Letter 38, which is normally located in the corpus of Basil of Caesarea’s correspondence but is actually written by his brother Gregory of Nyssa, is a profound reflection upon the vital necessity of distinguishing between the terms person and being in language about the divine Trinity. As an aid to thinking about this distinction, Gregory employs the analogy of the rainbow. While the rainbow had a positive meaning in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it had very different connotations in pagan Graeco-Roman culture. Drawing, in part, upon Aristotelian thought about the rainbow’s nature, Gregory not only aids Trinitarian reflection but also provides this natural phenomenon with new meaning for his Graeco-Roman context.
The doctrine of eternal generation sometimes draws the objection that it sounds like it is covertly telling a story about how the Son came to be. This objection, called here the story objection, can be answered in several ways. Trinitarian theology will never be able to preempt the raising of the story objection, because Scripture itself reveals the second person as the Son, and the Nicene Creed rightly models the classical theological practice of unfolding that revealed term by the use of action verbs: if Son, then generated. Thomas Aquinas is a key example of a trinitarian theologian who accepts both the biblical name and its Nicene unfolding as action that does not reduce to story.
Though Calvin’s views of eternal generation became widely accepted in Reformed thought from at least the nineteenth century onward, many modern theologians have not yet realized the seismic shift that he introduced into classic Trinitarian theology. It is important to alert modern readers to the unusual place of Calvin’s views in Christian history, as well as the potential outcomes of his move. After rehabilitating some historical questions about Calvin’s Trinitarian theology and exegesis and raising some contemporary questions about both, this essay evaluates Calvin’s revised form of eternal generation and argues that John Calvin’s views of eternal generation do not cohere well with standard Christian Trinitarian theology and exegesis.
