Triunity, immutability and election

We begin with the proposal which sparked the current debate,Footnote ¹ namely, McCormack's claim that God determines to be triune as a result, as it were, of God's determination to be God-with-us. As McCormack puts it, ‘it is God's act of determining himself to be God for us in Jesus Christ which constitutes God as triune’, which means that ‘the triunity of God is a function of the divine election’.Footnote ² On McCormack's account, then, God's determination to be God-with-us is logically prior to God's being-triune, since it is only in view of that determination that God gave Godself the kind of being, namely triunity, which would be ‘fit’ for this being-with. McCormack thus claims, for instance, that it is entirely proper to say that ‘God is triune for the sake of revelation’ and, by parity of reasoning, that God is triune for the sake of creation, reconciliation and redemption.Footnote ³

To understand these claims, it is important to see that McCormack proposes them as an answer to the question, ‘How is it possible for God to become, to enter fully into time as One who is subjected to the limitations of human life in this world, without undergoing essential (i.e. ontological) change?’Footnote ⁴ McCormack responds to this question by offering a set of inferences derived from the claim, original to Barth, that Jesus Christ is the electing God.Footnote ⁵ Jesus Christ, on this account, is not only the object of election (that is, the one in whom humanity is elect), but also the eternal subject of election: the man Jesus Christ, the one who gives himself wholly for our sake, is eternally the electing God. McCormack claims that this proposition, if taken seriously, entails that there is no eternal Son other than Jesus Christ, which means that there is no eternal Father other than the Father of Jesus Christ, and no Spirit other than the Spirit of the Father and Jesus Christ. It follows, that is, that there is no being of God ‘in Godself’ which is not essentially related to the one who gives himself wholly for our sake, which means, again, that God has no being other than that which is orientated towards being with us. McCormack claims, accordingly, that since Jesus Christ is the eternal subject of election, God has never not been so determined, such that ‘the eternal act in which God gives to himself his own being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the eternal act in which God chooses to be God in the covenant of grace with human beings, are one and the same act’.Footnote ⁶ There is a sense, in other words, in which God's act of ‘triuning’ Godself, and God's act of determining to be God-with-us, are two aspects of the same act, because God has never been other than the electing God and has therefore never been other than triune. McCormack nevertheless insists that the act of election is logically prior to God's act of triuning Godself, for otherwise – if triunity were logically prior – it would seem to follow that there had been (and may yet be) a Son other than the one determined to become incarnate. McCormack thus supplies himself with an answer to the question with which we began: God does not have to change in order to be God-with-us, on McCormack's account, because God's being is what it is precisely for the sake of being with us.

McCormack's position thus closes the door to any ontological ‘gap’ between God's being-in-Godself and God's being-with-us, since God's being-in-Godself is nothing other than equipment, so to speak, for being-in-covenant. His proposal thereby cuts off any further need for – or possibility of – speculating about God's being, since there simply is no God other than the one who revealed Godself in Jesus Christ. Most Barthians would welcome these results, yet many have argued that McCormack achieves them at too high a cost.Footnote ⁷ His proposal has been thought liable to three objections: first, that it fails as a reading of Karl Barth; second, that it is subordinationistic; and third, that it is modalistic. In what follows, I will defend a version of the first objection, while seeking to acquit him of the second and third.

