Paul as a Proto-trinitarian
Even the most casual reading of the preceding chapters would force on one the theological necessity of trying to come to terms with the twofold reality of Paul’s high Christology—his view of Christ as the preexistent Son and the exalted one who is given the “name” Lord—combined with his vigorously held monotheism. Consistent with the Jewish tradition in which he had been raised, Paul regularly asserts that there is only one God. So we ask in this concluding chapter: What does it mean for an avid monotheist to envision the one Deity as Father and Son? Yet there is more: in the preceding chapter we noted the role of the Spirit in Paul’s understanding of Christ as well as Paul’s understanding of the Spirit’s relationship to the Son and the Father. Our goal in this conclusion, therefore, is to carefully examine the data to demonstrate that it was not just John’s Gospel but equally Paul’s thirteen letters that caused the church in time to express itself in trinitarian, not binitarian, terms. In this concluding chapter, therefore, several theological matters will be examined, not with a solution in view but simply to raise awareness and offer some brief discussion of the issues.
The first aim of this conclusion, therefore, is to point out the considerable christological implications found in Paul’s many and varied statements that conjoin the Spirit with Christ (and the Father) in the economy of salvation. That is, we ask what the christological implications are of Paul’s understanding of the relationship of Christ and the Spirit, as much as that can be discovered in his various, not intentionally theological, statements. At the same time our interest here is in examining where Paul fits into a trajectory that caused these early, thoroughgoing monotheists to speak of Christ and the Spirit and their relationship to God the Father in such a way that finally resulted in the fully developed trinitarian resolution of the fourth and fifth centuries.
As a way to engage these matters we need first to look briefly at Paul’s basic understanding of the person and role of the Spirit in the divine economy.1 That will be followed by a brief look at Paul’s understanding of Christ’s relationship with the Spirit, as that emerges almost incidentally in the Pauline corpus. All of this together points to an especially high Christology in Paul, while at the same time pushing us toward a latent triadic understanding of the one God. This in turn suggests that Paul held to a kind of proto-trinitarian view of God, even though the Apostle himself never comes close to explaining how a strict monotheist could talk about God in this triadic way—especially in what might seem to be so casual a manner.
The Person and Role of the Spirit in Paul’s Thought
We begin our discussion of the Spirit with a brief overview of Paul’s use of the word pneuma as a referent to the Holy Spirit, which occurs approximately 120 times in the Pauline corpus. Of these the most common referent is simply to “the Spirit,” while seventeen times the more fulsome name, “the Holy Spirit,” appears. But on twelve occasions Paul speaks of the Spirit as “the Spirit of God,” which from the larger perspective of the whole of Scripture should come as no surprise. Most significant to our present study, however, are the four times Paul refers to the same Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:17); “the Spirit of [God’s] Son” (Gal. 4:6); “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9); and “the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:19). Before examining these passages, several matters about Paul’s understanding of the Spirit need to be highlighted, since many believers share the sentiments of a former student who once declared in exasperation: “God the Father, I know; God the Son, I love; but the Holy Spirit is a gray, oblong blur!”—something I still remember after several decades because it gave voice to what has been true for a great many believers.
Although Paul clearly understood the Spirit to be intimately related both to God the Father and to Christ, he also understood the Spirit to have a distinct personhood in his own right, as we can see in the many texts where the Spirit is the subject of actions that belong to personhood (given in their assumed chronological order):
The Spirit searches all things (1 Cor. 2:10).
The Spirit knows the mind of God (1 Cor. 2:11).
The Spirit teaches the content of the gospel to believers (1 Cor. 2:13).
The Spirit dwells among/within believers (1 Cor. 3:16; cf. Rom. 8:11; 2 Tim. 1:14).
The Spirit accomplishes all things (1 Cor. 12:11).
The Spirit gives life to those who believe (2 Cor. 3:6).
The Spirit cries out from within our hearts (Gal. 4:6).
The Spirit has desires that are in opposition to the flesh (Gal. 5:17).
The Spirit leads us in the ways of God (Gal. 5:18; Rom. 8:14).
The Spirit bears witness with our own spirits (Rom. 8:16).
The Spirit helps us in our weakness (Rom. 8:26).
The Spirit intercedes on our behalf (Rom. 8:26–27).
The Spirit works all things together for our ultimate good (Rom. 8:28).
The Spirit strengthens believers (Eph. 3:16).
The Spirit is grieved by our sinfulness (Eph. 4:30).
