CHAPTER 6
TRINITARIAN EXEGESIS
We believe God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because Scripture bears witness to the deeper self-revelation of the one God in the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity must arise from Scripture if it is to be affirmed by the church. Although the textual negotiations by which dogmatics identifies the Trinitarian revelation attested in Scripture have undergone a far-reaching change in recent centuries, the fundamental task is what it has always been: to discern the triunity of God in the biblical witness.
Is the Trinity in the Bible? It is always tempting to dispatch the question with the brief answer: the word is not there, but the idea is. Any concordance proves the first claim; any catechism the second.1 Nevertheless, profound and perennial issues are at stake in the question, because the church has always confessed the doctrine of the Trinity as something to be believed on the grounds of revelation alone as recorded in Scripture alone. The church should continue to do so. But the last few centuries of development in theology, hermeneutics, and biblical studies have brought the old dogma into a new context. The biblical demonstration of the Trinity, accordingly, has taken on new forms and adopted new strategies in the modern period. Some of these are in line with the dogmatic principles we have rehearsed so far, while others need to be drawn into alignment and consolidated. Before turning directly to the Trinitarian witness of Scripture, therefore, this chapter surveys what the new situation means for the prospects of biblical Trinitarianism.
AGRAPHON: UNWRITTEN TRINITARIANISM
Gregory Nazianzus found this question of whether the doctrine of the Trinity was explicitly in Scripture to be provocative enough to warrant serious (if not extended) attention. At the conclusion of his Five Theological Orations, he addresses the distinction between what is actually stated in Scripture and what must be admitted to be agraphon: not written. In that context, Nazianzus is specifically arguing against the pneumatomachian objection that there is not enough biblical evidence for the deity of the Spirit to warrant calling the Spirit “God.” His response is not that there is any other possible source of knowledge about the deity of the Spirit (tradition, mystical illumination, pure reason, etc.), but rather that a narrowly literal approach to Scripture is unable to detect all that Scripture teaches. To this end, he presents a little didactic lecture on words, things, and meanings, concluding that Scripture can mean things that it does not explicitly formulate. “Why are you so dreadfully servile to the letter . . . following the syllables while you let the realities go?” he asks. Such syllable-mongering would not even be able to support arithmetical reasoning, he argues. “Supposing you mention ‘twice five’ or ‘twice seven’ and I infer from your words ‘ten’ or ‘fourteen . . .’ would you allege that I was talking rubbish? How could I be? I am saying what you said.”2
Nazianzus’s use of a numerical example is fruitful beyond his immediate purpose. Although he does not make the connection, part of the question about whether the doctrine of the Trinity is in the Bible is the question of whether the number three is in the Bible with reference to divine things. Throughout these theological orations, Nazianzus explicates “the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19), which he summarizes as a threefold name. He frequently uses the word triad in reference to God, but also in reference to the threeness in the words of the risen Lord as he gave the baptismal command. Triad simply is Greek for threeness, just as thrynnysse is Anglo-Saxon3 and trinitas is Latin for threeness. Any reader of Matthew 28:19 must admit there is threeness, or trinity, in the text. The substantive question, of course, is what kind of threeness is envisioned. Subtrinitarian answers would include three titles, three modes of divine being, three manifestations, three roles, three people, three gods, three ways of talking about one God, and so on. But baptism in the name of one Father, one Son, and one Holy Spirit must signify three somethings, which puts threeness in the text, though not the word threeness. At the first level of analysis, then, Trinity is in Scripture as a very modest summarizing statement about how many names are to be counted in the one baptismal name in Matthew 28:19. This simple counting is in itself not much of a foothold for properly Trinitarian theology, which sees there the names of three coeternal and coequal persons related by processions revealed in the missions. But as certainly as twice seven is fourteen, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are related in Scripture as a threeness of some kind, though the word (threeness, thrynnysse, triad, trinitas) is agraphon. Only an exegesis “dreadfully servile to the letter,” one content with “following the syllables” while letting the realities go, would recoil from the conclusion. When Scripture lists the persons and we reply that there are three (perhaps even adding that these three are one), we are saying to Scripture, “I am saying what you said.”
Some elements of Trinitarian theology, therefore, are neither explicit in the words of Scripture nor ought to be expected to be. If the charge of agraphon Trinitarianism was brought forward as a defeater, Nazianzus treated it as no such thing. His response is echoed fifteen hundred years later in B. B. Warfield’s comments on the same subject. Writing the “Trinity” entry in the 1915 International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Warfield freely admitted that “the term ‘Trinity’ is not a biblical term”—a rather cheeky opening line for the “Trinity entry” in a Bible encyclopedia.4 But Warfield laid out the range of doctrinal commitments contained in fully elaborated Trinitarianism (one God in three persons who are coequal but distinct) and said that the terms of that doctrine were not set forth in the words of Scripture. Instead, Warfield argued, “a doctrine so defined can be spoken of as a biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is Scripture. And the definition of a biblical doctrine in such unbiblical language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.”5
If “the sense of Scripture is Scripture,” there need be no dichotomy between what the Bible says and what it means. But where a distinction exists, there may also exist the logical possibility of having one without the other. This is what Warfield posits: that it is possible to repeat the words of Scripture while departing from its own meaning, and conversely that it is possible to prescind from the words precisely in order to cleave to the meaning more securely. If forced to choose, the theologian would have to choose the truth of Scripture rather than the words of Scripture.6
Yet Trinitarian theology could not actually advance along some hypothetical path that departed from the actual words in the text of Scripture. Theology should at least keep itself on a short tether connecting itself to the words of Scripture. Karl Barth gave an eloquent account of the attitude appropriate for the preacher, and mutatis mutandis, it applies also to the theologian. “The right attitude,” he said in his lectures on homiletics, “is that of one who is not concerned with self but with something else, who is so caught up . . . that there is no time for other things.” Barth is emphasizing that the locus of attention should be the word of God rather than our own formulations; the good preacher will be asking, “What does it say?” rather than, “What should I say?” When the attention is properly fixed on the words of Scripture, “the sermon will be like the involuntary lip movement of one who is reading with great care, attention, and surprise, more following the letters than reading in the usual sense, all eyes, totally claimed.”7 The portrayal has not usually seemed flattering to preachers, let alone theologians, who enjoy the satisfactions of careful craftsmanship as much as any worker does, and who prefer not to think of their hard-earned formulations as an accidental by-product of rapt attention (“involuntary lip movement!”). And it is tempting to think these directions are for students at an early stage of development, a stage that mature theologians have so transcended that we can now multitask by putting one eye on Scripture and the other on the form of our own statements. But Barth was describing the attitude, not the thought process, of the one who ministers the word of God. And he was presenting a simile, not prescribing a method. The sermon, or the theology, will not be involuntary lip movement; it will be like it.
When Barth turns from homiletics in general to an actual dogmatics of the Trinity, he explicitly insists on the need for intelligent paraphrase. The Father’s own revelation in Christ through the Spirit is the text we focus on, while our theological formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the commentary we speak. Our theological formulation “translates and exegetes the text. And this means, for example, that it makes use of other concepts besides those in the original. The result is that it does not just repeat what is there. To explain what is there, it sets something new over against what is there.”8 Barth always treated the work of theology as honest labor in the field of the humanities. As such, it requires creativity and innovation and is subject to assessment and peer review. None of that is denied when we take the further step of noting theology’s peculiar character as a response to divine revelation.