The second and third objections can be combined to form a dilemma. Consider, first, that McCormack admits that God could have been God without us, and yet claims that there is no way of knowing what such a counterfactual God would be like. McCormack realises, that is, that ‘the statement “God would be God without us” is a true statement and has a value in safeguarding the divine freedom’ and yet, because he has claimed that election precedes triunity, he is unable in principle to say anything about the nature of such a God. So human beings have ‘no capacity’, he writes, ‘to know what God would have been without us, to know, in fact, how the divine being would have been structured had God not determined to be God for us in Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁸ By McCormack's own lights, it would appear that the (counterfactual) God who could have been without us must be one and the same as the (actual) God who elected to be with us and so triuned Godself, for otherwise the latter God's freedom would remain unsafeguarded. This brings us to the dilemma (apparently) facing McCormack's proposal: if God's determination to be God-with-us precedes God's triunity, then one might reasonably ask who (or what) wills this determination.Footnote ⁹ The most likely answer is (the one who constitutes Godself) the Father: God the Father determines to be God-with-us and therefore begets a Son and breathes forth the Spirit. This answer runs into a serious problem, however, as soon as we recall that insofar as God has freely bound Godself to us, God could have been otherwise (as McCormack himself affirms); hence, if the Father is the one who determines to be God-with-us and therefore constitutes Godself a Trinity, and if God did not have to be God-with-us, it follows that the Father alone is necessarily God – it follows, that is, that the Father could have been the Father without the Son and Spirit. It would thus appear that if McCormack identifies the electing God with the Father, he ends up holding an illicitly subordinationistic position. (The situation is even worse if he identifies either the Son or the Spirit as the subject of this determination, as he would still be saying that only one of the hypostases is necessary, and would also be committing himself to the idea that the Father was begotten by the Son or the Spirit.) If he wants to avoid these problems, then, he had better not say that the subject of the triunity-constituting determination is one of the three hypostases. That is to say, McCormack can avoid the charge of subordinationism only if the subject of this determination is not one of the three hypostases. This brings us to the other horn of the dilemma, namely, that such a ‘God behind the hypostases’ would reintroduce the modalistic spectre of a Fourth hidden behind the Three, a Fourth who is apparently the real God, but is not revealed to us. McCormack thus seems to be in a bind: if he supposes that God's covenant-determination precedes God's triunity, he cannot identify the subject of this determination with any of the triune hypostases (upon pain of subordinationism), but neither can he identify the subject as a Fourth ‘above’ the hypostases (upon pain of modalism). The only way out of this dilemma, it seems, is to say that the God who could be without us is precisely the triune God, from which it would follow that election is not logically prior to triunity; we shall return to this point later. The point for now is that McCormack seems forced to choose between subordinationism or modalism, in consequence of which his position has been thought to depart from Nicene Orthodoxy. So it appears, that is, to some of McCormack's critics.

I will return to these objections below, with an eye to acquitting McCormack of them, but first we need to consider the other objection to which his proposal has been thought liable, namely, that it represents a departure from, rather than direct outworking of, the views of Karl Barth. This objection is strongly supported by the relevant texts. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Church Dogmatics, IV/2, where Barth claims that God's ‘whole willing and doing ad extra is grounded in the triune life of God, as his life-act turned towards us; in this life is grounded his decretum et opus ad extra, his decision for and enactment of a relationship to a reality distinct from him, a reality endowed by him with its own, altogether different, creaturely being’, and that this decision and enactment is precisely ‘the electing of human persons to covenant with him, the determination of the Son to become human and so fulfil this covenant’. Barth then notes that, although God need not have elected human persons,

Barth thus asserts that God's works ad extra, including the election of humanity, repeat and confirm God's triune being, and that it is just because God is triune that God need not change in order to undertake these works. Barth explains God's being-with-us, accordingly, as the repetition ad extra of God's being-in-Godself and, conversely, God's being-in-Godself as the prototype of God's being-with-us.Footnote ¹¹ To see how this works, consider a few examples: on Barth's account, Jesus Christ's life of wholehearted obedience is a repetition in history of his eternal being-in-wholehearted-love-for-God; his imaging of God in history is a repetition ad extra of his eternal reflection of God's being; and so on.Footnote ¹² Or again: Barth claims that the Spirit's economic bearing-witness-to-Christ is the repetition ad extra of the Spirit's eternal witness to the love shared by the Father and Son; the Spirit's act of conforming persons to Christ is the repetition in human history of the Spirit's eternal love for (and so conformity to) the love shared by the Father and Son; and so on.Footnote ¹³ And finally, he claims that the Father's authoring of creation is a repetition ad extra of the Father's eternal begetting of the Son; the Father's sending of the Spirit is a repetition in history of the Father's eternal determination that his love for the Son would be glorious; and so on.Footnote ¹⁴ The point is that, by understanding God's acts ad extra as repetitions of God's triune life, and by understanding God's triune life as the eternal prototype of these acts, Barth arrives at an understanding of how God need not change in order to be with us, and Barth uses this same model to explain the relationship between Trinity and election.

