CHAPTER 8
OLD COVENANT ADUMBRATION
God is and was always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but did not make this known until the fullness of time, because the revelation of the Trinity was bound up with the accomplishment of Trinitarian salvation. Therefore the triunity of God is not an open phenomenon of the Old Testament, but can only be found there retrospectively, after the fact of the sendings of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The final step in ordering Christian language about the Trinity is identifying the status of the Old Testament in our knowledge of the triune God. We have chosen to use the word revelation for the personal communicative missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and give the name attestation to the inspired reflection and documentation of that revelation in the New Testament. For the Old Testament we will use the word adumbration, which is literally a shadowing-forth (ad umbrae), to indicate the dimly lit character of the Trinitarian reality of God in the time before the Messiah and in the pages of the Old Testament. Adumbration is a kind of attestation. Taken as a whole, the Old Testament could be called the prophetic or proleptic attestation of the Trinity and could be paired with the apostolic attestation. Thus, one side of the canon looks forward to the coming of the Son and Spirit, while the other side looks back on it. But for clarity’s sake, we will reserve the word attestation for the New Testament witness, which works without the burden of its subject matter’s unrevealedness. And if adumbration is not yet proper attestation, it is certainly not yet revelation. God did not yet reveal his triunity until the fullness of time had come. The Trinity is a mystery in the biblical sense: always true, once concealed, now revealed.
“When anyone in the endeavor to prove the faith brings forward reasons which are not cogent, he falls under the ridicule of the unbelievers, since they suppose that we stand upon such reasons, and that we believe on such grounds.”1 Thomas Aquinas made this observation, with its implied warning, in the Summa Theologica, brushing aside the periodic attempts of theologians to demonstrate the Trinity on purely philosophical grounds. Because the doctrine of the Trinity is a revealed doctrine, we should take our stand where it is revealed, rather than incur the irrisionem infidelium by pretending to establish it where it is not revealed. This principle applies especially to demonstrating the doctrine of the Trinity from Old Testament texts. There is no weaker strategy for commending Trinitarianism than the attempt to conjure the doctrine from the scattered allusions, obscure phenomena, and puzzling textual features of the Old Testament read in its own light. The God of Israel was always triune, but did not undertake to share that fact until, the fullness of time having come, the Father sent forth the Son and Holy Spirit on their salvation-constituting missions (Gal 4:4–6). Before that, knowledge of God’s triunity was shadowy, allusive, and indirect. We do not stand on such reasons, nor believe in the Trinity on such grounds. Nevertheless the adumbrations of the Trinity in the Old Testament are in their own proper way crucial to the doctrine’s stability. How should they be incorporated into a mature Trinitarianism normed and formed by its manner of revelation?
The Old Testament is a clear book of divine self-revelation, except when it isn’t. Some things about God are made extremely plain in the stories and oracles recorded in these Scriptures, and stand out as successful communication events with their origin in the God of Abraham who wills to be known. The triunity of God is not among these things. Instead it belongs among the secret things of God, sometimes making its presence felt but never announcing its character, and not stepping forward into the light until the fullness of time—the time of the events in the New Testament—had come. William Greenhill (1591–1671), writing about the mysterious book of Ezekiel, noted that theology had its difficult topics and dark passages just as surely as any field of inquiry did:
In most arts and sciences are difficulties; in divinity are depths. Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, have their nodos, and the Scriptures have their δυσνόητά. In them are dark sayings (Ps 78:2); riddles (Ezek 17:2); parables (Matt 13:35); wonders (Ps 119:18); great things (Hos 8:12); things hard to be uttered (Heb 5:11); hard to be understood (2 Pet 3:16); mysteries (Matt 3:11); hidden and manifold wisdom (1 Cor 2:7; Eph 3:10); the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:10).2
With this in mind, a doctrine of the Trinity that draws on the Old Testament may need to take the form of a noctuary or a sciagraph, with an admission that darkness and obscurity are key ingredients of the message. The recognition that parts of the Bible are difficult to understand is completely compatible with confessing the clarity of Scripture. In fact, one of the clear teachings of Scripture is that some passages of Scripture are not clear (2 Pet 3:16, along with all the passages cited by Greenhill above), at least not at all times for all audiences.