Furthermore, in Paul’s list of some of the fruit of the Spirit’s indwelling believers (Gal. 5:22–23), he gives expression to the personal attributes of God in their adjectival form, some of which occur above as verbs. In addition, there are three moments in Paul’s letters where he makes clear that he not only understood the Spirit as person but that he also understood the Spirit as in some sense distinct from the Father and the Son.
First, in his long exposition of the role of the Spirit in the life of the believer in his letter to “all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be God’s holy people” (Rom. 1:7), Paul asserts that it is the Spirit who gives us “adoption to sonship,”2 as attested by the Spirit’s prompting within us of the Abba-cry (8:15). The Spirit becomes the second necessary witness to our adoption, thus reflecting Paul’s biblical heritage that everything shall be established by two or three witnesses (Deut. 19:15; cf. 2 Cor. 13:1). Whatever else, this is the language of personhood, not that of some kind of impersonal influence or power. One need only look at the Apostle’s brief argument with the Corinthians as to the nature of true wisdom (1 Cor. 2:6–16), where he uses the analogy of human interior consciousness (only one’s own spirit knows one’s mind) to insist that the Spirit alone knows the mind of God. There Paul writes, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (v. 10). And because of this singular relationship with God, the Spirit alone knows and reveals God’s otherwise hidden wisdom (v. 7).
Second, the various triadic passages in Paul’s writings speak strongly against the conflation of the risen Christ and the Spirit who is poured out on believers. The two primary texts that have been used to argue for such conflation are the result of Paul using moments from the Septuagint to further other concerns (2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Cor. 15:45). But Paul has no intention of identifying the risen Christ with the Spirit. The same is true with the crucial passage in Romans, which we discuss at some length below, where Paul follows the phrase “the Spirit of Christ” with the phrase “if Christ is in you” (8:9–11). In context this can mean only “if Christ by his Spirit is in you,” and thus has nothing to do with conflating the Spirit with Christ. Rather, for Paul the Spirit has personhood in his own right. Even though he is intimately related to both the Father and the Son, the Spirit is also quite clearly distinct from them. This is made plain especially by the many triadic statements in Paul where the roles (noted below) of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in our salvation are distinct and unique—even though everything is seen ultimately to come from the one God.
Third, Paul’s triadic way of speaking about our human salvation will not allow us to confuse or conflate either the person or the work of the Son with that of the Spirit. In Paul’s worldview, “between the times” as it were, the Son is now seated “at [God’s] right hand in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 1:20), where he currently makes intercession for us (Rom. 8:34). Significantly, just a couple of sentences earlier in this letter Paul refers to the Spirit indwelling us and helping us in our times of weakness by interceding from within, speaking for us what is inexpressible (8:26), which God knows because God “knows the mind of the Spirit” (v. 27). Thus to put it in different terms, in the present “geography” of heaven and earth, both Father and Son are seen as dwelling in heaven, while the Spirit is seen as (in)dwelling on earth.
It is thus certain that Paul understood the Spirit both as personal and as distinct from the Father and the Son—to borrow language of the later creeds—although intimately related to both as God’s and Christ’s own personal presence within and among us, carrying on the ministry of Christ in the present age.
Christ and the Spirit in Paul’s Thought
Just as the coming of the Son has forever marked our understanding of God, who is henceforth known as “the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” likewise the coming of Christ has forever marked our understanding of the Spirit. Whatever else, the Spirit of God is also the Spirit of Christ (2 Cor. 3:17; Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:9; Phil. 1:19), who carries on the work of Christ following his resurrection and subsequent assumption to the place of authority at God’s right hand. To have received the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:12) is to have access to the mind of Christ (v. 16)—to understand what Christ is all about in bringing us salvation.
For Paul, therefore, Christ provides a fuller definition to the Spirit: people of the Spirit are God’s children, fellow heirs with God’s Son (Rom. 8:14–17). At the same time, Christ is the absolute criterion for what is truly Spirit activity (e.g., 1 Cor. 12:3). Indeed, the Apostle says, to have the Spirit of Christ indwelling us means that Christ himself is present with us (Rom. 8:9–10). It is fair to say that Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit is Christ-centered in the sense that Christ and his work help to define both the person of the Spirit and the Spirit’s active involvement in the ongoing life of the believer.
