Individuality and Communion

TF Torrance ( The Christian Doctrine of God ) writes that “Human beings do not exist within one another, but this is precisely what the divine Persons of the Holy Trinity do.” A page later he explained that since the Persons dwell in and with one another so intimately, “their individual characteristics instead of dividing them from one another unite them indivisibly together.”

I’d suggest a closer analogy between human and divine persons, from two directions.

First, the notion that the individual particularities of the divine Persons unites instead of divides is only half of the truth; because it’s precisely their “individual characteristics” (the Father’s fatherness, eg) that makes them distinguishable at all. (Of course, the Father is Father only in relation to Son, so we are immediately back to relation; but the Father is distinguished from the Son because the Father is the Father of the Son and the Son is not His own Father.)

Second, human persons are united by their “individual characteristics” in a way analogous to divine persons. “Father” is one of my individual characteristics, but that is a characteristic that necessarily unites me to my children. Or, we can think of the “individual” gifts of the Spirit, which are given in order to be employed for the common good of the whole. An individual member’s individuality is an individuality that unites him with other members; an eye’s eyeness makes him a useful part of the body.

There is a disanalogy: Human beings can deploy their individual characteristics in ways that divide them from one another, which the Triune Persons are incapable of doing. But individuality-as- separation is, it seems, a product of sin, and not an ontological necessity for humans.