There are a few structural options for an outline of Trinitarian theology that consistently recognizes that the Trinity is adumbrated in the Old Testament, revealed in the coming of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and attested in the New Testament. The present book represents a choice that is evident even in the order of chapters in the table of contents. Our preliminary exercises were a call to worship (chapter 1) and a strategic revision of the doctrine of revelation (chapters 2 and 3). We began our treatise on the Trinity proper with a thick dogmatic description of the events of incarnation and Pentecost, that is, the actual revelatory interventions of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the economy of salvation (chapter 4), and then traced its implications for the being of God (chapter 5). We then proceeded, after some hermeneutical considerations (chapter 6), to the New Testament’s attestation of the Trinitarian revelation (chapter 7) and finally to the Old Testament’s adumbration (chapter 8). Methodus est arbritraria (see chapter 4), but we have chosen a path calculated to reinforce formally our material judgments about the revelation of the Trinity by rehearsing the order of the mystery’s unveiling. There are disadvantages to this method, but at least the method reverses the unhappy trend of treatises on the Trinity that begin by canvassing the shadowy evidence of the Old Testament. That conventional sequence risks putting an intolerable burden on the exposition of the Old Testament texts, squandering its evidential power by premature exposure. The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise and cannot stand without the Old Testament, but the Old Testament’s usefulness for Trinitarianism is retrospective and dependent on the light provided by the fullness of revelation. We cannot set aside the Old Testament, but we can put it off until the salvation-historical mystery of the Trinity has emerged and the light of the New Testament has arisen.
THE TRINITY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
William Burt Pope (1822–1903) made a programmatic statement of the status of the Old Testament for our knowledge of the Trinity:
The doctrine of the Trinity, like every other, had, in the mystery of the Divine education of the Church, its slow development. Remembering the law that the progress of Old Testament must be traced in the light of the New Testament, we can discern throughout the ancient records a pre-intimation of the Three-One, ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Pet 1:5). No word in the ancient records is to be studied as standing alone, but according the analogy of faith, which is no other than the one truth that reigns in the organic whole of Scripture.3
It is, of course, a kind of canonical reading strategy, treating the Bible as a unified whole and refusing to study the Old Testament on this subject “as standing alone.” Pope uses the awkward term pre-intimation to signal that he is reading the progressive revelation of the Old Testament “in the light of the New Testament,” after a revelation that was in the future of the prophets but in the past of the apostles.
This pervasive Old Testament pre-intimation of the mystery was made up of a certain body of textual and literary phenomena that came to be more or less conventional in discussions of the Trinity in the Old Testament. An especially good representative treatment of them is found in the posthumously published Reformed Dogmatics of Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949). Vos is best known for his work in biblical theology, and the Dogmatics, which he wrote at a young age, is informed by the nascent sensibility of biblical theology. It is set in a question-and-answer format, with the questions themselves very carefully crafted. Vos opens his entire treatise on the Trinity with the complex question, “Why must we not seek a decisive proof for the Trinity in the Old Testament?” If one must begin a treatise on the Trinity by turning to the Old Testament, this is perhaps the safest way to do it: with a self-disabling opening question that points away from the Old Testament to something greater. Vos offers three answers to his own question:
(a) Because Old Testament revelation was not finished but only preparatory. The perfect comes only at the end.
(b) Under the Old Testament’s dispensation the concept of the oneness of God had to be deeply impressed upon Israel’s consciousness in the face of all polytheistic inclinations.
(c) We must not imagine that the Old Testament saints were able to read in the Old Testament everything that we can read there in the light of the New. Yet, what we read in it is clearly the purpose of the Holy Spirit, for He had the Scripture of the Old Testament written not only for then but also for now.4
Answer (a) deploys Vos’s strong doctrine of progressive revelation and high view of what is groundbreakingly novel in the manifestation of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Answer (b) appeals to the cultural and historical background in which the Old Testament revelation took place (the polytheistic ancient Near East). But it may also indicate the logical order of the Christian doctrine of God: De Deo Uno followed by De Deo Trino. Read left to right from cover to cover, the Bible depicts a monotheism that turns out to be Trinitarian monotheism, not an initial threeness that turns out to be unified. Answer (c) gives the Christian reader permission to find Trinitarian theology in the Old Testament, without claiming that such a theology could have been read from the same texts before the advent of Christ and the Spirit. Answer (c) is the tricky one, because it attempts to do justice to the Old Testament’s character as, in the words of B. B. Warfield, “a chamber richly furnished but dimly lit.”5 All the Trinitarian furniture was in there the whole time, but the lights were not on until the finished revelation—that is, answer (a).