TRINITY BETWEEN SOUND AND SENSE
Theology, therefore, does not do its work by simply repeating the words of Scripture. It answers back with what it hears there, and in giving its answer, theology may be heard making any number of noises not found in the text. This answering back is crucial to the theological task. It is what shows that something more than memorization of syllables is happening. It is what shows that one theologian has understood rightly and another has not. Anyone who is not willing to take the risks of translation, paraphrase, metaphrase, summary, and explanation has not yet crossed the threshold of theological speech. “It is one thing,” said Francis Turretin, for a doctrine “to be in Scripture according to sound (quoad sonum) and syllables, or formally and in the abstract; and another to be in Scripture according to meaning (quoad sensum) and according to the thing signified (rem significatam), or materially and in the concrete.”9
Turretin does not mean there is a dichotomy between the two ways for a truth “to be in Scripture,” as if we always had to choose between sonum and sensum, formal and material. All doctrines must have some purchase on the text quoad sonum, even if they must then be formulated using other words which are themselves chosen and employed quoad sensum. The example Turretin uses is the term theology itself. It is not a Bible word; Turretin admits it is not in Scripture according to sound, but only according to sense. Nevertheless the component parts are found in Scripture, and are even brought into relation several times (Turretin cites “logos tou theou” and “logia tou theou” from Rom 3:2; 1 Pet 4:10; Heb 5:12). Furthermore, Scripture uses a number of other terms to indicate something like theology: teaching, the form of sound doctrine, the full counsel of God, and so on. Minting the word theology (or appropriating it from extrabiblical Greek) is a matter of listening actively to Scripture and saying back what we understand by what we are hearing.10
Though the nature of theology itself is at stake here, the term we are asking about is not theology but Trinity. Is it biblical to speak of the Trinity? When we use this word, are we speaking quoad sonum or quoad sensum? While the truth of Scripture is Scripture, so are the words. Theological usage must make the leap from direct biblical language to its own helpful vocabulary. It must move from “the language of Canaan” to another tongue, spawning a set of generalizations and paraphrases, associative linkages and metaleptic allusions, new verbal tags, glosses, and clusters. But the leap from one vocabulary to the other ought to be a short one, and the latter vocabulary ought to signal its dependence on the former with enough clarity to keep the next generation’s language-learners from forgetting what all these terms indicate.11 Theology, with its terminological specifying, consistent systematizing, and logical sequencing, does not make an improvement on Scripture, as if perfecting it somehow, or succeeding in saying what Scripture was unsuccessfully trying to say. It is semiotically and structurally dependent on the words of Scripture and ought to make this evident.
In the way it speaks, theology as a whole and Trinitarian theology in particular occupies a place between sonum and sensum, in regular contact with both. It shares something of the character that French poet Paul Valéry attributed to poetry in his influential aphorism: “The poem is a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.”12 Trinitarian theology cultivates both the sound of Scripture’s own language and the sense of those words, given new articulation by new interpreters. As a result, it ought to be compounded of both, making use of Scripture’s own infallible language, as well as the fallible language of our best attempts to analyze what Scripture says. Barth described the utterly creaturely, purely responsive character of the doctrine in strong terms: “The doctrine of the Trinity is a work of the Church, a record of its understanding of the statement or of its object, a record of its knowledge of God or of its battle against error and on behalf of the objectivity of its proclamation, a record of its theology and to that degree of its faith, and only to that extent, only indirectly, a record of revelation.”13
But he also acknowledged the fact that any adequate statement of the doctrine of the Trinity would include within itself the actual words of the biblical witness, sometimes indirectly by allusion and sometimes by explication of the concepts: “The text of the doctrine of the Trinity is at every point related to texts in the biblical witness to revelation. It also contains certain concepts taken from this text. But it does this in the way an interpretation does.”14 The central instance of this juxtaposition of text and interpretation is the mission-procession schema, and the most concrete guarantee of it is the verbal-propositional character of biblical revelation. These two principles are woven throughout the church’s doctrine of the Trinity as the material and formal principles of Trinitarianism respectively: the missions-processions themselves are the material, and the divine explanation of those missions-processions is the formal. From both angles, we have something given by God and something achieved by way of human interpretive response.
THE SHIFTING FOUNDATION OF BIBLICAL TRINITARIANISM
Christians have always claimed they got the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible itself. While acknowledging they had rendered the doctrine more explicit, and also admitting they had manufactured a set of extrabiblical terms to help them articulate it with greater clarity and conciseness, they insisted the reason they believed in the Trinity is that they found it in Scripture. In some periods of theological history, it may have seemed that most of the work to be done was the work of elaborating the metaphysical implications of the revealed doctrine, or of illustrating the principles involved, or of extending the analogical footholds for the belief. But in our own time, it has become crucial for Trinitarian theology to demonstrate as directly as possible that it is biblical. The doctrine of the triune God must be known to be biblical and shown to be biblical. We cannot settle for claiming the doctrine merely harmonizes in some way with other biblical themes. If the suspicion has arisen that there are many ways of stating the gist of what is in Scripture, it may be tempting to present Trinitarianism as one of many possible legitimate trajectories that can be seen as emerging from the fullness of hermeneutical possibilities. We might win acceptance for Trinitarian theology as something relatively unobjectionable precisely because we present it as nonmandatory and contingent, a kind of semi-playful option among many, though graced with the favor of deep tradition. The time for these softer demonstrations and more allusive performances is not now. Again, in cultures marked by faith and docility toward the church’s teaching, it may have been possible to rest the burden of proof on the church’s tradition. But tradition was always a temporary resting station, a placeholder for revelation and the authority of Scripture. In contemporary intellectual culture, the full evidential weight of Christian faith in the triune God must fall on Scripture. If the doctrine is to thrive and serve its proper function in the Christian doctrinal ecosphere, it must be on the basis of Scripture. An adventurous theological critic once posed the question, “Has Christianity a revelation?”15 We might say the question for our age is, “Has Christianity a revelation of the Trinity in Scripture?”
Although there has been no change in the material content of the doctrine of the Trinity, the epochal shifts in biblical interpretation in the modern period have greatly altered the available arguments for Trinitarianism. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity stands today at a point of crisis with regard to its ability to demonstrate its exegetical foundation. Theologians once approached this doctrine with a host of biblical proofs, but one by one, many of those venerable old arguments have been removed from the realm of plausibility. The steady march of grammatical-historical exegesis has tended in the direction of depleting Trinitarianism’s access to its traditional equipment, until a prominent feature of the current era is the growing unpersuasiveness and untenability of the traditional proof texts that were used to establish and demonstrate the doctrine. “Most theologians no longer expect to find in the New Testament a formal Trinitarianism, only an elemental Trinitarianism,”16 remarked conservative Jesuit theologian Edmund Fortman in 1972. The heightened historical consciousness of modern scholars has made the very idea that Trinitarian theology has a foothold in the documents of the New Testament seem laughable: “Whatever Jesus did or said in his earthly ministry,” wrote R. P. C. Hanson in 1985, “he did not walk the lanes of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem laying down direct unmodified Trinitarian doctrine.”17 The presupposition has become widespread that the doctrine of the Trinity is a local phenomenon in the realm of systematic theology, with no provenance in the territory of New Testament scholarship. So deep has this presupposition sunk into the practices of the field that Ulrich Mauser could write in 1990, “The historically trained New Testament scholar will today proceed with the task of interpretation without wasting a minute on the suspicion that the Trinitarian confessions of later centuries might be rooted in the New Testament itself, and that the Trinitarian creeds might continue to function as valuable hermeneutical signposts for a modern understanding.”18
We may succeed in countering any particular taunt and in raising objections to the hardening of categories that attends the overwhelming consensus of the guild. Nevertheless, a great deal of the assured results of modern scholarship in this area simply must be accepted, even when the result is the partial removal of the traditional way of demonstrating the exegetical foundation of Trinitarian theology. A complete catalogue of examples would approach a survey of the entire discipline of biblical studies in its bearing on the doctrine of the Trinity.19 Perhaps no development in biblical studies has left the foundation of Trinitarianism unaffected, partly because the long Christian exegetical tradition had at various times delighted to find the Trinity in nearly every layer and every section of Scripture. If the doctrine of the Trinity had come to be at home in every verse of the Bible, it was more or less implicated in revisionist approaches to every verse.
At any rate, the overall trend of sober historical-grammatical labors has been toward the gradual removal of the Trinitarian implications of passage after passage. Some of these proof texts evaporated because they were, in fact, never anything but Trinitarian mirages: 1 John 5:7’s “three that bear witness in heaven,” for example, withered away at the first touch of “the lower criticism,” textual criticism. By overwhelming consensus, the comma johanneum is judged not to have been in the original manuscript, and therefore it should not be used as biblical support for Trinitarian theology, though it has some value as early Christian commentary on John’s letter. The discarding of the Johannine comma is perhaps the clearest example of the helpful, clarifying, and destructive work of biblical scholarship. Even the fustiest traditionalists gladly admit that this text has been reassigned to its proper place in the margins of our Bibles.20 Nor is this cutting-edge research; it was seen and affirmed in the eighteenth century and disseminated in the early nineteenth. Bishop Thomas Burgess (1756–1837) not only waved aside the Johannine comma but also lamented the fact that retrograde attempts to prove the Trinity by it had the opposite effect. “The doctrine of the Trinity I really believe,” he assured his readers, asserting that Socinian arguments against the doctrine could be “evidently overthrowne, though not by this text, yet by plaine Scripture-proofes.” Burgess generalized to a broader principle:
I could heartily wish that orthodox men would not build good conclusions upon bad principles, nor lie the weight of such great positions on such weak proofes; for a bad defence makes a good cause suspected; and when the adversary finds the premise false (as the Socinians often doe) they are soe far from being confuted, that they are confirmed in their errors, because noe better are brought.21
Burgess’s warning is perhaps even more appropriate now than when he wrote it, because now the complex clashes of premodern, modern, and postmodern modes of interpretation have left the field of Trinitarian exegesis in extensive disarray. Many arguments that once seemed foundational to Trinitarianism no longer apply.