For the most part the relationship between the role of Christ and the Spirit in the new covenant era is fairly straightforward. This comes out most often in the many instances where Paul speaks of the believers’ salvation in triadic terms in affirmations or assertions that occur throughout the corpus of letters both early and late. These include his semicreedal passages where he is affirming our salvation:
But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as firstfruits to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit. . . . He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord, Jesus Christ. (2 Thess. 2:13–14)
You were justified [= God justified you] in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor. 6:11; cf. 2 Cor. 1:21–22; Gal. 4:4–7; Rom. 8:3–4, 15–17; Titus 3:4–7)
The relationship between the Spirit and Christ is also expressed in many other seemingly offhanded moments, soteriological or otherwise:
Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. . . . So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law . . . ? (Gal. 3:1, 5)
I know that through your prayers and God’s provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. . . . For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 1:19; 3:3; cf. 1 Cor. 1:4–7; 2:4–5, 12; 6:19–20; 2 Cor. 3:16–18; Rom. 5:5–8; 8:9–11; 15:16, 18–19, 30; Col. 3:16; Eph. 1:3, 17–20; 2:17–18, 19–22; 3:16–19; 5:18–19)
Our point here is that, for Paul, human redemption is the combined activity of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Thus his grammar of salvation is quite consistent, even though it is usually quite ad hoc and thus expressed in a variety of ways. For Paul, salvation is (1) predicated on the love of God, which sets it in motion; (2) effected in history through the death and resurrection of Christ the Son; and (3) actualized in the life of believers through the power of the Holy Spirit. Although Paul gives expression to this reality in any number of ways, a passage in his letter to the believers in Rome offers a typical example: the love of God that found expression historically in Christ’s dying for us (Rom. 5:8) is what the Holy Spirit has poured out in our hearts (v. 5).
Thus in one of the most revealing of these moments in his impassioned letter to the believers in Galatia, Paul speaks in identical terms, first of God having “sent his Son” (Gal. 4:4) and then of God having “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” (v. 6). In the first instance the sending was for the purpose of effecting salvation in the course of human history: Jesus was sent by the Father into human history (“born of a woman”) in the context of historic Judaism (“born under the law”) for the express purpose of human redemption. This first sending concluded with the Son’s resurrection and exaltation, the latter being assumed in a variety of ways throughout the letter. So the second sending, that of “the Spirit of the Son,” occurred postascension, and from Paul’s point of view occurred precisely to put into effect the life that Christ had secured for us by his death. This presence of the Son by means of the Spirit of the Son is what actualizes our own “sonship,” that is, our adoption as God’s children—based on the redemptive work of the Son and actualized in believers’ lives by the indwelling of the Spirit of the Son.
The net result of all of this is that in his incarnation the Son of God came into human history, bearing the divine image and thus the divine presence on earth. What the Son came to effect was the restoration of the divine image in those who would become God’s children through faith in him; what the Spirit of the Son came to effect was the actual re-creating of that image in those who through Christ and the Spirit are themselves the children of God. And what is at stake here is not one’s personal life as such but our communal life together as one people of God.
These various data push us in two directions theologically. First, as already noted, there is in Paul’s view a clear distinction between the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit whom God the Father sent into the world. Indeed, the narrowly focused data presented in the preceding chapters could perhaps be seen as part of a larger New Testament picture, where God’s activity in our redemption is expressed basically in terms of the Father and the Son. But in Paul that is not the whole picture. In the end it is the triadic experience of God and of God’s effecting our salvation, the so-called economic Trinity, that led the later church to express this divine triad in terms of the ontological Trinity, God’s very being understood as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together as one God.
Second, what is striking for Pauline Christology is the ease with which the Apostle, when speaking of the Spirit, can shift language between the Father and the Son. Nowhere does this happen in a more telling way than toward the outset of Romans 8, where the Spirit not only actualizes the work of Christ in the believer’s life but also enables the believer to live and behave in such a way as to bring glory to God, both Father and Son. Thus, near the beginning of this remarkable presentation of life in the Spirit (vv. 9–10), the presently indwelling Spirit is spoken of in successive clauses in a most casual, offhanded manner as the way both the Father and the Son, who dwell in heaven, are seen to be present on earth, now dwelling in the heart of the believer: “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ” (v. 9). To be a genuine New Testament Christian is to be genuinely trinitarian.