What is some of the Trinitarian theology that can be found in the Old Testament by those who read it with the advantage of its fulfillment in Christ and the Spirit? Vos lists nine “traces of the doctrine of the Trinity,” which can be thus discovered in the Old Testament.6
1. The distinction between the names Elohim and Yahweh.
2. The plural form of this name Elohim.
3. The concept of the angel of the Lord.
4. The concept of wisdom personified.
5. The concept of the Lord’s “word” personified.
6. The doctrine of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament.
7. Old Testament passages in which God speaks of himself in the plural.
8. Old Testament passages where more than one person is expressly named.
9. Passages that speak of three persons (especially the Levitical blessing in Num 6).
Readers eager to find traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament have, in this list, a pretty full set of phenomena to investigate and instruments with which to carry out their investigations. But they should keep steadily in mind Vos’s starting point: We should not expect to find a decisive proof for the Trinity in the Old Testament, even with this equipment in hand.7
What is required for doctrinal interpretation of the Old Testament is a hermeneutical framework that acknowledges the complex structure of the revelation, and an approach to reading the documents that precede and follow the revelation. The key hermeneutical category for this kind of interpretation is rereading. It captures the ambiguity and concealment of the original writings, but also accounts for the progressive revelation and the attendant growth in understanding of the earlier material. Literary theorist E. K. Brown has said, “There is nothing magical in reading. It is in re-reading that some magic may lie.”8 We are not seeking anything magical, although the category of rereading might open up a relatively sober approach to the fascination with concealment that has animated much mystical interpretation of the Scriptures.
Rereading makes possible an interpretive interplay between the text’s parts and its whole. Northrop Frye argues that “the critical operation begins with reading a work straight through, as many times as may be necessary to possess it in totality. At that point the critic can begin to formulate a conceptual unity corresponding to the imaginative unity of his text.”9 Immersive mastery of a text opens up new interpretive possibilities in negotiating the whole-part dialectic, which is one of the main engines in the production of meaning for the reader. The eye of the mind can scan the whole, ranging backward and forward in it. By invoking this spatial metaphor, we are picturing reading as beholding a visually unified object, whose surface our eye can negotiate. This is, of course, not at all what reading a long book is like, either in a codex (where the stacked pages obscure each other), a scroll (where the sentences we have read are rolled up and the sentences we will read are not yet unrolled), or on a computer screen (where digital simulacra of either codex or scroll are presented to us). The verbal-visual trope is an ancient one, with roots in classical rhetoricians like Quintilian, and had already become a commonplace by the Middle Ages. Bonaventure observed that “no one can appreciate the beauty of a poem unless his vision embraces it as a whole.”10 Rereading delivers an “awareness of the totality of the text” and allows for “intercommunication” of textual features by correcting against “inherently linear models of reading.”11
It is interesting that in the field of critical literary theory, rereading is often invoked as a species of reader-response hermeneutics, perhaps because it is focused on the activities of the reader.12 It can even be made to sound subversive and transgressive, as if in the high-theory war between reader and author, rereading is a matter of taking up arms in anarchic rebellion against the author. Matin Calinescu situates rereading as a counterpractice against the regime of normative first reading, which he investigates as an eighteenth-century innovation. Normative first reading could be a side effect of romanticism, which expects textual love at first sight, or of scientism, which expects self-evident meaning to be transferred at a single reading that does not need to be savored for its literary quality. Calinescu also hypothesizes that printing contributed to the rise of normative first reading. European cultures before printing were not simply oral cultures, but were bookish cultures with few books. Hearing texts over and over meant that before anything new was read for the first time, there had been immersion in rereading of the Bible and some classics. This critical and genealogical discourse on rereading is still fairly new, and it remains to be seen whether rereading theory will be most at home among edgy comparative literature theorists or among more conservative critics who emphasize the enjoyment of literature. Rereading is, after all, one of the primary pleasures of popular reading. Successful novelists from Jane Austen to J. K. Rowling prove themselves to their fans not by how good their books are for reading but for rereading. Whole new vistas of insight and enjoyment open up to the reader who returns to certain well-structured books, where there is a palpable frisson between intuiting the whole text at once and reclaiming the linear experience of another trip through it.
