Divine person
In this corpus, a divine person is a hypostasis — one of the three who are the one God — not a human personality, a role, or a mask. English “person” is the usual translation and the usual source of confusion.
A divine person, in the sense this Library uses, is a hypostasis of the one God: Father, or Son, or Spirit. The English word is a translation with a history. Boethius defined person as "an individual substance of a rational nature"; modern ears hear a personality, a centre of consciousness, a someone you could have a conversation with. Some of that is useful. Some of it is how Social Trinitarianism got accused of tritheism.
Debby almost never lets the bare English word "person" autolink, because it is ordinary language. This entry is for the theological use. The live question in OTC-002 and OTC-008 is not whether "person" is a nice word. It is whether three persons means three someones who are the one God, and what would count as showing that without collapsing into modalism or multiplying gods.
The mistaken everyday reading is three people in a committee, or one actor in three costumes. Both are the pictures the doctrine was written to refuse.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Debby research packets OTC-002, OTC-008, OTC-011