I will say more about this in a moment, but with an eye to the argument which follows it will be helpful to mention Eberhard Jüngel's elaboration of this account in terms of the doctrine of appropriation: Jüngel notes that, in the economy, certain acts are appropriated to each of the triune hypostases, and that if we understand this appropriation in terms of the claim that God's being-in-Godself is the prototype of God's being-with-us, we can infer that, antecedently-in-Godself, God appropriates these acts to the triune hypostases; economic appropriations are thus grounded in an eternal appropriation, namely, God's eternal appropriation of actions ad extra to each of the triune hypostases.Footnote ¹⁵ If we now add that the impetus to such appropriation is God's determination to be God-with-us, we can say something a bit more specific about the relationship between triunity and election. The picture which emerges looks something like this: from all eternity, God is the Father who loves and so begets a Son, the Son who lovingly responds to, and so perfectly reflects, the Father's love, and the Holy Spirit who bears witness to their love and so conforms to it. In view of God's eternal determination to be God-with-us, God determines that there would be an ‘us’ with whom God would be – as Godself. God thus determines to create us by repeating ad extra the Father's eternal act of begetting the Son, to reconcile us to Godself by repeating ad extra the Son's eternal act of reflecting the Father's love, and to mediate this reconciliation by repeating ad extra the Spirit's eternal act of bearing witness to God's love. In determining to be God-with-us then, God appropriates certain acts ad extra to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and these appropriations are appropriate precisely insofar as the being of each hypostasis is ‘fit’ for these acts, that is, insofar as they can perform these acts ad extra by repeating their eternal being. Naturally, this means that, if God had not determined to be God-with-us, God would still be Father, Son and Spirit, but would not repeat God's being ad extra – yet Barth insists that God has determined to be God-with-us, such that God has never been triune without appropriating creation to the Father, reconciliation to the Son and redemption to the Spirit. This is what Barth has in mind, I take it, when he asserts that the covenant is grounded in God's eternal triunity.

Here, as elsewhere, Barth follows a principle to the effect that God's (logically) antecedent triunity ensures that God does not change in electing to be with us, from which it follows that God would be triune even if God had not determined to be with us. As Barth himself insists, ‘God himself would lack nothing if he no longer bore witness to himself in the world, if he let it run its course into nothingness, because his innermost being as God in the highest, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as the one who loves in freedom, lacks nothing, just as nothing of his majesty would be lacking if he had refrained from giving it being when he created it out of nothing.’Footnote ¹⁶ It seems overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that Barth would reject McCormack's claim about the logical priority of election to triunity. McCormack could rejoin, however, that Barth's position is in fact less self-consistent than I have presented it to be, and that McCormack's own proposal should be understood as an attempt to think through some of Barth's other claims, particularly those which assert that there is no God ‘in Godself’ apart from election, that ‘Jesus Christ, truly God and truly human, as executor of reconciliation, born, living, acting, suffering, and conquering in time, is as such also the one eternal Word of God at the beginning of all things’, and so on.Footnote ¹⁷ To these claims, accordingly, we must now turn.

Necessities of love

One might wonder whether the argument thus far has lost something of importance in McCormack's (and Barth's) position. Consider some claims from Barth: he asserts, for instance, that since ‘Jesus Christ is the electing God’, there is no such thing as ‘Godhead in itself’, since Godhead ‘is the Godhead of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the Father is the Father of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of this Father and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.’Footnote ¹⁸ Barth thus claims that ‘we can in any case speak rightly of God in his being for self only if we regard him always in this his comportment’ – regard God, that is, in terms of the covenant, since ‘the covenant is the comportment in which, by virtue of the decision of his free love, God wills to be and is God’.Footnote ¹⁹ The objection to which my account appears liable at this point, accordingly, could be formulated in the following terms: if there is a being of God which is logically prior to God's determination to be with us (and so to bear the name of Jesus Christ), as the previous section has argued, it would appear to follow, contra Barth, that there is a being of God in-and-for-Godself which is prior to and in isolation from that determination. It might appear, in other words, that the account defended here is unable to do justice to all of the relevant passages in Barth, or that Barth's own claims are at odds with one another. This is obviously an important objection. In order to address it, I now turn to my second major claim, namely, that triunity and election are both necessary to God, though not in the same respect. I have already argued that, for Barth, God is triune in all possible eternities (even those in which God determined not to be with us), from which it follows that triunity is necessary to God in an absolute sense, whereas election is not, since God could have been God without us. In this section I will argue that, for Barth, although election is not absolutely necessary to God, it is volitionally necessary, and that consideration of this variety of necessity should suffice to address the objection at hand.