Scripture, religiously experienced, is obviously another key site of rereading. It is not only an interpretive practice to be embraced by the consumers of the Bible, but because of the cumulative character of the biblical canon, rereading is a crucial element in the production of Scripture.13 Rereading is a mode of the New Testament’s use of the Old. R. T. France has pointed out:
In the argument of Hebrews we see a first-century example of a Christian expositor whose instinct it was to develop his argument by focusing successively on a number of key texts, and in each case not simply to quote it and pass on, but to stay with it, exploring its wider implications, and drawing it into association with other related Old Testament ideas, so as to produce a richer and more satisfying diet of biblical theology than could be provided by a mere collection of proof-texts. Like a dog with a particularly juicy bone, he returns to his chosen text again and again, worrying at it and aiming to get all the goodness out of it for the benefit of his readers.14
The New Testament writers follow the lead of Jesus himself in creatively rereading their Scriptures in the light of who he is and what he has done.15
Rereading is a mode of scriptural reengagement that allows Trinitarian interpretation to maintain the original meaning of the Old Testament, but also to layer onto it the insights that arise from later developments of its themes. Genesis 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth. A reader who continues through Genesis knows where the story goes from there, and learns a great deal about the character of the God of the first chapter. A rereading of Genesis 1 is enriched by the knowledge that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob created the heavens and the earth. Or again, a reader who continues through to Deuteronomy learns even more about this character and his ways. A rereading of Genesis 1 is in this case enriched by the knowledge that the God of the exodus created the heavens and the earth. Or again, a reader who continues through to the end of the New Testament learns a great many surprising things about this God, and a rereading of Genesis 1 in this case is enriched by the knowledge that the God who raised Jesus from the dead created the heavens and the earth. In fact, the Trinitarian rereading of Genesis 1 has to answer several questions: Does the extended sense of the rereading of Genesis 1 include the sense, “In the beginning, the Trinity created the heavens and the earth,” or does it rather include, “In the beginning, Jesus created the heavens and the earth,” or does it rather include, “In the beginning, God the Father created the heavens and the earth through the Son and the Spirit”? We know it includes, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We do not need to sort out all the layers of these questions here. We only need to recognize that rereading preserves the original linear sense while adding the holistic sense, and that much depends on what amount of text counts as the whole.
The modern focus on canon represented by Brevard Childs is helpful in this regard; in a pointed disagreement with critic James Barr, Childs gladly conceded that we must recognize and even emphasize “the role of the Old Testament as a testimony to the time before Christ’s coming,” but pointed out that Barr “fails to deal adequately with the theological claim of an ontological as well as soteriological unity of the two testaments, which lies at the heart of the New Testament’s application of the Old (cf. John 1:1–5; Col 1:15–20; Heb 1:2–3).”16 Trinitarian theology is canonical rereading of the identity of God, comprehending the total meaning of the text without effacing or replacing the linear meaning.
We have received much guidance from B. B. Warfield’s 1915 essay “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” and now we are ready to draw out its significance for reading the Old Testament. Recall that Warfield said:
We cannot speak of the doctrine of the Trinity as revealed in the New Testament, any more than we can speak of it as revealed in the Old Testament. The Old Testament was written before its revelation; the New Testament after it. The revelation itself was made not in word but in deed. It was made in the incarnation of God the Son, and the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit. The relation of the two Testaments to this revelation is in the one case that of preparation for it, and in the other that of product of it. The revelation itself is embodied just in Christ and the Holy Spirit.17
Historically speaking, this observation is trivial enough: first comes Jesus, then the Gospels. But two significant corollaries follow from the sequence “event then document.” First, the sequence accounts for the oblique way in which the New Testament contains Trinitarian elements. The authors of the New Testament seem to be already in possession of a Trinitarian understanding of God, one they serenely decline to bring to full articulation. The clearest Trinitarian statements in the New Testament do not occur in the context of teachings about God or Christ, but as almost casual allusions or brief digressions in the middle of discourse about other things.
The second corollary is that we should not seek to construct the doctrine of the Trinity from the words of the New Testament alone, where it is not properly revealed so much as presupposed. Instead, we must develop hermeneutical approaches and exegetical skills that let us read the New Testament in the spirit of its own composition: with constant reference back to the revelation in Christ and the Spirit. Our Trinitarian theology should be demonstrated from Scripture, but in a way that recognizes the priority of the actual revelation in events and the dependent character of the inspired texts.
