos, God of Himself as to his essence, even while the person of the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Francis Turretin and John Owen developed the same point. Order, yes. Ranking, never.

And there’s a better explanation for the Son’s willing submission than three eternal wills. It’s the covenant of redemption—the eternal agreement in which the Son freely undertakes the office of mediator. His submission is covenantal and belongs to that office. It doesn’t require a second will in God, and it fits the biblical text far more closely than a permanent chain of command.

Why any of this matters

This can look like a quarrel over vocabulary. It’s not. It reaches the gospel itself.

• If there are three wills, salvation is a negotiated settlement between three parties who happened to agree. Our rescue rests on a consensus.
• If there is one will, the cross is the single, undivided purpose of the one God—the Father sending, the Son accomplishing, the Spirit applying, all by one will that has never wavered and cannot.
• And our assurance rests not on divine teamwork holding, but on God being one.

That’s why the church fought about this in the 4th century, and why it’s worth fighting about now. The answer to the question is one. One essence, one will, one undivided work—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, blessed for ever.

Related Reads

• Oneness Pentecostalism vs the Trinity: A Biblical Response
• Is Jesus Eternally Subordinate to the Father? A Reformed Critique
• The Filioque Clause: Why Reformed Circles Support the Addition
• The Mystery of the Trinity: What the Bible Teaches and Why It Matters
• 7 Analogies to Explain the Trinity: Which Ones Work Best?