The Trinity in John

Putting together a PowerPoint on the Trinity in John. Here's what I've come up with.

God the Father
1. John 3:16 seems like a good place to begin: "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son." God's fundamental disposition toward the world is love.

2. "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth." (4:24) In other words, God is not limited by location, still less by a physical temple.

3. God the Father of Jesus and is one with Jesus (e.g., 1:14; 10:30).

Jesus the Word
4. One of the striking features of the Gospel of John is the way it points to the pre-existence of Jesus. The other Gospels do not explicitly mention Jesus' pre-existence. "Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed." (17:5)

Certainly John 1 says that the Word was there in the beginning, that the Word was God, that God created the world through the Word, that the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ.

John 8:28 seems to equate Jesus with God at the burning bush. This is perhaps the most startling statement in the entire New Testament: "Before Abraham was, I AM."

5. Jesus is certainly the Messiah and Son of God in John also, as in the other Gospels (1:34; 4:26). Jesus is the Son of Man in the strong sense in John (1:51).

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (1:29). John parallels signs Jesus does with various "I am" statements to make it clear who Jesus is. I am...

• “the bread of life” (6:35) 
• He gives living water (the Holy Spirit) (7:37-39) 
• “the light of the world” (9:5) 
• “the good shepherd” (10:11) 
• “the resurrection and the life” (11:25) 
• “the way, the truth, the life” (14:6)

Holy Spirit, the Paraclete
6. The personhood of the Holy Spirit is clearer in John than anywhere else in the NT. John clearly speaks of the Holy Spirit as a person (e.g., 16:7).

The Holy Spirit...

• “will teach you everything” (14:26) 
• “will guide you into all truth” (16:13) 
• “will convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment” (16:8)

What have I missed?

Ehrman Chapter 9: The Council on the Trinity

Only the Epilog after this post, on chapter 9 of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God.

So far:
Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies
8. After the New Testament (2nd and 3rd centuries)

And now chapter 9, "Paradoxes on the Road to Nicaea"...

Like the last chapter, I did not find a great deal in this chapter to disagree with. The bottom line, as it has been all along, is whether you believe God was leading the Church to Nicaea or whether you see the process as nothing more than the power plays and coincidences of history. It is of course possible that Ehrman is off on some details, but if so I am not expert enough to see it.

1. So it seems accurate to say that, with each decision Christians made to accept one alternative and reject another, they were on a path toward Nicaea. I have heard it said that Nicaea was the inevitable outcome if the church was to affirm everything it needed to affirm while denying everything it needed to deny.

This statement, it seems to me, is something similar to what Ehrman is saying when Trinity is a collection of "ortho-paradoxes." He grounds the Trinitarian paradoxes in two things.

First, there are the paradoxes of Scripture. The Gospel of John says that Jesus is God. But it also says that Jesus is human. Isaiah 45:21 says there is only one God. But Psalm 45:6 speaks to another God.

Second, Christians were navigating between extremes on both sides of issues. "But both of two opposing views cannot be completely wrong, or nothing is right, and so the orthodox--in attacking opposing views--had to affirm part of each view as being right and the rest as being wrong. the result was a paradox that each of the opposing sides was wrong in what it denied but right in what it affirmed" (327).

Here's another way of putting it: "If you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two" (328). "As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical."

I can't think of anything really to disagree with here.

2. In the lead up to Nicaea, Ehrman treats several individuals along the way who reflect the fluidity of faith in the centuries leading up to the great Council of Nicaea in AD325.

Justin Martyr
Justin lived in the mid-100s. Ehrman means to show that while Justin is movement toward orthodoxy, he is not there yet. I am not an expert on Justin, but it would certainly make sense if this were true.

I did wonder whether he had Justin quite right on Jesus being the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament. Given what Ehrman has said about Paul's Christology earlier in the book, it would be easy to read this section to say that Justin had the same view.

However, I have more thought that Justin saw the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament as a Christophany. A Christophany is when Jesus appears in the Old Testament in some form, such as in the form of the Angel of the Lord. This would be something quite different from Jesus being an angel who appeared. It would be Jesus appearing as an angel.

I have read a little of David Runia on the impact of Logos thinking on early Christianity. Runia does suggest that the Logos Christology we find in these early centuries (e.g., in Origin) would eventually prove inadequate in the light of full Trinitarian belief. The Logos emerges from God in relation to the creation, and this doesn't neatly fit "eternally begotten." So Runia argues, if I remember correctly, that the later church stopped using this imagery that had been used earlier, as the orthodox view became the norm.

Novatian
Novatian was a problem in the church because of the schism he led in the 200s after the persecution of Decius in 250. I believe it was he who inspired Cyprian to say that long since famous quote, "There is no salvation outside the church."

Ehrman says that "his theology, however, was completely orthodox in its day" (335). Again, while not being an expert, I suspect Ehrman is correct (although remember the distinction I made in my last post between not violating an orthodoxy and it not yet being appropriate to speak of an orthodox position yet on a particular topic). Novatian disagreed with the modalists, on the one hand, and the adoptionists on the other. For him, Christ was divine but he was distinct from God the Father.

Where Ehrman argues the later church would consider him heretical is in the fact that he saw Christ as subordinate to God. Christ is Lord and God of everything except for God the Father, to whom he is subject. I believe Ehrman rightly sees this subordinationist understanding of Christ as a view that would later be deemed incorrect.

Dionysius of Rome
As Ehrman presents the situation, one Dionysius in Rome wrote to one Dionysius in Alexandria, to steer him toward unity in his conception of the Trinity. Dionysius of Alexandria, in combating modalism was coming to close to tri-theism, in D of R's view. In D of R's view, D of A is too close to affirming three Gods to combat those who see the three persons as three faces of the same God.

Dionysius of Rome insisted that the unity within threeness had to be maintained.

3. We thus arrive at the trigger for the Council of Nicaea. The emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD313. Ehrman spends a little time discussing Constantine in this chapter. He takes the position that Constantine saw Christianity as a potential way of unifying the empire. Ehrman is also sympathetic to the view that Constantine truly believed it and thus that it would have been important for him to get the worship of Christ correct within his kingdom.

So Constantine writes the priests of Alexandria about their understanding of an Old Testament passage. Ehrman wonders if the passage was Proverbs 8, which is about wisdom as God's master craftsman in creation.

As an aside, I might say that this is a heavy role that theologians and scholars often play within a group. I sometimes get asked about various issues (I received a question via Facebook messaging just last night on the various Greek words for worship in the NT). Orthodoxy is stable. It isn't so hard to answer a question like, "What does orthodoxy teach about x," because there often are right and wrong answers. It is often possible to say, "The consensus of Christian history is this."