The third corollary is that we should expect the strongest arguments for the doctrine of the Trinity to be found along those seams where the Old Testament’s prospective witness and the New Testament’s retrospective witness are both present in overlap. That is, the doctrine of the Trinity is best established in an extended thematic study of the way the New Testament uses the Old Testament in its talk of God and salvation. This happy fact is a link between the state of scholarship in the twenty-first century and the second, as we are currently living in a kind of golden age of mature studies of the use of Old Testament by the New Testament.18 And in the second century with the ancient Jewish canon and the recent documents of the New Testament before him, Irenaeus of Lyons wrote a short, classic theological work19 in which he argued two major points: The Bible is one coherent book in two Testaments, and God is triune. The prophetic and apostolic witnesses, together, determine the shape and certainty of the doctrine of the Trinity.
C. Kavin Rowe has argued that “the two-testament canon read as one book pressures its interpreters to make ontological judgments about the Trinitarian nature of the one God ad intra on the basis of its narration of the act and identity of the biblical God ad extra.”20 Indeed, he says “it is safe to say that the doctrine of the Trinity would never have arisen on the basis of the Old or New Testaments in isolation.”21 One of the reasons for this is that all the presuppositions that give meaning to the New Testament are articulated in the Old Testament. As G. E. Wright said, “The New Testament is not itself a Bible; it is a small body of literature filled with all sorts of presuppositions which have no meaning to the uninitiated.”22 But Rowe makes the more specific point that the metaphysical heft of the biblical witness resides mostly in the rigorous monotheism of the Old Testament. Without this, the story of Christ and the Spirit would not demand interpretation as things that implicate the very being of God.
If, in fact, the two-Testament canon of Scripture is all one book, then the beginning has to be read in light of the ending. The second half of a sentence has a conclusive interpretive priority over the first half of the same sentence; while the first half has identifying priority over the second half. Likewise the Old Testament has identifying priority over the New, while the New Testament has conclusive interpretive priority over the Old. “The Bible includes within itself a world of anticipation and retrospection, of preparation and completion, whereby various and vital relations are constituted between its several parts.”23
This Trinitarian hinge is the place for important work on the exegetical basis of Trinitarian theology, and research in this area will be able to locate and identify a host of new demonstrations of the elements of Trinitarian theology. The field is wide and requires the implements of professional exegetes for its cultivation, so I name only a few instances here to indicate the sort of work that is possible. C. Kavin Rowe’s own treatment of the name kyrios (Lord) in the narrative of Luke-Acts is one example of the new approaches proving fruitful in recent years;24 Richard Bauckham’s reading of how Isaiah’s theology informs John’s gospel is another.25 The baptismal command of Matthew 28 seems to be a reinterpretation of Daniel 7’s vision of the Ancient of Days, the Son of Man, and the heavenly host, blended with the Levitical blessing of Numbers 6 with its threefold occurrence of the revealed name of God followed by the summary, “Thus shall you put my name on the people.”26
There is great promise here. In fact, it seems to me that creative new ways of demonstrating the doctrine of the Trinity are emerging even more rapidly than the old traditional proofs fell away. This changing of the guard need not be alarming, nor is it a signal that Christian theologians are merely ideologically motivated to find any arguments that serve to prop up their ready-made conclusions, being clever enough to devise new ones as fast as the old wear out. Instead, we, like the more ancient generations of Christians, are under the authority and guidance of the Word of God and are walking along after it, attempting to articulate for our own intellectual cultures and in our own idioms and canons of persuasiveness what we see and understand. We are all catching up with the Bible. Our task in this age is not to cast about looking for ways to replace yesterday’s superannuated arguments, but to articulate as faithfully as possible what we find in Scripture.
The doctrine of the Trinity cannot simply be read off of holy history or read in explicit formulation in the words of the Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity is rather a conceptual foregrounding of the entire matrix of economic revelation and must be approached from a place in which all the events of the economy and all the words of Scripture belong together. It is senseless to try to retain the result of the early church’s holistic interpretation of Scripture (the doctrine of the Trinity) without cultivating, in a way appropriate for our own time, the interpretative practice that produced that result. The crucial interpretative practice, both for exegesis and doctrinal theology, is attention to the economy of salvation as a coherent whole. In order to take a sufficiently large view of salvation history, however, theology needs to be instructed that there is such a thing as salvation history, and that in it God is not merely carrying out operations for our benefit, but is actually manifesting himself intentionally. God makes himself known in salvation history: the economy of salvation is the revelation of God’s eternal immanent being. This does not go without saying. It did not, in fact, go without saying: God both manifested himself and told us he had done so. The church was clearly informed that in these last days, God had spoken in a Son, and that the name of God into which we are to baptize is the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Filled with that knowledge and insight, classic Trinitarianism learned to interpret rightly what had occurred in the sending of Christ and the Spirit and took up the task of reading Scripture for further clarity about the Trinity.