To understand what I am claiming, it is worth spending some time first explaining what I mean by the phrase ‘volitional necessity’. The phrase itself is borrowed from Harry Frankfurt, to whom this section is heavily indebted. Frankfurt derives his notion of volitional necessity from an analysis of the phenomenon of love, which he understands as ‘concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it’.Footnote ²⁰ The love Frankfurt has in view here is thus a species of care: to love something is to care about it, and to care about it is to commit oneself to its flourishing; what is good for it is thus taken to be good for oneself, and what injures it is taken as an injury to oneself. In caring about something, accordingly, there is an obvious sense in which one identifies with it: ‘in the very nature of the case, a lover identifies himself with what he loves. In virtue of this identification, protecting the interests of his beloved is necessarily among the lover's own interests. The interests of his beloved are not actually other than his at all.’Footnote ²¹ The point is straightforward enough: to the extent that one cares about, say, the Chicago Cubs, one feels their wins and losses as one's own; more seriously, to the extent that one cares about one's child, one is oneself hurt by that which hurts them, encouraged by that which encourages them, and so on. When one cares about something, therefore, its interests become one's own – that is just what it means to care about something – and one thus identifies with it. One may care about many things, of course, while caring more about some than others. For our purposes, it is crucial to observe that one may care so much about some things that one cares about that care, and could thus rightly be said to stand wholeheartedly behind it, and thus not only to identify with the object of one's care, but to identify with that identification. One wills one's care, in other words, and wills not to will otherwise.Footnote ²² So, for instance, my children are important to me, and their importance to me is itself important to me; I stand wholeheartedly behind my care for them, such that I not only identify their interests as my own, I identify with that identification.

This brings us to the variety of necessity at issue, namely, volitional necessity: insofar as one cares about certain objects, one finds that there are certain things one cannot help doing, and certain things one could not bring oneself to do. If one genuinely cares about one's child, for instance, one could not bring oneself to act cruelly towards him or her, just as one cannot help but take his or her flourishing as sufficient reason to do something. One's care for something thereby imposes certain volitional necessities upon one, in the sense that one could not will otherwise.Footnote ²³ The necessities thus imposed do not necessarily compromise one's freedom, however, since what matters here is not whether one's will is constrained by these necessities, but whether one wills these constraints – whether, that is, the necessities are self-imposed rather than imposed merely from without. Volitional necessities count as free expressions of one's will, it turns out, just in case one identifies with them. Consider two examples. On the one hand, suppose that I care so deeply about others’ opinions of me that I cannot help acting in certain ways, and suppose further that I wished that I did not care so much about those opinions. If that were the case, there would be an obvious element of unfreedom in the volitional necessities thus imposed, inasmuch as these necessities are imposed against my will. On the other hand, suppose I care deeply about animal welfare, such that I cannot help but act if I see an animal being treated cruelly. If I identify with this configuration of my will, if I stand behind it, then it follows that I am free with respect to it not because I could will otherwise, but precisely because this will is self-imposed.Footnote ²⁴ As Frankfurt remarks, ‘just as we act freely when what we do is what we want to do, so we will freely when what we want is what we want to want – that is, when the will behind what we do is exactly the will by which we want our action to be moved’.Footnote ²⁵

Briefly stated, then, this is what Frankfurt means by ‘volitional necessity’. For our purposes, the salient points are these: to care about something, on this account, is to identify that thing's interests as one's own, and to care about it wholeheartedly is to identify unreservedly with that identification. In consequence of such identification, certain necessities are imposed upon one's will, but as long as one wills these necessities – insofar, that is, as one sees them as self-imposed – they are expressions of, rather than obstacles to, one's freedom.