Trinitarian theology has frequently conducted itself with exegetical candor and, on the academic side at least, has shown an openness to criticism and an eagerness to be instructed by fresh work in biblical studies. This candor has been interpreted as weakness and confusion by antitrinitarian writers, whose work is an interesting mirror in which to regard the transformation we are describing. Unitarian John Wilson published in 1845 The Concessions of Trinitarians, citing nearly six hundred pages of instances where scholars committed to the doctrine of the Trinity nevertheless overturned Trinitarian readings of various biblical passages.22 But the polemical mirror is a distorting one, not least because it assumes that Trinitarianism is an inherited dogma foisted on Scripture or read back into it by hermeneutical force, and that orthodox interpretation requires a “dogmatizing eisegesis rather than exegesis.”23 In fact, there is abundant evidence in early modern Trinitarianism of a desire to examine every text on its own terms. In the sixteenth century, Cardinal Cajetan famously departed from conventional exegetical judgments about a range of Trinitarian proof texts such as messianic psalms.24 Partly because of his similarly nontrinitarian interpretations of these same psalms, John Calvin even developed an undeserved reputation for being an antitrinitarian exegete.25 Certainly he refused to insert the doctrine of the Trinity into every place it had traditionally been found. In showing this sort of restraint, Cajetan, Calvin, and a host of later theological interpreters of Scripture have only been putting into modern practice the ancient principle articulated by the fifth-century Isidore of Pelusium: “If ye strive with violence to draw and apply those texts to Christ which apparently pertain not to him, we shall gain nothing but this, to make all the places that are spoken of him suspected; and so discredit the strength of other testimonies.”26
Was early modern Trinitarian exegesis basically in continuity or discontinuity with premodern conventions? This is the sort of question Richard Muller has traced carefully with regard to post-Reformation Reformed theology. Although he notes the “alteration of patterns of interpretation away from the patristic and medieval patterns that had initially yielded the doctrine of the Trinity and given it a vocabulary consistent with traditional philosophical usage,”27 he also detects a clear intention on the part of the Protestant scholastics to maintain the traditional doctrine of the Trinity on a biblical basis more solid than ever. Their commitment to the authority of Scripture combined fruitfully with their commitment to Trinitarianism; either commitment without the other would, of course, have been disastrous for the continuous identity of Christian doctrine. “The orthodox task of building the primary justification of the doctrine of the Trinity on exegesis was made more difficult” by conflict with Socinian exegesis, which was expelled from the churches but increasingly found its way into the academy. Muller notes that “the orthodox found themselves in the very difficult position of arguing a traditional view of the Trinity against an antitrinitarian exegesis that appeared, in a few instances, to represent the results of text criticism and, in a few other instances, to represent a literal exegesis of text over against an older allegorism or typological reading.”28 The early modern disputation of the exegetical basis of Trinitarianism was a battle on multiple fronts.
THE DIFFICULT TASK OF FORGETTING TRINITARIAN EXEGESIS
The sifting and rearranging of traditional Trinitarian exegesis, as early modern theology maintained essential continuity with premodern doctrine, could be told as a fairly peaceful story. Perhaps a gardening metaphor could be used, with disturbances no more traumatic than the horticultural: pruning, weeding, irrigating, and turning over the soil. But as Muller shows, what could have been a relatively straightforward readjustment of the patterns of appealing to Scripture for proof of the Trinity was greatly complicated by the rise of militant antitrinitarian exegesis. The broadly Socinian style of interpretation and many of its conclusions have become such central conditions of modern Bible interpretation that it is easy to forget how much work and argument it took to establish them. The centuries-old patterns of traditional Trinitarian exegesis did not fall away; they were pushed. And they required considerable pushing not only to overcome the inertial state of tradition. The reason the older patterns of Trinitarian demonstration stayed in place so stubbornly was that, for all their hermeneutical naiveté and inadequacy in the details, they were fundamentally correct as apprehensions of the total witness of Scripture. Being right about something as comprehensive as the holistic meaning of God’s self-revelation in the sendings of the Son and the Spirit, the great tradition of Trinitarian interpretation could survive a few thousand negligible errors, the occasional illegitimate totality transfer, and some premature fusion of horizons.29 We might say the Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible flourished because it is true, while the antitrinitarian interpretation, with all its demonstrable rigor, is false.30
When the Socinian movement arose in the sixteenth century, the churches rejected its theology as being a late revival of the same old antitrinitarian heresies that had circulated since the fourth century. But Socinianism was different from earlier varieties of antitrinitarianism in important ways. As a development of early modern thought, it was more rationalist, more literalist, and more committed to the liberationist task of breaking ecclesial authority than any of the ancient heretics could have been. It was also, as a movement of biblical criticism, more hermeneutically self-aware. As Klaus Scholder has argued, “Socinian criticism was aimed less at the content of dogma than at its presuppositions. And to the degree that the alteration to these presuppositions penetrated consciousness generally, the danger and influence of Socinian ideas increased.”31 The Socinians were not just finding different doctrines in the Bible; they were generating entirely new ways of reading the Bible.
The alternative approaches to the Bible scouted out by the Socinians were at length perfected by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), a German writer whose biblical criticism, published posthumously (and at first, anonymously), was a major event in Enlightenment biblical criticism.32 From this distance, what stands out most prominently about Reimarus’s criticism is the way it drove a wedge between Jesus and the apostles. According to Reimarus, Jesus was an admirable teacher who, in general, taught and practiced what Reimarus taught and practiced. The apostles, on the other hand, overlaid his simple message with a mess of metaphysics, church authority, and priestcraft. The distinction makes all the difference: “I cannot avoid revealing a common error of Christians who imagine because of the confusion of the teaching of the apostles with Jesus’ teaching that the latter’s purpose in his role of teacher was to reveal certain articles of faith and mysteries that were in part new and unknown, thus establishing a new system of religion.”33
In fact, however, what Jesus actually taught was not “articles of faith and mysteries,” but “nothing more than purely moral duties, a true love of God and of one’s neighbor.”34
Reimarus is very clear about the reason for driving a wedge between Jesus and the apostles. His target is the “main articles and mysteries of the Christian faith,” that is, “the doctrine of the trinity of persons in God and the doctrine of the work of salvation through Jesus as the Son of God and God-man.” Of course, Reimarus knows that terms like “trinity of persons” or “God-man” are not to be found in the mouth of Jesus. What he undertakes to explain are the basic biblical terms that orthodoxy has misconstrued. He explains “in what sense [ Jesus] is called Son of God, what the Holy Spirit signifies, and finally, what it means when Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are joined together during baptism.”35 In each case, Reimarus has to project a meaning that offers a clear alternative to the inherited dogmatic meaning.