Indeed, if the data of our preceding chapters do not themselves definitively bear out Paul’s view of Christ as fully divine, then surely the ease with which Paul here refers to the Spirit should do so. In the space of two clauses, where the second is obviously picking up what was said in the first, the one Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 12:4; Eph. 4:4) is expressed by Paul first as “the Spirit of God [who] lives in you” and then immediately as “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom 8:9). Since for Paul there are not two Spirits, nor is there more than one God, such sentences as these are what almost demand some kind of theological and christological resolution on our part—not in the sense of our finding out God, as it were, but of our trying to comprehend, or put language to, the ultimately incomprehensible divine reality: one God in three distinct persons. Thus rather than thinking of Paul as either confused or confusing by what he affirms with these words, we can recognize that it is the role of the Spirit—as simultaneously the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ—to both emphasize the full deity of Christ and cause us in the end to think of the one God in triadic terms.
One of the more interesting phenomena regarding Paul’s letters, given that he writes mostly to gentile converts who would have been primarily polytheistic, is how seldom he puts any emphasis on the basic Jewish theological reality that there is but “one God.” The actual language occurs in only six passages (1 Cor. 8:4, 6; Gal. 3:20; Rom. 3:30; Eph. 4:6; 1 Tim. 2:5); is implied in yet another (1 Cor. 12:6), where “the same” means “one and the same,” as a follow-up sentence makes clear about the Spirit: v. 11); and is expressed once in terms of “the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17). Since this is so presuppositional for Paul and assumed to be true for his readers, the need seldom arises for him to make a point of it.
But in five of the seven occurrences of this term or concept, Paul’s affirmation of his consistent monotheism occurs in conjunction with equal emphasis on either Christ (1 Cor. 8:6; Gal. 3:20; 1 Tim. 2:5) or on Christ and the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:6; Eph. 4:6). Three of these passages (1 Cor. 8:6; 12:6; Eph. 4:6) call for special attention because, even though in each case the work of the divine dyad or triad is expressed, the emphasis in each case is on the reality of the oneness of God in the context of emphasis on the oneness of Christ and the oneness of the Spirit (if mentioned).
Along with more than twenty passages where the divine three are mentioned in their roles in regard to human redemption,3 the present passages are constant reminders that Paul’s experience of Christ and the Spirit caused him to think of the one God in terms that included the Son and the Spirit. We have had reason above to look carefully at the most important of the dyadic passages, where Paul deliberately expanded the Jewish Shema to affirm the Father as the “one God” and to include Christ the Son as “the one Lord” (1 Cor. 8:6). Here we briefly unpack the significance of three triadic passages for Pauline Christology.
1 CORINTHIANS 12:4–6
There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.
At the beginning of Paul’s long correction and instruction regarding Spirit manifestations in the gathered community (1 Cor. 12–14), some proto-trinitarian implications appear. Paul’s aim throughout the passage is to broaden the Corinthian believers’ perspective on the activity of the Spirit in their gatherings for worship (over against their apparently singular interest in speaking in tongues). His way of doing it could be considered as something of an overkill, since in this lengthy argument he offers no less than seven different listings of Spirit manifestations, no two of which are alike! However, in each case the problem child, the gift of speaking in tongues, appears either at the beginning or the end of the list. It is because of the uniqueness of the situation that the divine triad appears in this case in the order of “Spirit . . . Lord . . . God” (12:4–6), the only one of its kind in all of his preserved letters.
Thus he begins the entire discussion by noting that diversity reflects the nature of God and is therefore the true evidence of the work of the one God in their midst. The divine triad is presuppositional to the entire argument, and these opening foundational words are the more telling precisely because they are so unstudied and so freely and unselfconsciously expressed. Just as there is only one God, from whom and for whom are all things, and one Lord, through whom all things came (1 Cor. 8:6), so there is only one Spirit (12:9), through whose agency the one God is manifest among them in a variety of ways in the believing community.
2 CORINTHIANS 13:14
May the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
The remarkable grace-benediction at the end of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian believers offers all kinds of theological keys to Paul’s understanding of salvation as well as of the eternal God. Several unique features make this passage particularly important for understanding Paul. First is that the benediction is composed and intended for the occasion and thus functions precisely as do all of his other grace-benedictions, which all begin exactly this way, with “the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” This is what determines the unusual order of Christ, God, and the Spirit.