A doctrine of election elaborated along these lines might include some version of the following claims: first, that in electing to be with us, God identifies our interests as God's own and thus identifies with us; second, that God identifies wholeheartedly with this identification; and third, that in so identifying, God has imposed certain volitional necessities upon Godself, the most important of which is that God has made this identity itself necessary to Godself. Differences of idiom aside, this seems to be precisely what Barth means to claim when he asserts, for instance, that ‘God is God in the free decision of his love and just so is God, so that he is God in this way, in a determinate relationship to this other . . . a relationship irrevocably entered into – a relationship apart from which, once he has entered into it, he would no longer be God’. It is a relationship, in other words, ‘in which God has in fact set himself and outside of which, once he has done this, he no longer wills to be God and thus no longer is God, and within which relationship alone can be honored as God’.Footnote ²⁶ Hence, ‘If we can speak here of any sort of necessity, this can only mean the necessity of the decision in fact made and executed by God: the necessity of the fact that the being of God, the almightiness of his free love, now has this concrete determinateness, is effective and manifest in this determinateness and not otherwise.’Footnote ²⁷ As we saw above, Barth is insistent that God could have been God without us, such that he would not say that election is absolutely necessary to God. But there is nevertheless a sense in which election is necessary, since God not only loves us but gives Godself wholly to this love. Barth thus claims, for instance, that we must understand the will of God ‘as it has determined and ordered and to that extent bound itself in its very sovereignty’, and that

God has freely limited God's possibilities, in other words, by ruling out the possibility of being otherwise than God-with-us. For precisely this reason, Barth claims that

Because God has committed Godself wholeheartedly to us, that is, it follows that ‘There is no height or depth in which he is still or yet will be God in any other way’.Footnote ³⁰ According to Barth, then, the covenant cannot be absolutely necessary to God, since God could be God without us, yet God has so bound Godself to the covenant that God has rendered it necessary to Godself, to such an extent that, properly speaking, God has no being-in-Godself apart from the covenant. It would thus appear that, although Barth nowhere uses the phrase ‘volitional necessity’, his claims are quite in keeping with the meaning I have here ascribed to it.

This way of explaining election – that is, as a species of volitional necessity – in turn provides us with a rather straightforward way of dealing with the concerns mentioned at the beginning of this section, to the effect that God has no being in Godself apart from the covenant. For Barth, it is crucial that we understand election as a determination of God's being rather than as constitutive of it, but if we nevertheless understand election as God's wholehearted identification with us, it follows that there is no height or depth in which God is indifferent to this identification, such that God has no being-in-Godself apart from the covenant. That is to say, if (a) God's being just is the Father's act of begetting and loving a Son, the Son's act of loving and so imaging the Father, and the Spirit's act of glorifying their love, such that God's being is ‘fit’ for being-with-us, and (b) God eternally and wholeheartedly wills to be God-with-us and not otherwise, such that God commits God's being-in-act to this being-with, then (c) God has no being other than that which is identified with us. Hence, if one understands election as a volitional necessity, one can affirm that God is unreservedly God-with-us – that God is God-with-us ‘all the way down’, so to speak – without having to claim that election either precedes triunity or is absolutely necessary to God.

So far, then, so good. At this point it would be helpful to say something further about how Barth relates triunity and election, and I propose to do so by using the just-sketched model to deal with the much-debated identity of the logos asarkos. In view of the preceding arguments, the first thing to be said on this matter must be that the Son's being need not change in order to be with us, since the Son's being is eternally ‘fit’ for this being-with. As Barth writes,

Because the Son's being is a perfect reflection of the Father's love, he does not have to change in order to reflect the Father's love for humanity and so to devote himself wholly to that love. The Son's eternal being is thus ‘fit’ for election, which provides us with a way of understanding Barth's claim that Jesus Christ ‘is to the created world and so ad extra what the Son of God is as the eternal Logos in the inner triune essence of God’.Footnote ³²

The first point, then, is that the Son does not change in order to be with us. The second point concerns the nature of the Son's determination to be with us: in electing to be with us – in electing the Father's election to be with us – the Son identifies with us and identifies wholeheartedly with that identification. It is in virtue of this identification that one can say, on the one hand, that the Son is logos incarnandus, that is, the Word who would become incarnate, and on the other, that he is already in eternity that which he would become in time, namely, the one who gives himself wholly to his identification with us.Footnote ³³ As Barth puts the point,

The Son wholeheartedly identifies with us, in consequence of which he wills to become incarnate for our sake – and since the Son becomes incarnate precisely by giving himself wholly to this identification, it follows that his being-incarnate is nothing other than that which he has been from all eternity. One can thus say that Jesus Christ – the Son of God who identifies wholeheartedly with us, even unto death on a cross – is pre-existent, just as one can say that the Son's eternal being is a being-in-anticipation of the life he would give for us.