A question like, "What does the Bible teach," on the other hand, seems tougher to me, because the Bible is a flow of voices addressing a flow of situations. In my world, most of us who count as scholars are really scholars who try to connect specific theological traditions with other domains of scholarship. The more idiosyncratic the tradition, the more unstable the connection between scholars of that tradition and broader scholarship. As a Wesleyan, there are specific concerns that have to be kept in mind when answering a question, and from the vantage point of an outsider, these might appear to skew the answers. The same applies to other traditions.

All that is to say that I prefer to give options as answers, based on particular points of view, rather than to pretend to have the answers. I at least agree with Ehrman on this point. History is a science that arrives at greater and lesser probabilities given the evidence as we have it. The negotiation of history in relation to theology, on the other hand, is a much less straightforward dialog that has everything to do with what assumptions you start with. And that is why there are thousands upon thousands of divergent Christian opinions on things.

4. The answer to Constantine from one of the priests in Egypt, Arius, brought him into major conflict with his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Arius suggested that Jesus was indeed the "firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). He was divine. He was Lord over all creation. We must worship him.

BUT, Arius taught that only God the Father was without beginning. There was a point when the Son did not exist. For Arius, it was before time, before creation, for Christ was God's agent in creation. So, like Origen before him, Arius saw Christ as superior to all of creation, just not as "of one substance" as the Father. For Arius, like others before him, Christ was only subordinate to God the Father. He was supreme over everything else that exists.

I would agree with Ehrman that Arius' position was not yet heretical at this time. The paint is not wet. I personally don't think we can speak of orthodoxy on this subject until the consensus was firm in the 400s. To me, orthodoxy is not as simple as a vote taken by some group of men at a council. That is because, to me, orthodoxy is a matter of Spirit consensus.

Arius would lose this vote. It would take decades for what would become orthodoxy to become what I am calling a consensus. But the current position of Christendom won the day in 325. Christ is "of one being" with the Father. He is "begotten, not made." Indeed, he is "eternally begotten."

So the Spirit consensus was beginning to congeal. Christ is not a distinct being from God the Father. He is not even "similar" in being to God the Father--the compromise position suggested by Eusebius. He was "of the same substance" and co-eternal, along with the Holy Spirit.

G.11 There is only one God, but God is three persons.

Last post in the section on God in my ongoing series giving some thoughts on theology in bullet points. I may have missed something, but I believe this concludes my section on God. I'll post all the links in a separate post in a moment.
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G11. There is only one God, but God is three persons.

How can God only be one God and yet be three distinct persons? It is a mystery. Any attempt to explain this historic Christian belief is doomed to fall into something that has been considered a heresy at some point or another in Christian history. You might say that, at best, we might simply affirm everything we need to affirm and not try to figure out how it all fits together.

1. There is only one God.
This is a central pillar of the Jewish faith from which Christian faith emerged. Old Testament faith was of course more complicated in its Ancient Near Eastern context. The Israelites believed that Ba'al existed. They just didn't believe he was an appropriate god to worship nor anywhere near as powerful as Yahweh, the God of Israel. [1] The God of Israel was in fact God Most High, the Creator God, the one true God. The others were inferior beings who were nothing next to God. They were to put no god before Yahweh (Exod. 20:3).

We as Christians today would not even call such beings "gods." We might take Paul's lead and call them demons at best (1 Cor. 10:20)--perhaps even figments of the Canaanite imagination. The one true God is the sole Creator of the universe out of nothing. [2] He created all other spiritual powers, including those that were associated with other peoples in the Ancient Near East.

Paul puts it this way: "For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live" (1 Cor. 8:5-6a). This is a consistent teaching of Scripture. Ephesians clearly states that, "There is... one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all" (4:4, 6).

2. There are three persons who are the one God.
Here is where it gets complicated. Since the 300s, Christianity has affirmed not only that there is one God, but that God the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. As a creed from those early centuries puts it, we do not confuse the persons of the Trinity, this three-in-one. And we do not divide the one substance. [3]

As this creed puts it, "there is one person of the Father and one person of the Son, and one person of the Holy Spirit, but the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one." All three are uncreated. All three are eternal. All three are all powerful. "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. Yet there are not three gods, but one God."

The details of this belief were worked out in the first few centuries of Christianity as the Church tried to discern what the Bible indicated about God. So John 1:1 said that "the Word was God," meaning that Jesus was God. But did Jesus become God at his baptism or resurrection (adoptionism)? Was Jesus the first, most exalted of God's creation, but still part of the creation (Arianism)? Or perhaps Jesus was only similar in substance to God the Father (homoiousios) rather than "of the same substance" (homoousios).

On the other side of the equation, were the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simply three different faces of God but not really three distinct persons (modalism)?  After Christianity became a legal religion in the Roman Empire, the leaders of Christianity came together at a city called Nicaea in the year AD325 to try to hammer out some of these disagreements. [4] It would take the better part of a century, but by about the year 400, the current belief had become the commonly accepted one on the Trinity.

The common belief of Christianity ever since is that all three persons of the Trinity are distinct persons but that they are only one God.

3. This is a difficult concept, and it has always been tempting to modify it or give it greater clarity than we are in a position to understand. It is also a position that required Christians to answer questions that are not entirely clear in the Bible, and the different groups who argued in the first centuries all used Scripture to argue for their positions.

Even today, there is a tendency to go into great detail about relationships between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before the creation of the world. But in all of Scripture, the only passage to come anywhere close to saying anything along these lines is when Jesus speaks of the glory he shared with God the Father before the world began (John 17:5). In the Bible itself, we see the nature of Jesus' relationship with the Father while he is on earth but not so much before.

Knowing the tendency traditions have to grow, it is best for us to focus most on the Trinity in relation to the roles each play in Scripture and not to speculate too much about things we could not possibly comprehend. God the Father functions most in Scripture as the transcendent and sovereign Creator to whom all glory must ultimately go (e.g., Phil. 2:11). Jesus functions most in Scripture as the agent of God in the redemption of the world, the one in whom the world once again finds its intended meaning and purpose. The Spirit functions most in Scripture as the channel of God's presence and power on the earth.

In Scripture, God is three persons, even though there is only one God.

Next week: C.1 God created the universe out of nothing.

[1] The worship of one God while believing others exist is called "monolatry," and the position is called "henotheism."

[2] I am following the lead here of Richard Bauckham's description of Jewish monotheism at the time of Christ in Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 184. In addition to "creational" monotheism, he describes Jewish monotheism as "cultic monotheism" (meaning that only Yahweh was worthy of worship) and "eschatological monotheism" (only Yahweh would emerge victorious at the end of history).

[3] The so called Athansian Creed.

[4] The Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD313.

