Friday Review: The Triune God

Yesterday we were privileged at IWU to have Bill Placher here for our Fall Colloquium. He presented the basic thrust of his recent book with Westminister John Knox, The Triune God. I was a last minute substitute on the panel, so found myself doing a quick read of this very readable book the other night. It covers a good deal of ground and is a really good book for someone who wants to get from 0 to 60 on theology in relation to the Trinity. I lent my copy of the book to a student, but was able to reconstruct my main thoughts here.

First, as a relative novice to the contours of contemporary trinitarian debate, I found a good deal that was helpful to me.

1. For one thing, Placher suggests that it is much easier to move from discussion of the three to a discussion of the one, where if we start with the one, we will have difficulty getting to the three. I found this very helpful. It is thus no surprise that after the first chapter, he goes straight to the Word, the Son, Christ. The next chapter then proceeds to the Spirit. Like Barth, the Son is the key place to start. He also believes that the Eastern Church is right to use threeness rather than oneness as the starting place. He pays a good deal of attention to the Cappadocians, indeed I would say more to them than to Augustine.

2. He seems sympathetic to negative theology, as I am to some degree. Another take away from the book were comments on attributes like infinity, simplicity, etc. telling us more about what we cannot affirm that about what we can affirm (we cannot affirm that God has limits, we cannot affirm that God has parts, etc...). I appreciated the apophatic approach.

I have said before that the classic statements on the Trinity tell us everything they need to say without really saying much of anything--three persons who are God, one God not three. If you can explain exactly what this means, they will make you Pope, I've told my classes before. Placher says something similar and in fact claims that this is really the point of view of the church Fathers. One take away from the book is a rehabilitation of Aquinas for me. If Placher is right, then Aquinas wasn't the "I've got it all figured out" person I had him pegged as.

Placher rehearses some of the language barriers that accompanied early debates over the persons and substance of the Godhead. Here we remember that Placher wrote the classic work on historical theology back when he was in his twenties.

3. His treatment of the Word, Christ, understandably went to the Gospels and thus involved some discussion of Scripture. We do not try to fit Scripture into our world or lives but we see ourselves in Scripture. As with Joel Green's book, one question I have is what we do when we don't see ourselves in the text, such as when the psalmist commends bashing Babylonian babies or Deuteronomy tells us to stone a disobedient son.

Where in his method (or Green's) do we find authority to process with texts that seem locked at a particular point of revelation history? What if it were to turn out that the priorities of equality within the Trinity are developments in the church and are something we do not see easily in Scripture? What if Jesus is squarely subordinated to the Father in Scripture with no sense of His ontological divinity? Of course Placher has found in Larry Hurtado a great asset in this respect, since Hurtado believes early Christian worship had already forked from standard Judaism from its earliest days.

4. I appreciated his comments about the nature of the gospels--not fiction, not myth, not history in the modern sense. They are not fiction because the writers are second or third hand witnesses. They are not myth for these are historical persons from a point in history, not gods and heroes from some nebulous past. They are not history in the modern sense for the rules were different and it seems impossible to harmonize them on the level of detail if one has any respect for what they actually say at all.

So we need not worry about the fact that the dozens of reconstructions of Jesus by scholars all feature different reconstructions of Him. Placher draws on David Kelsey to see the gospel stories (excepting the resurrection, of course, which is in a different category) as "anecdotal." These stories resonated with the early Christians as typical of Jesus. "Yep, that's exactly the kind of thing Jesus did." We can thus by-pass historicity debates by affirming that Jesus did things like these without having to prove that He did all these specific things.

5. The chapter on the Spirit seemed safe to me. The Spirit illuminates Scripture, yes? How much does He illuminate. Does He have to stick to the script. Kevin Vanhoozer amazingly says in Is there a Meaning that the Holy Spirit can blow wherever He wills in Scripture, but He cannot blow whatever He wills. I can handle a Bounds saying something like this because He would mean that the Holy Spirit will not command or allow something that violates His nature. But for Vanhoozer, this sentiment means that the Holy Spirit will not (mind you, he says cannot) reveal something different to you through the words of Scripture that violates the original meaning of the text.

6. There were a number of other interesting things in the book. Placher at one point looked over the cliff of Reformed epistemology and then stepped back. Alvin Plantinga's epistemology would have us never let our core religious beliefs be falsifiable. I resonated with Placher's sense that every belief is examinable and while it is unlikely in the extreme that even massive evidence would shake his faith, it remained in theory a possibility. Others heard his Presbyterian background more clearly than I did. Mainly, there was (like Barth) some sense of "fatalism" rather than proactiveness in working for God's will to be done, more of a que sera (pour Dieu) sera.

7. I appreciated the ecumenical concern of the book. A very nice aside on the filioque debate attempted to reconcile East and West. While the original Nicene creed read that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, the West later added "and the Son." Placher suggests we take it out, not because it does not point to a truth that could be justified in the theology of both sides, but because it simply was not placed there as a statement of the whole church.

8. Some thoughts on the gender imagery we use of God that I personally resonated with. He suggested we not tamper with the creeds and liturgies for practical reasons at the very least. There are so few things we agree on already; why tamper with one we do?

Yet he rightly recognizes that God has no genitals and thus is not literally male. He recognizes that God is not threatened in Scripture to have female imagery used of Him or His Son. Isaiah can speak of God having a womb and Jesus can be a hen trying to gather her chicks. He mentioned some experimentation such as a church in New York uses: "God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all." I personally can't find any theological error in this statement itself, although I realize there are lots of settings where other associations make it a very sensitive issue.

So I'll commend the book to you for good reading to deepen...