What does “Son of God” mean? Reimarus declares that it means simply “loved by God,” and since Jesus was especially that, Jesus was especially the Son of God. “Son of God” language should always signify, at its fundamental level, “loved by God” in Scripture:
This meaning is so obvious that any other interpretation is unscriptural, new, and unprecedented if it makes the Son of God a person whom God begot out of God’s being in eternity, and who in turn with the Father who begot him produces yet a third divine person. The Old Testament, the Jews, the evangelists, do not know such a Son of God, and Jesus himself does not present himself as such; it is, rather, the apostles who first sought something greater in this term.36
What led the apostles to seek “something greater” in the biblical language? Reimarus’s answer is a pervasive demystification of biblical language, which he finds quaintly oriental. It is characteristic of the Eastern mind that it expresses itself in grand and poetic ways that seize the imagination. This grandiloquent Jewish manner of talking must be borne in mind, says Reimarus, or later interpreters will systematically misinterpret the Bible’s expressions, making metaphysics of what was originally only an ancient culture’s hyperbolic manner of speech:
How easily, from ignorance of the Jewish expressions, thought, and allegories, one can be misled into a completely unfounded interpretation and system. For one can be certain of this much: the Hebraic expressions of the Jews sound swollen and bombastic in the Oriental manner, and one might marvel at what great things seem to be hidden beneath them, but they always mean less than the words seem to imply. So one must learn to divest and strip them of their magnificence; then he will at last understand their speech correctly, and the history of the ideas that prevailed among the Jews will confirm that we have hit upon their meaning.37
Reimarus subjects all the relevant language to the same stripping and divestment, showing that it means less than it seems to. He takes apart the term “Holy Spirit” into its component parts: “Spirit” points to special talents and aptitudes of the human spirit; “Holy” indicates their origin in God. When Reimarus reassembles all these trimmed-down linguistic parts, the results are similarly unspectacular. At the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, the descent of the Holy Spirit and the voice from heaven saying “this is my beloved son” signify “nothing more than Jesus’ extraordinary spirit or gifts imparted to him by heaven.”38
What stands out in the example of Reimarus’s pioneering work is how difficult a task he has set for himself. He has to devise explanations, practice them, and put them in place so plausibly that when a believer turns to Matthew 28 and reads, “Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” his readers will not see the Trinity right in front of them. If they have learned their Reimarus lexicon properly, they will instantly translate that formula into a command to baptize converts in the name of the one God, who Jesus respects so much he calls him “Father,” and in the name of the man who is especially beloved by God, and the unique charisma that God gave that man.39 Taking up a New Testament that seemed to bristle with Trinitarian indicators on every page and at every level of analysis, he labored to disenchant it. Readers who sometimes wish the elements of Trinitarian theology were clearer and more numerous in the New Testament may take courage from considering it from Reimarus’s antitrinitarian angle: how full of difficulties this text is for him, how much of it needs explaining away, how brimming it is with passages that might lead his readers back into the ruts of Trinitarian theology.
Reimarus’s views were an international shock to his era. Today, while much of his exegesis is dated, and almost none of it rises to the standards of scholarly argument in the guild, many of his conclusions have nevertheless become utterly commonplace in academic biblical studies. Francis Watson has noted “the antipathy towards the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation which the historical-critical tradition has inherited from its Socinian roots.”40 Many of the major strategic decisions about how to read the Bible in the academy—decisions that still guide the field of academic biblical studies today—were made early in the Enlightenment period and were made by antitrinitarians motivated by their unorthodox doctrinal commitments. The tools and techniques themselves—atomizing, dissecting, deflating, culturally locating—may be neutral enough to be used in a wide range of investigations. Competent scholars today routinely use some combination of them in studies that tend to support Trinitarian doctrine rather than some competing doctrine of God. But as Helmut Thielicke once remarked, “We need to remember that Biblical Criticism emerged in the form of a mortal attack, not merely on the mythical clothing of biblical faith, or on the excesses of popular piety, but more radically on the Christian message itself.”41 It takes a lot of work to remove all traces of the Trinity from the New Testament.
One of the principal tactics Reimarus used was to break apart the larger unities of Scripture, the better to handle the discrete parts. For him, everything depended on the untrustworthiness of the disciples of Jesus. Reimarus used their incomprehension of the Old Testament to separate the two Testaments from each other; he used their metaphysical perversion of the teaching of Jesus to fracture the New Testament between gospels and epistles. This technique of dissolution is vital for obscuring the Trinity. We have argued above in chapter 4, and will show again in the next section of this chapter, that a crucial element of renewing Trinitarian exegesis is to reverse that process and restore the connections among the various parts of Scripture.
In his classic 1915 essay on the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, B. B. Warfield wrote:
The doctrine of the Trinity lies in Scripture in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view. Or, to speak without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in formulated definition, but in fragmentary allusions; when we assembled the disjecta membra into their organic unity, we are not passing from Scripture, but entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture.42
Warfield’s image of assembling scattered parts into organic unity, or of crystallizing something that has been dissolved, is ambiguous. It could suggest that a lost unity is being restored, or that a new unity is being achieved, or that a concealed unity is being understood. We might conceive of the task of Trinitarian theology as getting the right perspective on the biblical evidence to see its unity, or we might conceive of the task as assembling the right structure from a set of materials. What is at stake is not so much the connotations about the theologian’s attitude (viewing seems more reverent than building) as the indication of what kind of argument the theologian will undertake. In either case, Trinitarian theology will be formulating statements that allow for “entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture.” In this book, we are mainly seeking to give dogmatic guidelines for Trinitarian exegesis, which is more a matter of viewing biblical Trinitarianism from the right angle, in the right light, at the right distance. We are explaining the “fragmentary allusions” as glimpses of a bigger picture. To this end, we are retrieving some classical dogmatic themes on the one hand, and inquiring after larger structures of the Bible’s own meaning-making on the other hand.
But there is also a venerable tradition of assembling the case for the doctrine of the Trinity in a constructive move, in which the component parts of the doctrine are identified and assembled. This piecemeal proof is a deeply traditional mode of demonstration. Those who practice it announce in advance the basic elements of the doctrine and then prove each of the various elements seriatim. This way of proceeding, while it can be carried out in a disjointed and pedestrian way (here a verse, there a verse), does not have to be. In fact, it is in one particular way congenial to the character of Trinitarian revelation, since the various propositions of the doctrine of the Trinity are not assembled thematically in any single passage of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity is a vast doctrinal complex containing numerous ideas, summarizing vast stretches of biblical revelation, integrating them, and holding them together so they can be taken in at one mental glance. For this reason, it will always be appropriate to demonstrate, in serial fashion, that the Son is divine, then that the Spirit is a distinct person, then that they are not the Father, and to conclude by reestablishing that there is only one God. These arguments then combine to yield a set of propositions that are reconciled with each other, resulting in a doctrine of one God in three persons. There is a wide range of variations in its popular use. Sometimes it is presented with as few as three points (one God, each person divine, persons not interchangeable) and sometimes with as many as nine (enumerating each relation by specifying that the Father is God and the Son is God but the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Spirit, etc.).
An admirable instance of the piecemeal proof is the way Augustus Hopkins Strong (1836–1921) arranges the treatment of the Trinity in his 1907 Systematic Theology.43 He begins his fifty-page discussion by summarizing the doctrine in six statements:
1. In Scripture there are three who are recognized as God.
2. These three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to conceive of them as distinct persons.
3. This tripersonality of the divine nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal.
4. This tripersonality is not tritheism, for while there are three persons, there is but one essence.
5. The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are equal.
6. Inscrutable yet not self-contradictory, this doctrine furnishes the key to all other doctrines.
“These statements,” he says, “we proceed now to prove and to elucidate.”44 Under each heading, Strong brings forth biblical evidence to demonstrate its truth, and material from the history of theology by way of amplification. The result is a teaching on the Trinity that is clear, concise, and comprehensive, especially apt for classroom use.45
For these reasons, the piecemeal proof is probably the most common way of teaching the doctrine of the Trinity at the popular level today. This is no small matter, because after worship, catechesis (rather than evangelism, apologetics, or cultural analysis) is the chief end that the doctrine of the Trinity serves in the Christian church. Whatever academic theologians may be doing, the future health of the doctrine of the Trinity is, humanly speaking, in the hands of catechists. If they are all using variations of the piecemeal proof, its explicit and implicit lessons will determine the way Christians approach the doctrine of the Trinity. Theological instruction on the Trinity in the standard textbooks of evangelical systematic theology tends in this direction: the doctrine of the Trinity emerges for its readers as the product of rightly combining the scattered propositional evidence. The impression of proof texting is inescapable, and when the procedure feels arid, it provokes among evangelical Christians a craving for a few extra paragraphs about “Why This Doctrine Really Matters at All.” That is to say, the piecemeal proof does not seem to carry its own sense of relevance along with it and may contribute to a heightened demand for personal or social application.
If we are keeping a watchful eye out for the eternal relations of origin, it may be the case that the piecemeal proof has a built-in tendency to de-emphasize them. Strong’s Systematic Theology, for example, does include instruction about the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit, but this instruction appears as a subpoint to statement 5, on the equality of the three persons. “Generation and procession,” he says, are “consistent with equality.”46 There follow several pages on eternal generation, well-argued though mostly double-negative in form: it is not creation, not a commencement of existence, not an act of will, not analogous to physical derivation. We would probably be exercising undue suspicion to charge Strong with underemphasizing the relations of origin by folding them into his system in this way. At most, we might hazard the warning that the relations of origin do not play a structural role in Strong’s Trinitarianism, or rather that their substantive structural role is concealed by the pedagogical arrangement of the material. Students who learn their Trinitarianism from Strong’s six statements will eventually have questions that only further reflection on missions and processions can answer.