Grudem 14e: Distinctions in the Trinity

Summary-evaluations of Wayne Grudem's chapter on the Trinity now concludes.
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D. Distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Summary
1. Different primary functions in world
The ways in which the different persons of the Trinity relate to the world is called the "economy" of the Trinity. For example, in relation to the Trinity, God the Father spoke the words of creation. The Son carried out these "creative decrees." The Spirit sustained and showed God's immediate presence in the creation. In redemption, God planned it. Jesus accomplished it. The Spirit implemented it, brought it to completion. Grudem sees Son and Spirit as equal in deity, but subordinate in their roles.

2. Eternally existed distinct
Grudem does not believe that the roles of the members of the Trinity are interchangeable. For him, the Father could not have come to die on the cross. They each have fixed "positions" (249). Second, these positions for Grudem are eternal. They have always had them from before the creation.

Finally, these are not distinctions in attribute, deity, or God's essential nature. They hold these things as part of God's one substance. The distinctions are in how they relate to each other, something Grudem calls "ontological equality but economic subordination" (251). He will of course use this understanding to argue for subordination in the family.

3. Relationships between persons and being
How does the being of God relate to the three persons of God? The persons are not each a third of God. Each of the persons is fully God. Yet the persons of God are not something added on to God, extra parts that the persons have that the others do not. The persons are not just different ways of looking at God (modalism), like looking at the same man as father, son, and husband.

Perhaps the analogy Grudem likes the most, but certainly considers imperfect, is a man thinking as subject, thinking about himself as object, and thinking about his ideas about himself--himself as subject, object, and thoughts about himself. He fully admits this doesn't get at it perfectly. God's existence is just a kind of existence far different than anything in our experience.

4. Can we understand it?
We simply cannot remove the mystery from the Trinity. He has already said that all analogies ultimately break down at some point. We simply will never be able to understand it fully. At the same time, he says, Scripture does not ask us to believe in a contradiction.

Evaluation
It is best to begin where Grudem ends. We believe in the Trinity because it is a doctrine of faith, because we believe that the Holy Spirit worked in the church universal to establish it as common doctrine. If we were truly limited to the Bible alone, other configurations would be possible. In fact, most scholars of the history of theology would argue that Grudem's version of subordinationism has historically been considered mildly heretical. It is possible to argue for it from the biblical texts, as Grudem does, but it is probably not the common consensus of Christians throughout the ages.

The historical understanding is not that the roles of the persons of the Trinity are subordinate but that the humanity of Jesus was subordinate to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). The incarnation--the pre-existent Son of God taking on flesh--is a matter for later in the book, but historically Christians have believed that the Son was not human before he came to earth. In that sense, the historical Christian belief is that only the human nature of Christ is subordinate to God the Father and that the Son did not have this dimension until the incarnation.

But as Grudem says, no analogy is adequate to explain or describe the Trinity and we must ultimately consign its full understanding to mystery. Grudem seems right to say that the different persons of the Trinity tend to do different things. He also seems on to something when he recognizes a connection between the creation and the various roles they play.

God the Father seems to relate more to God's transcendence. God the Spirit seems to relate more to God's immanence.  And God the Son seems to relate especially to bridging the gap between God's transcendence and his immanence.

An individual can speculate about such things, but refinement of doctrine is ultimately a matter for the universal church. But we can ask whether a more developed understanding of creation out of nothing would affect the way the church understands the Trinity.

For example, the Christians of the councils presumably had no thought for space itself being part of the creation. Creation, for them, was arguably the Trinity (in the emptiness) putting stuff into the emptiness that wasn't there before (creating it out of nothing). However, with the advent of relativity, we now must think of God creating the emptiness itself. We must now think of the very laws of nature being part of the creation.

The very idea of scientific law as part of nature belongs to the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. The assumption of the formative church would have been to see the operations of reason and experience as part of the givenness of the cosmos and they would have connected it to the nature of God.

Arguably, theologians like Grudem continue to blur the creation with the Creator. They have a three or at most four-dimensional understanding of God that ultimately sees him within the same space (and time) as the creation.  In their theology, he is not truly outside space and, although they might say he is timeless, their solution to the question of God's foreknowledge of the future betrays that they do not truly see him as outside time.

So when so many theologians talk of the relationships within the Trinity, we have to wonder if they are still mistaking the analogy for the literal.  That is to say, even "Father" and "Son" are analogies from our world to help us understand a mystery that ultimately reaches beyond our universe and frame of reference.  We believe by faith in some eternal distinction in the pre-universe "nature" of God that corresponds to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But arguably even these distinctions are this-universe analogies.

E. Application
Summary
Grudem's primary application is of course to marriage. The husband's role is parallel to that of the Father, whom he believe God intends to have authority over the wife in marriage. The relationship of parents to children is thus analogous for him to the relationship between parents and children. All are equal in humanity, importance, and personhood, but have different fixed roles and levels of authority.

Evaluation
Scholars of the history of theology largely disagree with Grudem (and thus Hodge) on subordination within the Trinity. Historically, it is the humanity of Jesus that is understood to be subordinate to God the Father. If Grudem wants to pull the cork on this issue by trumping the church fathers with Scripture, then he also opens the door to the question of whether Jesus is of "one substance" with the Father in the New Testament. It is no coincidence that, in the Protestant Reformation's turn back to the Bible, we not only saw the rise of Lutherans, but Socinianism as well, which denied the Trinity.

However, in the end, it is not clear that the Trinity is an appropriate model for the family at all.  Jesus is not the bride of God the Father.  He is the Son.  The Holy Spirit is not the child of the Father and Son (a non-traditional family indeed and certain to be incarcerated). Given the mystery of the Trinity and our sense that even the orthodox statements of church history had an underdeveloped sense of ex nihilo, we must consider even the titles of "Father" and "Son" as analogies.  They are metaphors drawn from human life to help us catch a glimpse of God. They are images we must not mistake for the fully literal.

God has no genitals.  He is not literally male or literally a father. God uses feminine images of himself as well (e.g., Isaiah 42:14). We must never mistake the pictures of God for God himself.  God uses pictures in revelation to meet us in language we can understand.  But no human words or thought can fully--or perhaps even literally--capture God in our understanding.

Grudem 14d: Trinity Errors

My summary-evaluations of Wayne Grudem's chapter on the Trinity continues.
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C. Errors on the Trinity
Summary
In the previous section, Grudem has conceptualized the Trinity in terms of three statements he believes capture biblical teaching: 1) God is three persons, 2) Each person is fully God, and 3) There is one God. In this section, he discusses various historical perspectives on God that fail in regard to one of these three.

1. Modalism
Also called Sabellianism after the early third century teacher Sabellius, modalism understands the three "persons" of the Trinity simply to be three different forms or modes in which the one God manifests himself. In other words, modalism fails to see God as three distinct persons.  The United Pentecostal Church affirms modalism as one of its core beliefs.

Modalism is obviously strong in its affirmation of there being only one God and that he is supreme ruler (it is sometimes called "modalistic monarchianism") but it fails to capture relationships between the persons of the Trinity, such as we find at Jesus' baptism or in the intercession of Jesus and the Spirit to the Father on behalf of us.