One can accordingly understand the eternal logos as incarnandus, since he has eternally and wholeheartedly determined to become incarnate, but not as ‘nothing but’ incarnandus, since the Son could have been otherwise than incarnandus and since, even in identifying wholeheartedly with us, the Son maintains the being he would have had apart from the covenant. Indeed, on Barth's account it is precisely and only by maintaining this being that the Son can be fully for us, since our highest interest is precisely to share in the relationship the Son enjoys with the Father – for the Son to identify wholeheartedly with our interests, in other words, is for him to will that we would share in his relationship with the Father. In Barth's formulation, ‘What God seeks and creates between himself and us is in fact nothing other than that which he wills and accomplishes and thus is in himself’,Footnote ³⁵ such that ‘In all his electing and willing what God primordially and finally wills is himself’.Footnote ³⁶ One can, accordingly, understand the logos asarkos as the Son's own-most relation to the Father, a relation which he would have enjoyed even if God had not determined to be with us, and which he continues to enjoy even in determining to be with us. There is no ‘gap’ between this relationship and the Son's wholehearted identification with us, however, since (a) his being is ‘fit’ for this identification and (b) that which is in our interest is precisely to share by grace that which the Son enjoys by nature, namely, communion of love with the Father.

At this point, I should say something, if only briefly, about how this position relates to the views of the other principal contributor to this discussion, Paul Molnar. When I wrote an earlier article on this debate, it seemed to me that Professor Molnar was suggesting not only that God could have been without us but that, in some depth of God's being, God remains without us, in the sense of maintaining a being-in-and-for-Godself in which God remains isolated from election. I am no longer sure that this is an accurate construal of Molnar's position, though I am convinced that such a position – whether or not it is Molnar's – would not do justice to Barth's own views on the matter, as is evident from the quotations with which this section began. At the very least, I have demonstrated that one need not reverse the order of Trinity and election in order to affirm God's wholehearted identification with us, just as I have demonstrated that one can affirm God's wholehearted identification with us, and therefore the volitional necessity of this identification, without implying that creatures are absolutely necessary to God. If I am right about this, then we should not accept Molnar's suggestion that ‘when a theologian claims that creation or humanity are in any sense necessary to God, that claim is a sure sign that the true idea of contingence has been lost and a logical necessity has been introduced’.Footnote ³⁷ I think I have nevertheless done justice to Molnar's central concern, namely, that ‘since God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and would so have existed even if he had never decided to create, save, and redeem the world, his decision to be God for us could neither be deduced from his nature nor could it be seen as necessitated by any external constraints’.Footnote ³⁸ That is to say, although I have departed from the letter of Molnar's position, I think I have upheld its spirit and perhaps even shed some light on it. I suppose he will be the judge of that. If nothing else, I have shown that the position defended here is not liable to the criticisms he raises against McCormack.

To recap the argument of this section, I have claimed (a) that one can understand election, in Barth's sense, as God's wholehearted identification with us, such that there is no God other than God-with-us, (b) that one can thus affirm that God has no ‘being-in-Godself’ which is indifferent to election and (c) that one can do so without violating Professor Molnar's anti-‘Hegelian’ scruples.

In defence of McCormack

The preceding sections sought to demonstrate that Bruce McCormack's understanding of election as logically prior to triunity is a departure from, rather than outworking of, Karl Barth's views on the matter. It seems evident that Barth sees triunity as the basis of election rather than its consequence, and evident, too, that this is consistent with Barth's other commitments, from which it follows that McCormack's proposal should be understood not as an elaboration of Barth, but as McCormack's own, novel contribution to contemporary trinitarianism.Footnote ³⁹ As such, his proposal should be evaluated on its merits, which brings us back to the objections raised in the first section, namely, subordinationism and modalism.