Something has gone wrong, however, when B. B. Warfield makes a briefer use of the piecemeal proof in his influential 1915 article quoted above. Nestled between fine statements of the pervasive yet indirect character of Trinitarian truths in Scripture, Warfield says that “when we have said these three things then—that there is but one God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person—we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness.”47 Warfield’s omission of the relations of origin in a statement that manifests doctrinal “completeness” might be attributed to oversimplification. In fact, however, Warfield’s abbreviated piecemeal proof is the first signal he gives his readers that he is not enthusiastic about the idea of relations of origin; he makes his reservations more explicit before he is done. The great failing of this otherwise helpful article is its weak treatment of the processions, driven by a fear of subordination.48 Warfield’s misstep is not dictated by his use of the piecemeal proof, though. He could have added more points. In fact, even the three points he selects are in themselves absolutely unobjectionable. Warfield’s points are a kind of compression of the Athanasian Creed.49 But the Athanasian Creed goes on to call God the Father “neither created, nor begotten,” the Son begotten, and the Holy Spirit “neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.” This is precisely the language Warfield avoids. As a result, his claim of completeness is compromised, since the doctrine of the Trinity stripped of the eternal processions is brittle and abstract.
Warfield’s weakness on the doctrine of eternal processions came from motivations more substantive than the pedagogical device he used to communicate them. There is no reason the piecemeal proof cannot be used to organize a more robust Trinitarian theology around the divine processions. However, it is worth remembering that the piecemeal proof has a naturally fragmentary tendency; its strength is in the way it breaks a larger complex down into discrete parts. As a result, its form colludes with the spirit of the modern age in a way that does not fully support the health of Trinitarian theology. Emphasizing one subtopic at a time, it can only with difficulty climb back up to the level of the comprehensive judgment necessary to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity. It should be supplemented with other strategies that help to reinstate the large, comprehensive structures of meaning. These are needed to indicate how the parts should be assembled. The doctrine of the Trinity requires such comprehensive patterns of thought and does not thrive unless those patterns are cultivated. Trinitarianism was at its lowest ebb in modern theology when it was thought to stand or fall with a series of individual arguments, or even to await the conclusions drawn from the inductive gathering of numerous exegetical fragments.50 A case in point is the Anglican philosopher and priest Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), whose 1712 book The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity undertook an exhaustive investigation of every verse of Scripture that provides evidence for Trinitarianism. Clarke printed and commented on these verses in his massive book and gathered them under the headings of fifty-five propositions constitutive of his construal of scriptural Trinitarianism. This method, though bearing some resemblance to earlier projects, was characteristically modernist: it was the kind of inductive approach one would expect from a philosophical member of Newton’s circle during the period of the exhilarating rise and formulation of modern science. Clarke’s approach to the Trinity is an instance of an early modern tendency to press the methods of the natural sciences into service in every field, including fields where they are not methodologically appropriate. The doctrine of the Trinity is a particularly integral doctrine that cannot be formulated in the fragmentarily inductive way Clarke or other critical moderns attempted. Orthodox theologians of the period tended to be highly impressed by his method, though chary of his conclusions.51 They should have been more alert to the bias built into his method. Anybody making use of the piecemeal proof ought to be vigilant about communicating the larger relational structures that bind together the individual theses of Trinitarianism.
INSIGHT FOR THE RECONSTRUCTIVE TASK
The service that systematic theology can provide in the present state of disorder is not to do the exegesis itself, nor to dictate in advance what the exegetes are required to find. The lines of authority in the shared, interdisciplinary task of Christian theology do not run in that direction, nor with that directness. But the theologian can draw attention to the larger structures within which the exegetical laborers might do their skillful work. By offering dogmatic guidelines for Trinitarian exegesis, this book intends to highlight where meaningful work is to be done by qualified investigators. It is these larger structures that make sense of the individual bits of information that go into the doctrine of the Trinity. We have already seen how a Christian doctrine about revelation must be formed and normed by the central facts that constitute revelation itself, the communicative missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. We took care not to exclude verbal revelation from the total matrix of God’s communicative strategies, so we would not need to extract the entire doctrine from mute divine acts. We have construed the entire canon of Scripture as bound up in a single narrative unity, and taken the further step of acknowledging that unified witness as an element of God’s economy of redemption and communication. All of this has been underwritten by the recognition that the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit reveals the divine life of eternal processions. This divine vantage point, made available to us by revelation, gives us the necessary remoteness and perspective from the details of Scripture that we can keep our bearings as we carry out Trinitarian exegesis of Scripture’s manifold unity.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not just one doctrine among many, but is rather a conceptual foregrounding of the entire matrix of salvation-historical revelation and must be approached from a place in which all the events of the economy and all the words of Scripture hang together with an inner unity. It is senseless to try to retain the result of the early church’s holistic interpretation of Scripture—the perception of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity—without cultivating, in a way appropriate for our own time, the interpretative practice that produced that result. The one premodern interpretive practice that is crucial for the doctrine of the Trinity is attention to the economy of salvation as a coherent whole. This is where attention must be focused. Many of the other hermeneutical moves of the premodern fathers—based on elaborately multilevel readings, and free-range allegorical exegesis in particular—are more to be admired than imitated (as Bonaventure said of the extreme humility of St. Francis).52 Certain techniques of interpretation are so temporally bound and culturally located as to be unavailable to modern academics, and appropriately so.53 But recognition of the coherence of the economy of salvation is both available to us and necessary for the practice of Trinitarianism, whether in the mode of dogmatics or exegesis.
Because of the uniquely integral character of the doctrine of the Trinity, it is never quite at home when formulated bit by bit from fragmentary elements of evidence. Atomistic approaches can never accomplish the necessary transposition of the biblical evidence from the salvation-history level to the transcendent level of the immanent Trinity.54 Such a transposition requires first the ability to perceive all of the economic evidence at once, including the intricately structured relations among the three persons. That economic information, as a coherent body of evidence, can then be interpreted as a revelation of God’s own life. To make the jump from salvation history to the eternal Trinity, the interpreter must perceive the meaningful form of a threefold divine life circulating around the work of Jesus Christ. What psychologists of perception call a gestalt, a recognizably unified single form, is what the Trinitarian interpreter must identify in the history of salvation. This triune form, once recognized, can then be understood as enacting among us the contours of God’s own triune life. He is among us what he is in himself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Karl Barth describes this reality from the other direction: “To the involution and convolution of the three modes of being in the essence of God there corresponds exactly their involution and convolution in his work.”55 God’s unity and salvation history’s unity mirror each other in a precisely Trinitarian manner.
If our situation is that biblical scholarship has removed formerly cherished Trinitarian patterns of interpretation, what are we to do? It is no good to seek shelter in a precritical mind-set. Even if we are persuaded that in certain details the modern consensus is wrong, there is no road back. If the tools, techniques, and standards of modern biblical studies are warranted and legitimate, the way forward must be to use them better, more fully, and more strategically. The concepts and the vocabulary of Trinitarian theology need to be chastened and held to scriptural standards, and critical scholarship has helped greatly in pressing this demand. Nor is the role of modern scholarship merely negative or restrictive. Among its many positive contributions, we must count its enhanced literary sensibility and alertness to narrative reasoning. After noting how “the methodological moves of the older proof-texting approach occlude the theological significance of the surface shape of Scripture,” including such basic elements as its existence in discrete books, C. Kavin Rowe offers a balanced assessment of modern interpretive moves: “If modern biblical studies has anything crucial to teach us in this respect, it is that engagement with the literary texture of Scripture’s surface forms a critical part of fruitful interpretation in our time.”56 But whatever blessings modern historical critical scholarship brings, we will not find among them a holistic apprehension of what God says in the inscripturated economy of his self-revelation. And whatever weaknesses may have hobbled patristic and medieval interpretive practices, and however unusable some of those techniques may be for us, their great virtue was always their grasp of the overall meaning of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity is a large doctrine, and its formulation and defense have always required a certain ampleness of reflection on the revealed data.