2. Arianism, etc.
Grudem puts denials of the full deity of the Son and Holy Spirit under the heading of Arianism, although it is only the best known representative of this category.

a. The Arian Controversy
Arius taught that although Jesus was the greatest of all creation, he was created by God before God made everything else (cf. Col. 1:15). The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that his views were false. The Creed of Nicaea said that Jesus was "begotten, not made."  The Nicene Creed, which issued out of the next Council of Constantinople in 381, clarified that this begetting took place "before all ages."

Nicaea also debated whether Jesus was "of one substance" (homoousios) with the Father or only of similar substance (homoiousios).  It concluded that Jesus was "of one substance" with the Father, which Grudem believes is true to biblical Christianity.

b. Subordinationism
As Grudem defines the heresy of subordinationism, it is to hold that the Son is inferior in being or attributes to God the Father. Grudem does not believe it is subordinationism to believe that the Son is subordinate to the Father in role or function (244 n.27). He will return to this issue later in the chapter.

In this section he also praises Athanasius for his role in defeating Arianism.  The Athanasian Creed probably does not come from Athanasius but is a clear affirmation of trinitarian doctrine used in some Protestant and Catholic churches today.

c. Adoptionism
Grudem mentions one form of adoptionism that existed in the early church, namely, the view that Jesus lived as an ordinary man until God "adopted" him as son at his baptism. Like Arianism, it did not affirm the eternal, full deity of Jesus. He also mentions in this section that the Nicene Creed of 381 added a statement on the deity of the Holy Spirit.

d. Filioque
In AD589 at a regional council in what is now Spain, the Western church added to the Nicene Creed a sense that the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father but "from the Father and the Son." Grudem does not believe that Scripture has an explicit statement on this issue because John 15:26 and 16:7 are about Jesus sending the Spirit after his resurrection, not from eternity past. He considers it unfortunate that the Eastern church split from the Western church over this doctrine, although the underlying issue had more to do with the authority of the Pope and the Western church.

On the whole, Grudem thinks the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son makes sense. Might not the relation in time in John 15:26 match the eternal relationship of the Trinity? In any case, he does not believe that it warranted such a division in the church.

e. The Importance of the Trinity Doctrine
Grudem believes that the Trinity is crucial for six reasons. First, he believes Jesus could not have born the full wrath of God if he had not been fully God. Second, he believes that justification by faith alone would be in peril. Could we depend on him for salvation if he were not fully God? Third, if he is not infinite God, should we pray to him or worship him? Wouldn't it be idolatry to worship him then?

Fourth, we then begin to give credit for salvation to a creature rather than to God himself. Fifth, the personal nature of God comes to be at stake, because there are then no personal relationships within the Trinity. Sixth, Grudem sees the unity of the universe at stake--how can the diverse elements of the universe have any unity if in God there is no plurality in unity?

3. Tritheism
Few persons in the history of the church have actually held that the three persons of the Trinity are three separate Gods, although Grudem suggests many evangelicals may unintentionally fall into this category by recognizing the distinct persons but not the real "unity of God as one undivided being" (248).

Evaluation
Grudem's account is overwhelmingly orthodox, for the most part. The one area where there is significant debate is whether he has accurately caught the sense of subordinationism. Grudem does not believe that subordination of role or function counts as a heresy, only inferiority in being or attribute. As we will see later in the chapter, serious questions can and have been raised about this interpretation of subordinationism.

Grudem's six points on the importance of the Trinity are perhaps more open to discussion. It is true that Gregory of Nazianzus in the late 300s said that, "What has not been assumed cannot be healed." He was arguing that Jesus must have become fully human for atonement to work. Grudem's argument is somewhat of the flip side--Jesus needed to be fully divine for atonement to work.

This is a fully orthodox perspective, although Grudem predictably focuses more on God's wrath than early Christian tradition did. And while it is orthodox to believe that Jesus needed to become human to heal humanity of its sin, it is highly debatable whether God, in his sovereignty, couldn't have justified us, pronounced us "not guilty," by divine fiat and command. This is arguably an ironic defect in Grudem's sense of God's sovereignty.

Grudem's arguments about the importance of relationship in God or the importance of plurality seem obscure and highly debatable.  Again, it is ironic that Grudem seems to be using the creation in order to argue for a certain understanding of God, as if God needs to have certain items on his pre-creation resume in order to relate to us.

Surely God, as God, may have his own well of creativity. The Trinity may make sense of a God who creates a world with relationships and unity in plurality, but surely Grudem does not want to suggest that God could not have created such things without the Trinity. Grudem seems to be creating God in the image of the creation.

It might be worth adding that it was not at all clear in the 300s who would emerge the winner and what would end up being considered Christian orthodoxy. It is easy for us to look back and condemn people like Arius, but it was not at all clear at the time who was correct. There was a time in the 300s when more Christians were Arian than Athanasian.

Finally, it is probably significant to point out that it was more theology and philosophy in the early church that solidified this orthodox understanding rather than biblical teaching itself.  For example, neither Athanasius nor Grudem for that matter would not have written Colossians 1:15 the way it is, that Jesus is "firstborn of all creation." The emphasis is indeed probably on Jesus' pre-eminence, but might not some in the audience of Colossians have easily assumed that Jesus was something like the logos--not created like the rest of creation, but not uncreated like God either?

What Grudem calls "biblical Christianity" is arguably more than just biblical.

Grudem 14c: Trinity in Summary

... continued from way back when
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B. Three Statements in Summary
Summary
Grudem captures the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (he calls it the biblical teaching on it) in three statements:
1. God is three persons.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.

1. God is three persons.
Scripture speaks of Jesus as a distinct person from God the Father. It speaks of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person from Jesus. It uses a masculine pronoun of the Holy Spirit in John, treating him as a person. Since the Spirit intercedes to God the Father, he must be distinct from him as well.  The three persons of the Trinity are thus distinct persons from each other.

2. Each is fully God.
God the Father is clearly God. Grudem draws on John 1:1-4 to show that Jesus was fully God.  He argues against the Jehovah's Witness' sense that John 1:1 should be translated that the word was a god on the basis of Greek grammar. Colwell's rule states that when a predicate nominative precedes the verb in Greek and the subject follows, the predicate nominative will lack the article (234, n. 12).

Other verses are adduced to support Jesus' full divinity. Thomas calls Jesus God in John 20:28. Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ is the "exact representation" of God's being. Hebrews 1:10, Titus 2:13, 1 Peter 1:1, Romans 9:5, Isaiah 9:6, Colossians 2:9 are all mentioned.

If God the Father and God the Son are God, then surely the Spirit is in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19. Lying to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5:3-4 is lying to God. Fleeing the Spirit in Psalm 139:7-8 is fleeing the presence of God. So each distinct person is God.

