person (divine)

In my gift-ontology, person means hypostasis, an irreducible who, not a separable part, not a mere role, and not a psychological profile. Divine personhood is not three consciousnesses or three individual substances; it is personal subsistence by relations of origin within the one simple divine life. This term must be protected from modern misreadings. First, it must not collapse into “role” language, as if Father, Son, and Spirit were merely three ways the one God appears. Second, it must not collapse into “three individuals” language, as if the Trinity were a society of three divine beings. In this approach, a divine person is the whole divine reality subsisting in an incommunicable provenance. The person is not “part of God,” and the person is not “a share of essence.” The (divine) person is wholly God, with distinction only by origin-fromness.