There is something disconcerting in maintaining a doctrine while replacing many of the arguments for it. If Trinitarian theology can arise using one set of arguments, but then discard many of those and set about seeking better ones by which to maintain its claims, does this imply that Trinitarians intend to go on believing what they are believing, no matter what? The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus described his philosophical approach in the words, “you give me the doctrines, and I will invent the proofs.”57 Proof-switching could signal that a system of orthodoxy is functioning like what Marxist analysis calls an ideology: a set of power relationships concealed behind ideas that really defend them by rationalization. Proof-switching could also, however, be an example of renegotiating the “justified” part of what epistemology sets forth as the definition of knowledge: justified true belief. We all have many beliefs; some of them are true; some of those are justified. A belief can continue to be true during the phase when a thinker has rejected one justification for it and is casting about for another. The thinker cannot demonstrate its truth during this phase, but that is the whole point of pursuing convincing arguments.58 Buildings that have always stood firm can, on inspection, be found to have less than optimal support, and undergo seismic retrofitting without ever coming down. After the tectonic shifts of biblical criticism, Trinitarian theology is due for some seismic retrofitting.
But there is a deeper explanation for why it is legitimate to transfer our allegiance to another set of arguments while continuing to affirm the original doctrine, an explanation that has to do with the unique character of the doctrine of the Trinity. Trinitarian theology is a complex discourse based on an insight into the overall meaning of Scripture. The church fathers, as the earliest theologians to discern its truth, draw it out of the scriptural materials, and render it explicit, did their work in the light of a profound spiritual apprehension of the subject matter itself. They were aware of God’s own triune presence to them as they scanned the texts and labored to formulate what they understood in it. They did not claim that their utterances were divinely inspired, but they did acknowledge that in the interpretative relationship between res and signa, the thing itself was impinging on them as they sifted through the signs. “We are saving the Trinity,” wrote Gregory of Nazianzus, “and by the Trinity can be saved.”59 His sharp transition from the doctrine he was arguing for to the God he was serving shows his awareness of theologizing in the presence of the triune God.
Many of the church fathers used a moral and ascetic vocabulary to express the spiritual insight required for Trinitarian theology. At the end of On the Incarnation, Athanasius exhorts his reader Macarius that while he has made a good beginning by reading this book, he should now turn to Scripture itself to see the truth of what Athanasius has argued. He sets out the requirements for reading Scripture correctly:
But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds. Thus united to them in the fellowship of life, he will both understand the things revealed to them by God and, thenceforth escaping the peril that threatens sinners in the judgment, will receive that which is laid up for the saints in the kingdom of heaven.60
The shift in register is jarring to modern sensibilities: a good life, a pure soul, virtue, holiness, purity, and imitating the good deeds of the sacred writers. Athanasius prescribes a spiritual and ascetical training that will result in communion with the mind of Scripture’s authors (being “united to them in fellowship of life”) and promises hermeneutical insight as one of the two benefits. The other benefit is going to heaven rather than hell. This is not the course of study modern theologians expect to enroll in when they inquire after the biblical evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity.
But what if some process of intellectual and spiritual formation like this were in fact the prerequisite for “the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures” in regard to “the truth concerning God the Word”? And what if a school of teachers in the early centuries of Christian theology undertook this course of study, gaining insight thereby into the meaning of Scripture as a unified message and then spelling out the hermeneutical and exegetical arguments for what they had come to perceive? If this is what happened, then these patristic generations must have been faced with the difficulty of training their own disciples not only to repeat the arguments but also to undertake the spiritual formation required to apprehend the same spiritual reality that funded the arguments. We see Athanasius making reference to all three moments in his closing remarks to Macarius: having (1) drawn out his theological arguments, he (2) exhorts his student to read the Scriptures and (3) to “cleanse his life” so he can “understand the mind of the sacred writers.” No doubt some students would do so, and would themselves become teachers who had the arguments, the formative preparation, and the insight into Scripture’s total message. No doubt some other students would repeat the arguments, but fail to achieve the insight. Something like this is what has happened in the mixed process of transmitting the doctrine of the Trinity across the centuries.
EINSTEIN AND ALTERNATE EXPLANATIONS
An extended illustration of this sort of process will lend concreteness to the observation. Consider the case of Albert Einstein, whose work in theoretical physics can only be followed by people who have themselves had advanced training in physics. But Einstein repeatedly undertook to make his theory and its implications understandable to a wider audience than physics students. Reflecting on the challenges of translating his thought for a generally educated audience, he mused:
Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt. Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further.61
Einstein had grasped a truth and wanted to communicate it without obfuscation or oversimplification. To this end, in 1946 he wrote a short article titled “E=mc2: The Most Urgent Problem of Our Time.” In a recent analysis of this article, Shulamit Kapon noted several unusual features of Einstein’s popular presentation of his theory of relativity. In his attempt to explain “an advanced, central and counterintuitive principle in physics” (that is, the equivalence of mass and energy) to a popular audience, Einstein was confronted by the problem that his audience did not have the background information crucial to understanding the argument. Kapon lists among the prerequisites things like the Maxwell-Hertz equations about empty space and the Maxwellian expression for the electromagnetic energy of space. All of them require the ability to represent physical entities mathematically so that the mathematical representations (not the actual physical entities, nor mere conceptual representations of them) can be manipulated. None of this is available to readers unless they have undergone a sequential, multiyear training in mathematical physics. Without that training, the grounds of the demonstration are simply unavailable. In this situation, readers could simply accept the conclusions based on bare authority. But Einstein wanted more. He wanted to persuade his readers by offering them an alternative argument and convincing explanatory devices. He wanted to invite nonspecialists into the process of sense making.
To this end, Einstein gave an account of recent scientific history, describing how he came to wonder how to move from the traditional idea of the conservation of mass to the new idea of mass as a form of energy. In this narrative of discovery, the crucial component was radioactive disintegration, which steps into the story as the first observable proof. In his popular-level article, Einstein completely glossed over the reasons from mathematical physics that he would suspect mass and energy were theoretically convertible in the first place. As Kapon writes, “In this alternative argument, Einstein replaced the deductive derivation of the principle with a historical argument driven by the nature of scientific inquiry.”62 There is nothing in this historical sketch that actually adds to the reader’s grasp of relativity. But it “forms the necessary skeleton on which a variety of explanatory devices are coherently employed to enhance and support the reader’s sense making.”63 For example, Einstein generates a number of analogies, including the analogy of heat being a form of energy, which has the advantage of being perceivable (in contrast to mass as a form of energy). On top of such analogies, Einstein actually tells a parable: Once upon a time there was an incredibly rich miser, but nobody could tell how rich because he never spent money. But upon his death he leaves his money to his two sons, with the stipulation that they give a small part of their money away for the good of society. Since the sons are misers too, the only gauge of the original fortune is the fraction given to society. Being interpreted, this parable is about the release of energy from the split atom. Finally, Einstein gathers up all that he has explained and gives it ethical urgency. Since the new science can produce nuclear bombs, coming to terms with it is the “most urgent problem of our times.”
Kapon summarizes Einstein’s success as an explainer of physics to the uninitiated:
One of the main claims made [in the field of the public understanding of science] is that some advanced ideas in science and particularly in physics are hard to popularize because what is left of the formal explanation after the mathematical formalisms and the advanced conceptions are “stripped” from them is a very thin statement that might be significant to the professional scientist, but cannot make much sense to a person with no academic background in the sciences. Einstein directly confronted this challenge when he explained the equivalence of mass and energy to the general public by generating an alternative argument that bypassed the core of the formal derivation and instead provided a sense of derivation through an argument that is based on the history of science and the nature of scientific inquiry.64
Did Einstein surrender to the temptation to give his readers the “deceptive illusion of comprehension” that he had earlier warned about? Was he so afraid that the untrained reader would be “unable to follow the exposition” that he veered into explaining something else—something they could grasp? No, it seems he communicated many true things about his work by using an alternative explanation more widely accessible.
This is a parable, and it applies to the transmission of Trinitarian theology since patristic times, especially the use of scriptural arguments. If one of the conditions of the church fathers’ insight into Scripture was that they had undergone the Athanasian discipline, it seems they would be in the situation of only being able to pass it along to others who had undertaken the same regimen of formation. But to communicate it further, they devised alternative explanations, constructing conceptual frameworks on which they could hang analogical arguments from Scripture. These arguments would be the proof texts they often employ. No wonder we cannot use them. And it follows that when we set them aside and seek new arguments, we are doing so on the basis of insight into the thing itself.