3. There is one God.
Despite there being three distinct persons, each of which is fully God, the Bible seems to require that there only be one God.  This faith is the centerpiece of the Shema of Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4 and it is also key to Isaiah 45:5-6, 21-22.

Grudem's next two points in this section are that 4) simplistic solutions all run aground on one of the previous three points and that 5) all analogies have shortcomings. In the next section, he will treat the various errors of those who have tried to oversimplify the Trinity, including those who have erred on the "one God" side and those who have erred on the "all three are fully God" side.

Meanwhile, all analogies fail on one or another of the three basic points: analogies of a three-leafed clover or a tree with three parts or a person who is a farmer, a mayor, and an elder in his church or one person who has intellect, emotions, and will.

Finally, 6) Grudem makes it clear that all three persons have eternally existed as the Trinity.

Evaluation
Grudem's treatment in this section is entirely orthodox. These are the historically shared beliefs of the vast majority of Christendom. He treats in his footnotes a couple outliers--Jehovah's Witnesses and oneness Pentecostals. The former deny that Jesus was God in the same way as God the Father and the latter are "modalists" who believe the three persons were really only manifestations of the same person.

If there were to be a critique, it would be in the interpretations of the proof texts, although there is nothing idiosyncratic about the way Grudem uses them. It is at least possible that many of the passages that have been classically adduced were far more nuanced originally. That is to say, the classic statements of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) on the Trinity and dual nature of Christ probably reflect more developed understandings of these passages than their original meanings.

For example, it seems more likely that Old Testament passages like Isaiah 9:6 took their original meaning from the fact that kings of the Ancient Near East (ANE) could be conceptualized as God's divine representatives on earth. Such language seems fantastic to us used of a human being but, then again, we have not grown up in the ANE. The New Testament interestingly never uses this passage in relation to Jesus, but it is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament for later Christians to see the divinity of Christ in it.

Some of the New Testament passages may find their original background in various Jewish traditions that used divine language of the logos (word) or of kings. The Jewish thinker Philo spoke of the logos, the divine word, as the one through whom God made the world (cf. Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:3). We also have evidence of divine language/imagery used of exalted figures like the Son of Man in 1 Enoch, Adam in The Life of Adam and Eve, or even Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian.

The point is that the original meanings of these verses may have been more nuanced at first than they seem to us today. This explains why there was such long debate over the Trinity and how such differing positions could be taken. The point is not to deny the Trinity in any way but simply to say that God used the flexibility of language to bring Christian thinking on this subject to maturity, just as he did with the New Testament in its understanding of the Old Testament.

So the position that Grudem takes in this section is completely and historically orthodox. This position, however, may require us to put more faith in God's working in the early church than would make Grudem himself comfortable.

Sunday Theology: The Trinity

The theology video series continues:

Grudem 14b: Trinity in Scripture cont.

... continued from this morning.
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Yet surely Grudem is right to think we should find traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament. And we do find the Spirit of God in numerous places in the Old Testament. Even in Genesis 1:2 we find the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters. The Spirit of God comes on various people in the history of Israel--David, for example (1 Sam. 16:3).

And perhaps Grudem is right that the angel of the LORD reflects one of the persons of the Trinity, such as the pre-incarnated Christ. This is a difficult concept, since it is hard to imagine what the person of the Son was before he took on human personhood.  But these are questions beyond the scope of individual speculation.

The New Testament does not specify the exact nature of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Grudem is quite right that all three are said to be divine. All three are distinct persons.  Yet God is one. God would work out the rest of the details in the church.

Grudem 14a: Scriptures on the Trinity

... continued from last week.
_______________
Chapter 14: The Trinity
A. Progressively Revealed in Scripture
Summary
This part of the chapter has two sections.  The first is on the partial revelation of the Trinity in the Old Testament. The second is on the more complete revelation of the Trinity in the New Testament. Grudem acknowledges up front that the word trinity is not found in the Bible. However, he believes the idea represented by the word is found in several places.

As for the Old Testament, he says it would be surprising not to find indications of it if God indeed has existed eternally as three persons. Although it is not explicitly found, he catalogs at least 9 passages that might imply that God exists as more than one person.

• Let us make humanity in Genesis 1:26
• God distinguished from his God in Psalm 45:6-7
• The LORD said to my Lord in Psalm 110:1
• God speaking of Israel grieving his Holy Spirit in Isaiah 63:10
• The LORD speaking of the Lord coming to his temple in Malachi 3:12
• The LORD saying he will save them by the LORD in Hosea 1:7
• The servant of the LORD in Isaiah 48:16 distinguishing between the LORD and his Spirit
• Passages having to do with the angel of the LORD that glide between them being messengers and God speaking in the first person
• Possibly wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-31 who stands at God's side in creation--Grudem does not actually think this one is likely (229 n.7).

Then Grudem sees more explicit teaching about the trinitarian nature of God in the New Testament, as you might expect when the Son of God came to earth.  He explores at least 8 passages that might relate somewhat directly to the fact that three distinct persons are God even though there is only one God.

• Father, Son, and Spirit present at Jesus' baptism (e.g., Matt. 3:16-17).
• The three invoked in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19
• The mention of all three in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6
• The final blessing of 1 Corinthians 13:13 mentions all three.
• The mention of all three in Ephesians 4:4-6
• All three mentioned in 1 Peter 1:2
• All three mentioned in Jude 20-21
• Grudem mentions 1 John 5:7 in the King James Version, but makes it clear that it is not at all likely that this verse was in the original text of 1 John.

Evaluation
Grudem has done a good job of pulling together various texts from the two testaments that have played some role in the question of the Trinity and the Bible.  He also demonstrates that he does not simply accept an idea because it fits with his way of thinking.  For example, Proverbs 8 is almost certainly a personification of wisdom such as we find in other Jewish literature. It is not in any way thinking of wisdom as an actual being, despite how vividly it portrays her.

Similarly, 1 John 5:7 played no role in the great trinitarian debates of the 300s. This fact alone would indicate it did not exist at the time. After all, it would have been the most explicit trinitarian verse in the entire Bible if it had existed at the time. I affirm Grudem for looking at these passages objectively.

I want to affirm in strong terms his sense that the Trinity is "progressively" understood in Scripture. That is to say, the New Testament has much more to say in relation to the three persons of the Trinity than the Old Testament does. It is perhaps also significant that he says "more complete" revelation about the Trinity in the New Testament.  Surely this wording is acknowledging what seems impossible to deny, namely, that the most complete understanding of the Trinity did not come until the 300s and 400s--hundreds of years after the New Testament was written.

Grudem's basic expectation of the Old Testament seems, at first glance, to be reasonable. We should expect to find hints of the different persons of the Trinity in the Old Testament.  The question is whether Grudem is looking in the right way in the right places.

