The Triune God — what Scripture settles, and what it leaves open

These chapters are generated from arguments/TestimonyArguments/Trinity. Every heading and paragraph is a docstring in those files; every formula is rendered from the encoding they check. If a chapter and the source disagree, the chapter is the one that is wrong, and regenerating it is the fix.

Claims are numbered once for the whole argument, so P₁ means the same claim in every chapter; the numbered list is in Appendix: the claims and their sources. Reading the logic is the short version of what the notation means. A result marked ⚗ is one this library constructs rather than reports.

Every argument is also set for print, the claims linked and the derivations in words as here, in one PDF, and each tagged release of the project carries a copy.

This argument is set in 6 chapters:

• The Triune God: what Scripture settles, and what it leaves open
• Is the Son less than the Father?
• Weighing the readings of the order texts
• Does the Spirit proceed from the Son?
• Weighing the positions on the procession
• Appendix: the claims and their sources

Ken Kibbey's Living Systematic Theology (LST) is a systematic theology written in the open and revised whenever its author is persuaded that Scripture requires it. Its governing maxim is to speak "with the certainty Scripture gives, refusing certainty Scripture does not give". So it grades its own claims: some it confesses as what Scripture establishes, some it defends as a synthesis Scripture "strongly grounds" without stating, and some it says are "not demonstrated". Its section on the Triune God (§3, version 2.9, 21 October 2026) uses all three grades.

Those grades are claims about what follows from what, and that is what this library checks. A confessed claim should follow from the texts LST cites. A claim it calls not demonstrated should be independent of them: neither it nor its denial should follow. This argument checks the grades, one question at a time, and reports what the checks find whichever way it goes.

The question encoded so far: does the Spirit proceed from the Son?

The creed of the Council of Constantinople (381), the one Christians call the Nicene Creed, confesses that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father". In the West the words "and the Son" (Filioque) were later added to it. The Council of Florence defined in 1439 "that the holy Spirit is eternally from the Father and the Son", and the Westminster Confession confesses "the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son" (II.3). The Orthodox churches never accepted the addition. "Most Orthodox believe the Filioque to be theologically untrue," Kallistos Ware writes. "They hold that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone."

LST once confessed the Filioque, as Westminster does. Version 2.9 says that it "no longer confesses" it, and gives its reasons:

These texts establish a real relation of the Spirit to both Father and Son. They do not state that the Spirit's eternal origin is "from the Father and the Son" rather than "from the Father through the Son," and they do not by themselves settle whether John 15:26 is speaking directly of eternal origin or of the Spirit's mission. LST therefore no longer confesses the Western Filioque formula as a demonstrated biblical proposition.

The chapter Does the Spirit proceed from the Son? checks each of those sentences, and each holds, with one limit. The texts establish the relation. They leave the Filioque open, and they also leave open whether John 15:26 speaks of eternal origin. The limit is that "through the Son" is not yet a position of its own, so what is checked is "and the Son" against "from the Father alone". Each side needs at least one reading of its own beyond the texts. Any one of them is enough, so answering one does not answer the side. The chapter "Weighing the positions" sets LST, the West and the East against each other. What the texts establish is accepted however the disagreement is settled. The two sides defeat each other, so neither is.

The second question: is the Son less than the Father?

LST also grades the texts of the Son's obedience: "These texts establish real personal and mediatorial order, but they do not by themselves establish inequality of divine nature or an eternal hierarchy of command and obedience between the divine persons as such." The chapter "Is the Son less than the Father?" checks that sentence, and it holds in each of its three parts. The texts establish an order of Father and Son in the work of salvation. They leave open whether the Son is less than the Father in his divinity, which the Arians read John 14:28 to say and Augustine, Athanasius and Calvin each answer differently. And they leave open whether the order is eternal, which Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware hold and Kevin Giles denies. Weighed, what the texts establish is forced, and every reading beyond it stands off against another. That includes the Arian reading, which means only that these few verses do not settle the Son's divinity. LST confesses it from other texts, the next question.

Still to come

LST's other graded claims in §3 are not yet encoded: that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are each God and are three persons, not three gods, against the Arians, the modalists and the "a god" of the New World Translation at John 1:1; and that eternal generation is a "defended synthesis" rather than a stated proposition. The issue that tracks this work lists them.