A major task of this book is to make our knowledge of the Trinity more secure by ordering our language about it more accurately. To this end, it has sometimes been helpful to use the word revelation with an unusually tight restrictiveness, in which it refers only to the actual historical sending of the Son and the Spirit in the incarnation and Pentecost. The writings of the New Testament, then, are not Trinitarian revelation proper, but inspired attestation of the revelation that had already occurred “between the Testaments” (in B. B. Warfield’s phrase). Of course, our only reliable point of access to the truth of the revelation is through the attesting documents, which accounts for a certain perspectival collapsing of revelation into its attestation. But if for clarity’s sake we maintain the precise distinction, it sharpens the question we began this chapter with: In what sense is the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible?
In 1962’s The Trinity in the New Testament, Arthur Wainwright gave a carefully balanced answer that has served interpreters well. Wainwright says that what can be found in the New Testament attestation is not so much a formulated doctrine of the Trinity as an awareness on the part of some of its authors that they are facing “the problem of the Trinity.” By using the category of problem, Wainwright draws attention to the presence of two bodies of evidence: on the one hand, there is only one God; on the other hand, Jesus is God and so is the Father. These two facts, given as such in the New Testament, need to be adjusted to each other. They demand explanation, and all the more so when the Holy Spirit is introduced. This demand for explanation is what Wainwright calls “the problem of the Trinity” in the New Testament. “Whether the problem is binitarian or Trinitarian in form, the crucial issue is the relationship of Father to Son, because the problem would not have been of practical importance if there had been no Incarnation. If the Word had not been made flesh, there would have been no stumbling-block for Jewish monotheism.”65
Having reframed his task as a quest for the problem of the Trinity rather than the doctrine of the Trinity (“a statement of doctrine is an answer to a doctrinal problem”66), Wainwright surveys the various authors of the New Testament to see how far each of them goes. His conclusion is that, taken as a whole, the New Testament surfaces the problem but does not formulate the answer. This conclusion does justice to the fact that there are no stretches of the New Testament that undertake to explain the Trinity. The prominently didactic or argumentative sections of the New Testament are about things like the implications of Israel’s election (Rom 9–11), or the logic of the new covenant (Heb 9–10), or the inclusion of Gentiles in the community of the Messiah (Acts). Nowhere in the New Testament do we find the elements of the doctrine of the Trinity laid out on the table and being made a matter of doctrinal reasoning and formulation. Wainwright claims that “the problem of the Trinity was in the minds of certain New Testament writers, and that they made an attempt to answer it. None of their writings, however, was written specifically to deal with it,” and he goes on tellingly: “most of the signs that a writer had tackled the problem are incidental.”67 So is the doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament or not? “In so far as a doctrine is an answer, however fragmentary, to a problem, there is a doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament. In so far as it is a formal statement of a position, there is no doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament.”68 If “doctrine of the Trinity” means the word Trinity, that does not appear in Christian writing until the second century, in authors like Theophilus (trias) and Tertullian (trinitas). If it means the philosophical method of adjusting the various truth claims to each other within a comprehensive framework, that does not happen until Irenaeus and Origen. If it means the set of technical terms that grow up around these basic moves (person, essence, etc.), that is a much more extended conversation with semantic shifts occurring in each usage over the course of several centuries.
The decision to say “the problem of the Trinity” is in the Bible is in part a rhetorical decision, a judgment about how to order and present the truth artfully, considering the effect it will have for the audience. Any presentation of the truth will raise certain questions and tend to suppress others. One of the questions Wainwright’s “problem” terminology raises is whether the New Testament knows there is a challenge of consistency, or even a paradox, to be dealt with in monotheistic worship of Jesus. Can we say we detect in the New Testament an awareness of tension between these truths? Emil Brunner drew a sharp line between what he considered the “simple testimony” of the apostles and the mysterium logicum of the One and the Three posed by later Trinitarian theology, a mysterium that “lies outside the message of the Bible.”69 This way of talking suggests that the authors of the New Testament were unaware of the strongly contrasting nature of the vast realities they were writing about. Wainwright admits “the words ‘paradox’ and ‘antinomy’ do not occur in the New Testament,” but rightly points out that “there is in the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel a clear awareness of the paradox of the relationship between Father and Son. The man who wrote ‘The Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ knew that his statement contained a paradox.”70 We could say similar things about the men who wrote that God sent his Son and Spirit, and yet that sent ones were coequal with the sending one. The authors of the New Testament registered at the very least a problem that required a solution, a set of facts that could only be set alongside each other against a wider horizon of meaning.
But perhaps a bit more can be said. Writing in 1991, Cornelius Plantinga argued that the gospel of John stood out from the rest of the New Testament as a major source of Trinitarian theology because “among all the New Testament documents the Fourth Gospel provides not only the most raw material for the church doctrine of the Trinity, but also the most highly developed patterns of reflection on this material—particularly, patterns that show evidence of pressure to account somehow for the distinct personhood and divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit without compromising the unity of God.”71
We can count three elements here: (1) raw material, (2) patterns of reflection on it, and (3) pressure. All three elements, according to Plantinga, are there in Scripture. The raw material must include things like the characters of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a narrative framework, with the words they speak to and about each other. But this material is hardly raw. Thus Plantinga also indicates that we have in Scripture “highly developed patterns of reflection” on the data. John’s gospel goes far beyond narrating the adventures of three characters; it also poses questions, gives answers, and makes claims about how they are related to each other. And third, there is “pressure to account somehow for the distinct personhood . . . without compromising the unity.”72 Taken together, the material, the patterns, and the pressure are enough to support a bolder claim that we can find a doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament. Of course, having said this, we must distinguish it from the elaborated form that Trinitarianism took on in the developing tradition of Christian doctrine. That form of the doctrine, with its panoply of technical terms, summary judgments, and philosophical distinctions, is obviously not in the New Testament.73 But a doctrine of the Trinity is. To say less is not to say enough. As long as “the sense of Scripture is Scripture,” and the sense is present in its raw material, its patterns of reflection, and the pressure it exerts, there is such a thing as biblical Trinitarianism.
The problem of the three persons, the patterns of reflection, and the pressure of the text are productive of the doctrine of the Trinity, whether in its biblical form or in its classically elaborated form. But they are not automatically productive of it. Trinitarian theology, as Athanasius would remind us, was worked out in the presence of the risen Christ and therefore in the domain of the triune God. Whenever we focus on the interpretive task with its attendant challenges, we risk making our conclusions sound like something that could be achieved by competent readers following general rules. As much as we need to say the Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible is the correct interpretation, and can be shown to be, nevertheless something more was at work in the Trinitarian construal of the biblical revelation. John Henry Newman noted that “though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as illustrated and (as I may say) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all.”74
Newman thought this “sacred impression” that inhabits the faithful helped account for “the mode of arguing from particular texts or single words of Scripture, practiced by the early Fathers, and for their fearless decision in practicing it.”75 The presence of “the great Object of Faith on which they lived” also helped explain why some of their arguments seem to overreach, or to make far too much of a small bit of evidence. “Never do we seem so illogical to others, as when we are arguing under the continual influence of impressions to which they are insensible.”76 The problem, the patterns, and the pressure are good. But the presence is best, and it influences the Trinitarian interpreter as we do our work with the other elements.
1. Except the Racovian Catechism.
2. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31:24, 135.
3. For one example of the usage, see “. . . se haelend sylf on his halgan godspelle cythath tha halgan thrynnysse on sothre annysse” (p. 6): “. . . the Savior Himself, in His holy gospel, declare the Holy Trinity in a true unity” (p. 7) in Henry W. Norman, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Hexameron of St. Basil, or, Be Godes Six Daga Weorcum (London: Smith, 1849).
4. Warfield’s entry is reprinted as “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952), 22–59.
5. Ibid., 22.
6. It is hard to cite brief examples, but consider the difficulty of expounding Isaiah 9:6 (“to us a child is born, to us a son is given . . . and his name shall be called . . . Everlasting Father”). A Trinitarian explanation of this passage would have to include the assertion that the Son is not the Father.
7. Karl Barth, Homiletics, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley and Donald Daniels (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 76. For the considerable textual uncertainties surrounding this statement, see Angela Dienhart Hancock, Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic, 1932–1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 226–27.
8. Barth, CD I/1, 308.
9. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, ed. James T. Dennison Jr. (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R, 1992), 1.
10. For a surprisingly prolific account of theology along these lines, see Bernardinus De Moor, Concerning the Word and Definition of Theology, vol. 1 of Continuous Commentary on Johannes Marckius’ Didactico-Elenctic Compendium of Christian Theology, trans. Steven Dilday (Culpepper, VA: L & G Reformation Translation Center, 2014), 45–75.