Here we face a fundamental issue of hermeneutics. Do we read biblical texts for what they were likely to mean to those to whom they were first written or do we read them in terms of the full blown Christian faith that was not in place until the 400s after Jesus? For Grudem, these two ways of reading will tend to be the same because he does not really know how to read biblical texts in context.

I personally believe that both are valid ways of reading the text, although the second way is more Christian. It just isn't always what the text meant originally.

For example, Psalm 45 seems to have been a wedding psalm for a king originally. The princess is ready in her chamber, dressed in gold (45:13).  She is led to the king with many virgin maidens accompanying her (45:14). They enter the palace and the promise of sons and princes is mentioned (45:16).

This confirms that the psalm originally referred to a human king when it spoke of riding out in military triumph (45:4-5) and that it was indeed a theme in relation to a human king (45:1). The entire literary context thus pushes us to see the words, "your throne, O god" addressed to a human king (45:6), and the historical context tells us that earthly kings were often addressed as gods at that point in history. After all, the king is the embodiment of God on earth, God's focal representative at that time. We are not surprised, then, to find the next verse distinguish the king as god from Yahweh as God (45:7). Hebrews then takes these verses in a "fuller sense," a spiritual sense, when it reads them in relation to Christ (Heb. 1:8-9).

Suffice it to say, ancient Israel probably did not take any of these verses in the Old Testament in the way Grudem and other Christians have in the past. That does not mean that God did not intentionally plant clues for later Christians to find. It only means that all these verses probably were read differently originally, since the Trinity was not a way of reading the Old Testament until after the New Testament. Even New Testament passages like Hebrews 1:8-9 may have been more nuanced originally than Christians came to take them.

So no Israelite would have taken Genesis 1:26 in relation to a triunity within God.  They would have taken the "us" in one of the other ways Grudem mentions--either a kind of plural of majesty or, perhaps more likely, as an address to other heavenly beings. There is clear evidence from the rest of the Old Testament that Yahweh could be visioned in the presence of other gods (e.g., Psalm 82; Deuteronomy 32:8 in its more likely original wording).

Psalm 110 is an uncomfortable passage in this discussion. On the one hand, like Psalm 45, it reads quite easily in relation to a human king. Since the headings of psalms and other biblical books were added to them later, they are usually not considered part of the inspired text. In that case, the LORD (Yahweh) is addressing the Lord (king) of the psalmist.  It thus becomes a psalm in honor of a human king of Israel.

God promises to put the enemies of the king under his feet (110:1). God will bring triumph over enemies as the king rides out with his troops on the day of battle (110:2-3).  He will be a king-priest like Melchizedek in Genesis 22, a king who also represented God spiritually (110:4).  The king Lord fights at God's right hand, crushing other kings and judging nations (110:5-7).

Surely this is how those who first heard this psalm would have taken it.  After the heading was added, the Israelites probably took it as David speaking of himself. This interpretation is not problematic so far.

What creates difficulty is the fact that Jesus uses this psalm in his sparring with his debaters and the early church followed suit.  As part of his argument--and that of the early church--Davidic authorship is assumed. For the early Christians, including the gospel writers, we can suggest something that we often find, namely, that God inspired the biblical authors in the categories of the day, including the structure of the universe and human personality. It does not seem problematic to say that authorship was never the inspired point but rather the clothing in which the inspired point was presented, just as we do not think of there being three heavens above us to get to God (2 Cor. 12:2).

But what about Jesus (Mark 12:35-37)?  Did not Jesus know who the author of Psalm 110 was, since he is God himself? We could suggest that Jesus was "gaming" them, playing on their own assumptions rather than his own. On the other hand, Jesus himself tells us he did not access his omniscience while on earth (Mark 13:32).  But most would be more comfortable thinking that this only means his knowledge was partial rather than inaccurate at some point.

Grudem, in fact, would probably consider it an unintentional sin to assert the wrong authorship of a book. As a Wesleyan-Arminian, I do not.  The intention to lie would not be present, and no one would be wronged inadvertently since the overall point being made was true either way. It is a sensitive enough issue that I will not take a position on it, only to say that Psalm 110:1 was not likely read to indicate more than one divine being until the time of Christ...

Practical Theology 8: Three in One

More in the theology series...

Introduction
1. Is Theology Practical?
2. Why Believe in God?

God as Creator
3. God as Other
4. God as All-Powerful
5. God as All-Knowing
6. God as Eternal
7. God as Spirit


8. Three in One
Probably no Christian belief is more mysterious than the Trinity.  The Trinity of course is the firmly held belief, on the one hand, that there is only one God, coupled with the equally firmly held belief that God the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. The overwhelming majority of Christians throughout the centuries have believed that God exists as three persons, even though he is only one substance.

It seems very difficult to explain this belief in any detail without running into imbalance either on the one God side or the three persons side. And if we do fall into imbalance, there is sure to be a name from history for the imbalance. For example, if someone suggested that there were three gods, that is polytheism.  If someone suggested there was only one God who changed his roles and functions throughout time, that is called modalism or Sabellianism.

There is a massive history here, and it is not clear how practical it is to know it except that it reinforces to us a sense that what Christians believe sometimes has as much to do with the church in history as it does with the Bible. There were options the Bible seems to leave open that were quite decisively shut closed in church history.

For example, some Jewish Christians of the early second century believed Jesus was the Messiah without believing he was divine (Ebionites, Nazoreans). Some New Testament interpreters see them in continuity with some of the earliest Christians, perhaps like the Judaizers. Acts 15 possibly treats such people as "in" at that time, but they would be "out" at least by the late second century.

Another early heresy was the idea that Jesus became God at his baptism, adoptionism.  Then there was the idea that Jesus the divine spirit being never fully became human, Docetism (he only "seemed" to be human).  We already mentioned modalism, which is the idea that God the Father in the Old Testament became God the Son in Jesus, who then ascended and returned to earth as the Holy Spirit.

Probably the biggest historical challenger to what we now consider to be orthodoxy was a heresy called Arianism.  Arius at the beginning of the 300s believed that Jesus was the "firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15), that Christ was the first thing God created and the most pre-eminent thing that God created, but still part of the creation. At one point in the mid-300s, probably more Christians were Arians than were trinitarians. Again, you can see how Arius could argue his point from Scripture.

These ideas only became heresies at a certain point in time. That is to say, while it may be obvious to us today that they are false, it was not always obvious at the time. We might expect to see some of these thinkers in the kingdom, even though their beliefs were eventually condemned. Some only became heretics after they were dead.

Historically, it seems pretty clear that the doctrine of the Trinity developed in order to clarify several beliefs that seemed in tension with each other. So the belief that there is only one God is central to a Jewish understanding of the Old Testament, even if most of ancient Israel believed in the existence of other gods that were not legitimate recipients of worship. That is to say, the official practice of ancient Israel was "monolatry," the worship of one God, and they were "henotheists."

