Person

Definition

A person is an individual, rational being: something that both has a rational nature and exists as its own distinct, undivided instance of it, rather than as a shared instance or a mere mode of something else.¹ Theology uses “person” in two distinct contexts, and the meaning shifts with each:

In the doctrine of the Trinity, there are three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one divine essence. Here “person” names a real, distinct existence, not a mere role or appearance.¹
In Christology, Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human.² Here “person” names the single subject who has both natures, not a third thing produced by blending them.

“Person” applied to God is only analogous to ordinary human personhood, and the disanalogy matters: three human persons each have their own separate instance of human nature, while the three divine persons share one and the same, numerically identical divine being.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states, of the Trinity, that “there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”³ It calls Father, Son, and Spirit “subsistences” rather than “persons,” where some other Reformed confessions say “persons” outright; the choice guards the same point noted above, that none of the three is a separate rational individual alongside the others the way three human beings are.

Of Christ, the same confession states that his two natures “were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man.”⁴ Personhood here belongs to the single subject who is both God and man, not to either nature considered on its own.

Historical Development

The early Eastern church spoke of prosopon (corresponding to the Hebrew for “face” or “role”), which risked a Sabellian reading: that the “persons” were only external appearances of one underlying subject rather than really distinct. This pushed Eastern theology toward hypostasis instead.¹ The West settled on persona and substantia, though Augustine found substantia an imprecise term for God (it suggests a distinction between essence and accidents, which does not hold for God) and preferred essentia.¹ Against Arianism, the church had to insist the three were not three substantiae but three personae.¹

Boethius supplied the definition later Scholasticism inherited: a person is an individual rational being.¹ Reformed theology kept the term but flagged the definition’s danger from the start, not as an afterthought: taken at face value and applied to the Godhead, “individual rational being” is exactly the reading that risks tritheism, three separate divine minds rather than one God in three persons (see Opposing Views below).¹ Applied to Christ, Charles Hodge puts the same idea more technically: a person is a suppositum intelligens, an intelligent subsistence, which requires both a rational nature and a distinct subsistence of its own. Christ’s human nature has the former but never possessed the latter; it subsists in the person of the Son rather than as a person in its own right, which is why the union does not make Christ two persons.⁵

Opposing Views

Modern individualized reading. The term “person” today usually means a separate, self-conscious individual with a mind and will of its own. Reading the Trinity this way, as three separate centers of consciousness, treats “person” univocally with its modern sense rather than analogically.¹

Objections and Responses

If the three divine persons don’t each have their own separate consciousness and will, in what sense are they really distinct? Bavinck answers that the distinction is real but not the same kind of distinction three human beings have. All three persons “fully share the divine essence,” having “one mind, one will, and one power”; what distinguishes them is not separate faculties but their relations of origin, the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding.¹ Reading “person” as a modern, self-contained individual risks tritheism, dividing the one God into three; the confession’s preference for “subsistences” over “persons” exists for exactly this reason.³

Related Doctrines

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 388-389. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
Hodge, 389. ↩