11. Recall the ambiguous career of “economic Trinity and immanent Trinity” language in chapter 5 above.
12. “Le poème, cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens.” Paul Valery, “Rhumbs,” in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). One indication of the aphorism’s influence is its use in the title of the widely used textbook now continued by Thomas Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, 14th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2013).
13. Barth, CD I/1, 308.
14. Ibid., 309.
15. F. Gerald Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation? (London: SCM, 1964).
16. Edmund J. Fortman, The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), 291.
17. R. P. C. Hanson, Studies in Christian Antiquity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 296.
18. Ulrich Mauser, “One God and Trinitarian Language in the Letters of Paul,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 20:2 (1998): 100.
19. No such survey has been undertaken to my knowledge since Richard J. Knowling, “Some Recent Criticism in Its Relation to the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” in Messianic Interpretation and Other Studies (London: SPCK, 1910), 38–84.
20. Though see Pohle-Preuss’s remarkable Vatican I–era Roman Catholic defense of 1 John 5:7. Even with its text-critical foundation admittedly undercut, Pohle-Preuss treats it as “a pregnant and clear textus per se dogmaticus” whose authority is guaranteed by its reception into the Vulgate and its centuries of liturgical use (Joseph Pohle, The Divine Trinity: A Dogmatic Treatise, ed. Arthur Preuss (St. Louis: Herder, 1930), 31.
21. Quoted in Crito Cantabrigiensis [pseudonym of Thomas Turton], A Vindication of the Literary Character of the Late Professor Porson (Cambridge: Deighton, 1827), v–vi. For one example of an antitrinitarian polemicist gleefully seizing on the passage as evidence of mendacious conspiracy, see Some Trinitarian Forgeries Stated by a Monotheist (New York: Grafton, 1906).
22. John Wilson, The Concessions of Trinitarians: Being a Selection of Extracts from the Writings of the Most Eminent Biblical Critics and Commentators (Boston: Munroe, 1845). Wilson’s strategy was inspired by John Locke, who noted that “there is scarcely one text alleged to the Trinitarians which is not otherwise expounded by their own writers” (see Lord King, The Life and Letters of John Locke, with Extracts from His Journals and Common-Place Books [London: Bell & Daldy, 1864], 297).
23. This is Richard Muller’s characterization of Frederic Farrar’s suspicious view of Protestant scholastic interpretive culture, in The Triunity of God, vol. 4 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 411.
24. Jared Wicks, “Cajetan,” in Dictionary of Major Bible Interpreters, ed. Donald McKim (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 283–86.
25. See G. Sujin Pak, Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and for further Reformed developments, Benjamin Merkle, Defending the Trinity in the Reformed Palatinate: The Elohistae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
26. Quoted in Edward Bickersteth, The Christian Student: Designed to Assist Christians in General in Acquiring Religious Knowledge (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1832), 79.
27. Muller, Triunity of God, 62.
28. Ibid.
29. I genuflect toward James Barr, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and other vigilant watchers of interpretive correctness, having learned not to perpetuate these hermeneutical blunders, though I reserve the right to excuse them in the fathers.
30. This is to appropriate the language, but not the actual argument, of David C. Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37:1 (April 1980): 27–38.
31. Klaus Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1990), 28.
32. Charles H. Talbert, ed., Reimarus: Fragments (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970). See Talbert’s introduction for the intrigue surrounding the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. The quotations below are from “Concerning the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching.”
33. Ibid., 71.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 76.
36. Ibid., 84.
37. Ibid., 88.
38. Ibid., 95.
39. Breaking the hold of the Trinitarian baptismal formula is, Reimarus admits, a task that requires more labor. He announces on page 91 of Fragments his intention to explain it and works steadily toward that goal until page 117.
40. Francis Watson, Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 256. Watson introduces this topic as an illustration of the way a Trinitarian hermeneutic that presents itself as speaking about reality must “show itself to be capable of responding to objections proceeding from a different understanding of reality.” On the Socinian roots of modern biblical studies, see further Scholder, Birth of Modern Critical Theology, 26–45.
41. Helmut Thielicke, Modern Faith and Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 103.
42. B. B. Warfield, “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952), 22. “Disjecta membra” is an allusion to the Roman poet Horace’s first Satire. The phrase is used there to indicate that a poet torn to pieces still has poetic parts.
43. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium Designed for the Use of Theological Students (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1907). This is the final edition, revised and enlarged, of the three-volume system that Strong originally published in 1886.
44. Ibid., 304.
45. Roger Olson relates the story that when he was taught theology from Strong’s book, his teacher pointed out that the six points can be rephrased to spell T R I U N E (Three recognized as God; Regarded as three distinct persons; Immanent and eternal, not merely economical or temporal; United in essence; No inequality; Explains all other doctrines yet itself inscrutable). This does not seem to have been Strong’s own intention. See Roger Olson, The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity & Diversity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002), 140.
46. Strong, Systematic Theology, 340.
47. Warfield, “Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” 36.
48. Ibid., 53–55.
49. The structure of the Athanasian Creed is also similar to the medieval “Shield of the Trinity” diagram, which relates the three persons to deity by the word is, and to each other by the phrase is not. This diagram has long been helpful in teaching, and it works especially well as visual support for the piecemeal proof. It is subject to the same limitations, however, and it especially tends to eclipse the relations of origin.
50. A good analysis of the shift in temperament that brought this about can be found in Jason Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). Vickers’s argument is that because the doctrine ceased to function as means of grace, it became instead a topic of dispute. The book fruitfully applies the characteristic argument of the canonical theism movement to the history of modern Trinitarianism.
51. See, for example, George Hill, Lectures in Divinity (New York: Carter, 1856), 382–89.
52. Bonaventure, The Life of St. Francis, 6:2. Available in the Bonaventure volume of The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist: 1978), 230.
53. The modern retrieval of patristic exegesis has perhaps passed through its enthusiastic phase and is entering a period of more critical, though still appreciative, reception. A book instructively located at the boundary between the two phases is John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno’s Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
54. I am using “economic and immanent” language here sparingly, but deliberately, to show that it can signal comprehensiveness and distanciation. This sort of usage should, I hope, be safely within the guidelines offered in chapter 5 and perhaps also reassure readers that I am not a total language cop.
55. Barth, CD I/1, 374. The unusual words “involution and convolution” translate Ineinander und Miteinander.
56. C. Kavin Rowe, “The Pauline Corpus and Hebrews,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 43.
57. Chrysippus the Cilician (279–206 BC). Cited in J. H. Randall, Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 41. There are, of course, noncynical ways of construing this boast. Consider how perfectly it would work as a pedagogical method in geometry, for example.
58. Recall Socrates’s description of “tying down” beliefs in Plato’s Meno.
59. This is how Frederick Norris translates the phrase from Oration 29:21 in Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Lionel Wickham’s translation is perhaps less daring with Gregory’s wordplay (sozoimen and sozoimetha): “We have the Trinity in our safekeeping and by the Trinity can be saved” (Oration 29:21, in On God and Christ, 89).
60. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, sect. 57.
61. Albert Einstein, in the foreword to Lincoln Barnett’s 1948 popularization of the theory of relativity. Cited in Shulamit Kapon, “Bridging the Knowledge Gap: An Analysis of Albert Einstein’s Popularized Presentation of the Equivalence of Mass and Energy,” Public Understanding of Science 23:8 (2014): 1013–24.
62. Ibid., 1016.
63. Ibid., 1017.
64. Ibid., 1021.
65. Arthur W. Wainwright, The Trinity in the New Testament (London: SPCK, 1962), 3.
66. Ibid., 4.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. From Brunner’s Dogmatics I:206; cited in ibid., 8.
70. Ibid.
71. Cornelius Plantinga, “The Fourth Gospel as Trinitarian Source Then and Now,” in Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective, ed. M. S. Burrows and P. Rorem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 303–21. For excellent commentary on this statement, see Andreas J. Köstenberger and Scott R. Swain, Father, Son, and Spirit: The Trinity in John’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 19–24.
72. For much closer analysis of such “pressure,” see C. Kavin Rowe “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11:2 (2002): 295–312. Rowe traces the category to Brevard Childs, calling it “one of the most important contributions of his Biblical Theology taken as a whole” (308).
73. David Yeago’s essay on judgments that can be rendered by various concepts is very helpful in increasing the plausibility of such claims (“The New Testament and Nicene Dogma,” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen Fowl [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], 87–100).
74. John Henry Newman, Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached Before the University of Oxford (London: Rivington, 1843), 335–36.
75. Ibid, 336.
76. Ibid.