But by the time of the New Testament, such gods were thought of as demons (1 Cor. 10:20), and belief in one God seems firmly established within Judaism. Subordinates to YHWH could be reverenced as a function of worshiping him, such as bowing to the king or reverencing exalted angels that represented YHWH or bore his name. The New Testament strongly affirms that there is only one God (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:4-6; Eph. 4:6).

Yet the New Testament also considers Jesus to be God (John 1:1) as a distinct person, and some passages consider the Holy Spirit to be a distinct person (16:7-11) who is obviously God as well. So we have one God, but we have three persons who are God. This is basically what the idea of the Trinity, clarified at the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), affirms. God is one in substance, but exists as three persons. This belief affirms everything that needs to be affirmed.

What is the practical pay-off?  Probably the first that comes to mind from the history is a recognition of how much we owe to the church in the first four centuries for what we now believe about the Trinity. It may seem obvious to us today that the Bible teaches the Trinity, but it was not obvious to all the early Christians for several hundred years. Indeed, when the Reformation opened the door to a re-examination of catholic belief in the light of Scripture alone, we should not be surprised to find that some Protestants, like the Socinians, ended up rejecting the Trinity.

Even such revered Protestant names as John Milton (Paradise Lost) and Isaac Newton (laws of physics) seem to have rejected the classic view of the Trinity. John Wesley firmly believed in the Trinity, but believed individuals such as these would be in the kingdom. [1] Even today, there are "oneness Pentecostals" who are basically modalists who believe that the one God only has existed in history as one person at a time, and they would have an inerrantist view of the Bible. The long and short of it is that we seem to need more than the Bible alone in order to arbitrate such debates and that, as in the case of the biblical canon itself, one has to put some faith in the church to have certainty on the doctrine of the Trinity.

What other practical pay-off might the doctrine have? Certainly you hear lots of supposed practical insights allegedly drawn from the Trinity. Both egalitarians and complementarians sometimes refer to the Trinity as a basis for their beliefs. [2] Look, the egalitarian says, Christians have historically believed that the divine Son is not subordinate to the divine Father. The complementarian then responds with Scriptures where the (human) Jesus is subordinate to the divine Father. Both arguments seem rather arcane and probably unhelpful.

Others see the Trinity as an embodiment of love and relationship as an eternal attribute of God, with John 17 no doubt playing the key biblical role. The theologian Karl Barth structured his entire, voluminous theology on the structure of the Trinity. So much of the teaching we find right now on the Trinity seems quite speculative, especially considering how mysterious it is and how cautiously it came together in church history. So much thinking right now about it seems reminiscent of the layer after layer of paint added to Christianity in the medieval period.

In my view, the most practical view to take on the Trinity is to stick somewhat closely to its original form. We Christians affirm that there is only one God. We also affirm that Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is God. We can talk of Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct persons while only affirming one God. To go much beyond this basic affirmation is to enter the often impractical world of speculation and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

[1] Egalitarians do not believe that it is God's long term will for wives to be subordinate to their husbands, even though God accommodated the culture of ancient times in parts of the Bible (e.g., Col. 3). Complementarians believe that God has built into the creation the subordination of wives to their husbands at least for the time prior to the coming of God's kingdom.

9. God as Love
10. God as Just
11. God as Unchanging

Jesus' Balance of Power

This is from the last chapter of my second Jesus book:
________
The Nicene Creed, said in many churches today, was a perfected version of what the Council of Nicaea decided in 325, but it didn’t reach something like its current form until the next council at the city of Constantinople in AD381. That creed says that, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

It was now agreed that Jesus was divine in the same way that God the Father was divine. And of course it was agreed that he was human too. A Christian leader in the 300s named Gregory of Nazianzus famously argued that “what has not been assumed cannot be healed.” What he meant is that if Jesus did not really take on humanity, he can’t heal us.

So after working out the basics of the Trinity, Christians for the next hundred plus years would debate how Jesus’ humanity and divinity fit together. Now that Christianity was legal, they didn’t have to spend as much time worrying about persecution. In fact, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the only legal religion in 380. The contents of the Bible were also coming together.  By the year 400, Christians pretty much agreed on which books belonged in the New Testament. This “peace and quiet” created a space for them to iron out some of these issues.

The end result was the common Christian belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine in such a way as that both were real features of who he was. The church steered a path between a number of competing ideas. For example, a bishop named Apollinarius offered the possibility that Jesus had a human body but a divine mind, as if the divine Logos had taken over a body. The result basically would suggest that Jesus didn’t have any human element in his thinking.

Still later, an archbishop named Nestorius suggested that Jesus’ almost had a split personality—a human one and a divine one. In response, a man named Eutyches argued Jesus only had one nature that was a mixture of human and divine. No doubt these were all well-intentioned attempts to figure things out, even though the politics of it all often got ugly.

The final decision, like the one about the Trinity, was very balanced. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He was only one person (against Nestorius) but he had two natures (against Apollinarius and Eutyches). He was really tempted and experienced genuine humanity in its fullness. But he was also truly God walking on the earth.

Obviously by 451 Christians had come a long way from simple biblical statements like 2 Corinthians 13:14: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The Corinthians may have had a very simple sense of such a verse. Here are three different persons: One God, one Lord, one Spirit.

When we read it today, we believe all three are mysteriously the same, one God. So Jesus the Lord is both the fully human Jesus who walked the earth and the fully divine Jesus who came from heaven. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

James McGrath on Tom McCall

I'm glad to call both of these gentlemen my friends.  James McGrath has just reviewed Tom McCall's new book, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism.

Sunday Oden 5: The Trinity

The previous post in this series is here.

I only got through one chapter this week, chapter 5, "Whether God is Triune."

Oden repeatedly says that theology is simply an explanation of baptism, very interesting even though I wait to be fully convinced. I continue to be bothered by the way he handles the "fathers." Bounds has indicated to me that his sense of "original meaning" is more subtle than one might at first think, that in fact the end of the first part on the Father will lay down some of his hermeneutical cards.

But in general, the early fathers were no more wired to read the New Testament or Old Testament texts in their literary and historical contexts than the New Testament authors were in their readings of the Old. We presume their trinitarian readings of Scripture were on the right theological track. But a clever student who has taken inductive Bible study will be a better contextual interpreter than any of them.

The Bible scholar in me thus chafes when Oden says silly things like, "The unique phrase 'O God, thy God" makes no sense without a triune premise" (113). I have no objection to reading this psalm and Hebrews that quotes it with trinitarian lenses. But the psalm made perfect sense against its ancient near eastern context, a place where human kings were thought of as God's sons and where the king as godlike and God's representative in no way contradicted God as God. We should see these statements as stones on a revelatory path toward trinitarianism and we can read them in the light of later trinitarianism. But this is not the same as reading them in their original contexts.

