The question arose lately in our groups of whether we can refer to the essence of God as ‘He’ without creating another person of the Trinity. Does the language imply unitarianism?

Necessitarian said:
An effective way to think about it – how Van Til’s follower’s considered the issue – is that God is a personal being. God is a being who possesses personhood in an original, infinite, and self-existent way, and therefore, God’s personality is Triune. This precludes any impersonal quality in God. His aseity is personal. His immutability is personal. His omniscience and omnipotence and infinity are personal. All God’s attributes belong to a being who possesses personhood and whose personhood is tripersonal.
There is a class: God. This class is a person in the sense that the class represents a being with personal properties or with personhood generally. The class is exhausted in three referents: Father, Son, and Spirit. Each of the referents is a person in a more intuitive sense, that being a center of conscious life with a will, etc.”
“For example, the class “boxes” is not sufficient to individuate all its members. Some boxes are white, some brown, some torn, some in mint condition, and none of these differences is captured in the class “box.” Created beings are referents of many different classes, no one of which can capture all the details that make an individual thing.”
“Another example: zebras. Well, is a half-zebra-half-horse a referent of that class? If not, then there are particulars that can resemble or bear analogous ontology to some kind of universal without being an instantiation of said universal. If so, then there are many universals insufficient to individuate and so account for all their instantiations.”
“The reverse is also an issue. Is there a universal for brown boxes as well as just boxes? Is there a class for all individuals? If so, how would those classes relate? Assuming they do relate, they would have to do so in terms of unifying principles: classes that overlap with respect to species classes or referents. We can picture this as a list of terms which sometimes umbrella other terms which in turn act to classify a number of referents.”
“The Trinity is very special in this regard for two interlocked reasons. First, there is no class in God that fails to individuate its referents exhaustively and there is no referent in God that fails to instantiate every class. All particular truths or attributes or perfections of God coextend and overlap all general truths, attributes, perfections. This is why Van Til referred to God as self-contained: God does not need some extraneous reality in which to unify or individuate Himself. He is totally unified and individuated, totally classified and distinguished in and of Himself. His general being as well as His particular individuality are “contained” or grounded in Himself.
Anyway, God is not only self-contained, but He is absolute personality. What does that mean? It means God is the original example of what it means to have personhood. God is the original personal being in virtue of whom all other personal beings derive their creaturely personality. Or, put another way, God is the one and only self-contained person. That means the class “God” refers to a being who possesses personality, but not of any abstract or extraneous kind. Remember, God does not depend on something outside Himself to unify His individuality nor to distinguish aspects within unity. He is totally unified and parsed in and of Himself. This applies to God’s personhood. So unlike every other person in existence, God is the one personal being who contains all that is necessary to be considered (by His perfect, omniscient judgment) personhood, and that would include things like interpersonality, relational love, I-You distinctions, etc.
All that to say, God is personal as a class and God is personal as (three) referent of that class, and in between there is nothing impersonal whatsoever. All of God’s being is exhausted in terms of personhood. Hence, absolute personality: absolute because self-sufficient original which alone can account for all other analogs to itself.

Alex said:
“Hmmm… but to say God possesses triune personhood we are creating a fourth person because possession is a personal act. ”

Necessitarian said:
Yeah, that seems to just miss the idea that the shared unity, the deity of Triune Members, is personal because exhaustively instantiated on the Persons. We’re not positing a fourth person. We’re saying God has a general personality common to the Members without removing the uniqueness of the members.”
“On this method of speaking about the Trinity, God is a personal being with tripersonality while humans are personal beings with unipersonality.

Balint said:

Thanks for the question! I think one thing that needs to be emphasized is that the divine essence is exhausted by the persons, such that there’s no fourth thing “in the middle”. I admit that there’s some difficulty as God is apparently a “He” while according to — at least some — Trinitarians God should be a “They”. But remember that in Scripture, God may sometimes be referred to as “Us,” and “He” may often refer to one divine person. I mean, God may refer to Godself as “us”. If you were to ask me why that is, I’d suggest that our notions of created personal identity, reference, and pronouns apply only imprecisely to God.”When we make statements like “God is expressed in three persons” doesn’t that sound like God is a person found throughout another three persons, or is that not how “God” is being used in that sentence?” I think what is meant by God there is the divine being/essence.I don’t think it’s helpful to think about God as a class of things. The key somehow is that notions of being and personhood are ordinarily closely linked. But in the Trinity these two are distinguished. Such that many things we’d apply to “someone” we can apply to God because He is one being, even though He is three persons.

TheSire said:

I think we should expect these anthropomorphic and analogical language being used when we speak of God and not us creating an entirely new language so we can speak about God. God speaks to man using terms and languages that men have. So, it would be unexpected for the Biblical writers to invent a language for such. It would be as wrongheaded to argue that we can’t refer to the Trinitarian persons as ‘He’ because they are 3 as it would be to say we can’t refer to a Unitarian being as ‘He’ because he lacks male parts.