We begin with the charge of subordinationism. McCormack's proposal has been thought liable to this charge, recall, in consequence of his claim that God could be God without us, yet that the God who could be without us would not necessarily be triune. From this, it seemed to follow that if the God who could be without us were ‘the Father’, then the Father could be the Father without the Son or Spirit; the Father alone would then be necessarily God, while the Son and Spirit would be so only contingently. It is in this respect that McCormack's proposal could be thought guilty of subordinationism. There are at least two reasons to think, however, that his proposal is not in fact subordinationistic, though I can only outline these points here. First, it is important to distinguish subordination from subordinationism, in something like the following fashion: if one understands divinity in light of the economy of grace, and understands the Son's divinity in the same light, one may conclude that the Son's dependence upon the Father – even for his very being – does not compromise the fullness of his divinity. One could thus say, on the one hand, that to be divine is to enjoy by right that in which creatures participate by grace, namely, the communion of love which characterises (and is) the being of God, and that, on the other hand, for the Son to participate fully in that communion does not rule out the possibility that his being is contingent upon the will of the Father. One could claim, in fact, that it is precisely the Son's manner of being divine, and precisely his dignity, to be wholly dependent in this way upon the Father, since this dependence would indicate the freedom of the Father's love for the Son.Footnote ⁴⁰ To say that the Son is in some respect dependent upon the Father, therefore, and that the Father freely begets the Son, may entail that the Son's being is not necessary in the same way that the Father's is, but this would not entail that the Son is less divine; it would entail, rather, only that the Son's way of being divine – his hypostatic identity – differs from that of the Father.

This brings us to a second point. While McCormack's proposal may imply that the Son's being is not necessary in the way the Father's is, this does not necessarily entail that the Father could be the Father without the Son, since McCormack could claim that the (actual) Father's love for the Son makes the latter necessary. The Father could not be the Father without the Son, in other words, not because of some impersonal necessity imposed by the Son's being, but because the Father loves the Son wholeheartedly and therefore wills not to be God in any other way than with him by his side. And since the Father has never not loved the Son – just as he has never not loved us – so he has never been the Father without the Son and, in consequence of his love for the Son, could never have been the Father without the Son. McCormack could argue, accordingly, that to speak of the contingency of the Son's being is not to suggest that the Son is not necessary to the Father; it is to suggest, rather, that the Son's necessity is a consequence not of his being, but of the Father's love.

Which brings us to one last point: McCormack could counter the present objection by pointing out that those who favour Barth's proposal (as understood here) are no better off on this score than he is. That is to say, if (a) Barthians claim that God does not change in order to be the electing God and (b) God is the electing God in virtue of the Father's free decision to be God-with-us and the Son's acceptance of this determination as determining his very being, it seems to follow (c) that God's antecedent triunity must be characterised by a free decision of the Father which determines the very being of the Son. If so, it would appear that the Barthian proposal is no better off with respect to the charge of subordinationism since it, too, would imply that the being of the Son is in some respect consequent upon the Father's free determination. And while this sort of rejoinder – tu quoque – would not provide further warrant for McCormack's proposal, it would suggest that Barthians should be careful about accusing McCormack of various heresies, since these accusations could come back to haunt them.

With respect to the first charge, then, it would appear that, although McCormack's proposal may imply a kind of subordination of the Son to the Father, this need not amount to subordinationism, so long as one understands divinity in light of the economy of grace. This brings us to the second charge namely, modalism (in the sense of positing an unknown God standing behind the three hypostases, rather than the sense of positing a God who puts on different masks for different occasions). In light of the preceding claims, a single rejoinder should here suffice.Footnote ⁴¹ The argument is straightforward enough: assuming that subordinationism is no longer an issue, McCormack could claim that the God who elects to be with us, and so triunes Godself, is in fact the Father, and thereby acquit himself of the suspicion that the electing God is a ‘fourth’ behind the three hypostases. And while McCormack would still be unable in principle to say anything about what God would have been like if God had not elected to be with us, he can say, unequivocally, that the actual God is wholeheartedly committed to us and has thus ruled out any other way of being God, which would entail that there is indeed no unknown ‘depth’ of God which might call into question the ultimacy of God's love for us.Footnote ⁴² McCormack's position can thus be acquitted of modalism, too.

Bruce McCormack's proposal has been subjected to endless critique, both in scholarly and not-so-scholarly venues. The aim of this section was to demonstrate that, although McCormack may be liable to one critique (namely, that he departs from Barth), he is not liable to more serious objections with respect to the very orthodoxy of his proposal. Hence, while there may be good reason to prefer Barth's proposal over McCormack's, the justifiability of the former should not be thought to entail the unjustifiedness of the latter.