Still, this chapter is a gold mine of the biblical texts in which the earliest Christians were inspired to hear reference to the Trinity. "The triune teaching has become incrementally clarified as established teaching by passing through successive stages: preindications in the Old Testament; the central disclosure of God as Father, Son, and Spirit in the New Testament; and the full development of church teaching in the Nicene definition and its subsequent interpretations" (109-110).

In the Old Testament, he mentions the plural form of Elohim, the threefold repetition of "holy" in Isaiah. The plural form in "remember your creators." I'm not sure if Oden really thinks these things originally had anything to do with the Trinity, which is highly doubtful--it would require us to assume such things made no sense to the people they were actually written for. But they are passages in which later Christians have heard inklings of the Trinity.

He mentions that Father, Son, and Spirit in the NT all are called God. All display the attributes of God. All do the same works. All are worshipped.

Finally, he mentions 12 NT passages that include all three persons: 1) the baptismal formula of the Great Commission; 2) Jesus' baptism; 3) Paul's benediction in 2 Cor. 13:13; 4) the Ephesian formula of 2:18; 5) Jude's summary call to prayer; 6) the Johannine farewell discourses; 7) John's prologue; 8) the Johannine letters; 9) Revelation's salutation; 10) Philippian hymn; 11) Colossians 1; 12) Hebrews introduction.

On the whole, I've found all the chapters of Oden disappointing thus far. It's because he has kept his promise. He is saying nothing new. He isn't even really clarifying the old.

Relationships in the Bible

The "original meaning scholar" inside of me always cringes a little when I read about Moses' relationship with God... or David's or Peter's or Paul's. Frankly, I have the same reaction when people talk about the relationships between the persons of the Trinity. The reason? These sorts of comments strike me as vastly anachronistic.

Six months ago I would have tried to explain this "feeling" I get in terms of ancient personalities being "dyadic" or group embedded. I might have suggested that the modern, introspective self traces back to the Romantics and in some ways back to Augustine, who individualized our understanding of Paul's writings.

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self has been filling in some of the details. I wish I had the time to encapsulate his massive tome in detail. One of the main shifts that I blogged on a few weeks back is a shift from seeing truth as something out there that is part of the order of the world to seeing truth as something that my mind has to sort out by sifting through all the particular evidence of my reason and senses.

Inadvertantly, "I" become the center of the universe. I can still affirm that God is the center, but I am keenly aware that I am concluding that God is the center. Before I simply assumed God was the center unthinkingly. (I sense that Taylor will go Heideggerian on me at the end, but I'm no fan of Heidegger, meaning that I find this Cartesian situation unavoidable to some extent).

Eventually, individual identity becomes more and more particular to me. "I" become more and more self-defined, determined, and differentiated. It thus entails the eventual birth of modern intimacy, where my vastly increased in size self connects with your vastly increased in size self.

What I'm getting at is that pre-moderns did not have nearly as developed senses of themselves as individuals as so many of us do. And as a result, their relationships were not nearly as deep or complex as ours can be. It is not simply that "abba" did not mean "Daddy" in Aramaic (it didn't). I am saying that there really weren't any "Daddys" of the modern sort. Love between individuals did not have the kind of differentiated complexity--or post-Romantic age feeling--that we often have in the Western world. Go look at relationships in Africa or Asia if you want to know what biblical relationships were like.

Now of course the Trinity is a realm of absolutes beyond cultural contexts. The Trinity did not change their interrelationships after Descartes, as far as I know. But I'm not sure any of us mortals could really fathom what their absolute relationships would be like. Nevertheless, I predict that most of the trendy trinitarian stuff right now will be completely abandoned within twenty or thirty years. I suspect that an aweful lot of it is yet more of the post-Cartesian, post-Romantic projection of the modern self on God.

Calvin Quote for the Day 2-11-08

"If, therefore, these terms [theological terms in relation to the Trinity] were not rashly invented, we ought to beware lest by repudiating them we be accused of overweening rashness. Indeed, I could wish they were buried, if only among all men this faith were agreed on: that Father and Son and Spirit are one God, yet the Son is not the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but that they are differentiated by a peculiar quality."

I might say as I look at Calvin's use of Scripture, I think I can understand why some of the more "fundamentalist" Calvinists have difficulty with people like Peter Enns. One of the sections of the Institutes I read today has Calvin looking for Christ in the Old Testament, and he consistently shows that he is unable to read the Old Testament inductively, to let it speak in context. Certainly he would have had little of our sense of the Ancient Near Eastern cultural context.

I was excited to get a copy of Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament today. I don't know when I'll be able to fit it in here, but I am looking forward to it greatly.

Subordination of the Spirit?

Something dawned on me that I had never thought of until this weekend: just as the neo-Calvinists subordinate the Son to the Father, they subordinate the Spirit to the Son.

This realization dawned on me as I read the second to last chapter of Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text. Both V and Grant Osborne keep the Holy Spirit on a short leash when it comes to biblical interpretation. According to them, the Spirit does not innovate when it comes to biblical meaning. He illuminates the intended meaning of the text and leads us to apply the appropriate significance of that meaning to our lives. He blows wherever He wills, but not whatever He wills. He does not make it mean something out of continuity with something it meant.

Of course whether the Spirit is subordinate to the Father or Son, this particular theology seems to crash on the rocks of NT texts. The Spirit seems to blow all over the place often with little concern for the intended meaning of OT texts. I guess He didn't read the rule book.

The question of subordination is an interesting one, though. Classic orthodoxy of course rejects any subordination of the persons of the Trinity within the Godhead itself. In that sense, individuals like Wayne Grudem and John Piper are unorthodox. They would see the subordination of the Son to the Father within the Godhead as a paradigm for the household today in which the wife is subordinate to the husband.

But since in my own way I accept the Protestant principle ecclesia semper reformanda--"the church always needs to be reformed"--I am open to the possibility that this consensus might need adjustment. I will give it the benefit of the doubt, mind you, to the consensus of the church over these "neo-reformers."

Certainly in the NT we see Christ subordinated to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). But then again, questions about the relationships within the Trinity go well beyond the NT. When Paul subordinates Christ to God the Father, he is not thinking of the subordination of the second person of the Trinity but the subordination of the Messiah as mediator of God's kingship on earth. I remain convinced that Paul has no understanding of Christ's divine ontology.

And the logos Christology of John did not get the Trinitarian rocket fully into orbit. The classic creeds of the church did not use logos language because it played into views of Christ that did not see Christ to be quite as much God as God the Father.

So I see people like Grudem and Piper as inconsistent. If they're going to believe in the Trinity, then they're going to have to be willing to put some faith in the Spirit working through the church of the fourth and fifth centuries (and not just in an individual named Augustine :-).

But the same Spirit that led that generation to affirm the Trinity led them to affirm the persons of the Godhead as unsubordinated to one another.

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...