Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames is trying to make an abstruse theological knife-cut: God is not a bundle of parts, yet the Christian tradition insists on real distinctions within God. “Subsistence” signals the Scholastic vocabulary for what later theology will call “personhood” in the Trinity. He’s saying that God’s “manner of being” is not a second thing added onto essence, but the one divine essence considered under “personal properties” - the Father’s paternity, the Son’s filiation, the Spirit’s procession. The line strains for precision because the stakes are high: get it wrong and you slip into tritheism (three gods) or modalism (one God wearing three masks).

The subtext is polemical. Ames wrote in the Reformed, post-Reformation world where Protestants were accused of doctrinal looseness, while Catholics claimed proprietary rights over Scholastic rigor. By using technical Latinized distinctions, Ames signals: we can do metaphysics too, and we can do it in service of orthodoxy. He’s also protecting divine simplicity, a doctrine that says God isn’t composed of separable attributes. “One essence” is the anchor; “personal properties” are the allowable differentiators.

What makes the sentence work is its disciplined minimalism. It doesn’t sentimentalize mystery; it draws boundaries. Ames offers a map of permissible speech about God: you may distinguish without dividing, name without multiplying. In an era when doctrine functioned like civic infrastructure - shaping preaching, politics, and communal identity - that kind of conceptual fencing wasn’t pedantry. It was social order, argued at the level of being.