Second, this benediction summarizes the core elements of Paul’s unique passion: the gospel, with its focus on salvation in Christ, which is equally available by faith to gentile and Jew alike. That the love of God is the foundation of Paul’s view of salvation is stated with passion and clarity in several moments elsewhere in the corpus of letters (e.g., Rom. 5:1–11; 8:31–39; Eph. 1:3–14). The grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, is what gave concrete expression to that love; through Christ’s suffering and death on behalf of his loved ones, God accomplished salvation for them at one moment in human history. The participation in the Holy Spirit continually actualizes that love and grace in the life of the believer and the believing community. Indeed, this is precisely how the living God not only brings people into an intimate and abiding relationship with God, as the God of all grace, but also causes them to participate in all the benefits of that grace and salvation—that is, by indwelling them in the present with God’s own presence and thus guaranteeing their final eschatological glory.
Third, this benediction serves as our entrée into Paul’s understanding of God as such, which had been so radically affected for him by the twin realities of the death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Granted, Paul does not here assert the deity of Christ and the Spirit. What he does is more telling by far: he equates the activity of the three divine persons (to use the language of the creeds) in concert and in one prayer, with the clause about God the Father standing in second place! This suggests that Paul was at least proto-trinitarian. According to his benediction, the believer knows and experiences the one God as Father, Son, and Spirit, and when dealing with Christ and the Spirit one is dealing with God every bit as much as when dealing with the Father.
Thus, while making a fundamental distinction between God, Christ, and Spirit, this benediction also expresses in shorthand form what is found throughout Paul’s letters—namely, that salvation is the cooperative work of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
In his letter to the believers in Ephesus, written some years after his Corinthian correspondence, one finds the same combination as in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 13:14)—a creedal formulation expressed in terms of the distinguishable activities of the triune God (Eph. 4:4–6). The basis for Christian unity is the one and only God, who has been revealed through both the incarnation and the subsequent gift of the Spirit as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus the church as one body is the work of the one Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 12:13), by whom also we live our present eschatological existence in one hope, since the Spirit is the “down payment on our inheritance” (Eph. 1:13–14, my trans.). All of this has been made possible for us by our one Lord, in whom all have one faith and to which faith all have given witness through their one baptism. The source of all of these realities is the one and only God “who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:6). Again, because at issue is the work of the Spirit, “the unity of the Spirit” (v. 3), the order is the same as in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6 (Spirit, Lord, God), which works from the present, experienced reality to the foundational reality of the one God.
If the last phrase in this passage reemphasizes the unity of the one God, who is ultimately responsible for all things—past, present, and future—and subsumes the work of the Spirit and the Son under that of God the Father, the entire passage at the same time puts into creedal form the affirmation that God is experienced as a triune reality. Precisely on the basis of such experience and language the later church maintained its biblical integrity by expressing all of this in explicitly trinitarian language. And Paul’s formulations, which include the work of both Christ and the Spirit, form part of the basis for these creedal expressions.
In this passage (Eph. 4:4–6), as in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, discussed above, Paul is emphasizing rather than abandoning the basic theological reality of his tradition: that there is only one God and that the one God is God alone. But this emphasis occurs primarily in contexts where he is deliberately expanding the identity of the one God to include the “one Lord” and the “one Spirit.” And it is the recognition of this reality that led the early church to wrestle with the biblical data so profoundly.
Conclusion
As we end this study, we note that even though some Christians feel uncomfortable with the Nicene “settlement,” which spoke of Christ as being of one “substance,” or “being,” with the Father, it is not difficult to see how such language was the natural result of trying to come to terms with the biblical revelation as it existed on predominantly Greek soil. What seems to be certain from the Pauline data is the inevitability of speaking of God at least in terms of the economic Trinity: God revealed to us as Father, Son, and Spirit in the work of our salvation.
Anything less than this twofold affirmation would seem to be the result of our own modern presuppositions and limited human reasoning rather than learning from God’s own self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it is ours to let God be God and to regularly fall on our faces, as it were, and worship with praise and thanksgiving the eternal One who should so care for the likes of us fallen ones. And so I conclude by offering thanks to God in my historical denominational way: Hallelujah! Eternal praises be to the one and only God!
For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live, and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (1 Cor. 8:6)
For you know the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. (2 Cor. 8:9)
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. (Gal. 4:4)
For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. (Rom. 8:3)
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. (Col. 2:9)
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:6–8)
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. (1 Tim. 1:15)
This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. (2 Tim. 1:9–10)
1. For a fuller discussion of these matters, see my books God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994]) and Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996]).
2. Here, as elsewhere, “sonship” clearly includes men and women alike as God’s children.
3. In God’s Empowering Presence, I refer to this as “soteriological Trinitarianism” and include a summarizing list of these passages (841–42).