The second pattern to be observed is the way lines of thought that seem to emerge from the Old Testament witness along trajectories diverging from each other are, in fact, revealed to have been converging toward each other in God’s economy of salvation and revelation. Thus, in the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit, all God’s ways are fulfilled, but they are more than fulfilled—or hyperfulfilled—because they all converge on the events at the Trinitarian hinge of the canon. This convergent hyperfulfillment is most manifest in Jesus, who is both David’s son and David’s Lord, the root and the branch of Jesse. Taught to look for a messianic son, a suffering servant, a prophet greater than Moses, and the Lord himself, the apostles met them all in one person. Some of this convergent hyperfulfillment can just be asserted on the basis of the personal advent of the Son and Spirit. But for the exegetical case, much depends on demonstrating that, according to the witness of the New Testament, the Lord and the apostles understood the Old Testament in precisely this manner. They drew these conclusions in arguments about David’s son being David’s Lord (Matt 22:41–46), in their use of layered Old Testament fulfillments, and in numerous other ways. Origen coined the term autobasileia (usually translated “absolute kingdom,” but literally something like “himself the kingdom”) to indicate how Jesus takes over Old Testament categories and, in Henri de Lubac’s words, “sublimates and unifies them by making them converge upon himself.”27
And much depends on showing that even the highest points of the Old Testament witness manifest an awareness of the coming convergence: the fact that Psalm 110 (the text mobilized by Jesus in Matthew 22) is already drawing together priest and king, and that the later chapters of Isaiah envision a servant whose completed work is indistinguishable from the presence of the Lord in person, matters a great deal. Convergence discernible within the Old Testament witness is the ground of convergent hyperfulfillment in the New Testament witness, which alone enables a theological interpretation broad enough to establish the doctrine of the Trinity.
Traditionally, appeals to convergent hyperfulfillment have centered on the christological aspect of the biblical witness. But one of the ways that the categories of classic Trinitarian theology can inform exegetical investigations is by reminding us that the pneumatological aspect is equally significant. In fact, the locus of hyperfulfillment is not simply the coming of the Son, but the coming of the Son and the Spirit together in the fullness of time on the mission of God the Father. The Messiah is the anointed one. If the symbolism of anointing is kept in mind, and the Spirit’s role in anointing functions as a live metaphor, then the best term for the point of convergence is that it is messianic: The Son who is constituted as Christ by the anointing of the Spirit is the focal point. This reminder is very helpful in keeping the hyperfulfillment argument from converging on such a narrow point (Jesus considered abstractly, in isolation from the Spirit and the Father) that it comes to seem forced and artificial. That sort of artificiality would only open the doctrine up again to the irrisionem infidelium, but the solution is to be more comprehensively Trinitarian rather than less so.
It should also be emphasized that all of the interpretive maneuvers we have outlined so far—from negotiating the canonical hinge to tracing the lines of convergent hyperfulfillment—are only possible because of an implicit logic that is eschatological. These moves are only possible in the case of a definitive and unsurpassable self-revelation of God and would lose their persuasiveness and necessity if they were only provisional developments along an ongoing trajectory. The opening passage of the book of Hebrews sketches out the fundamentally eschatological logic that is to be followed. According to Hebrews 1:1–2, the pluriform modes of divine disclosure in the Old Testament are all gathered, fulfilled, and surpassed in the coming of the one who antedates creation itself, yet whose personal identity as the all-inheriting Son of the Father has only been unveiled eschatologically: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”
All the major authors of the New Testament advance similar claims to the finality of what they have seen in Christ, and that eschatological definitiveness is what makes the Trinitarian interpretive moves not just possible, but urgent and necessary. There are no other hinges in the canon to compare with the one between the covenants; there are no further divine persons to identify retrospectively; and there is only one convergence point of the lines of messianic hyperfulfillment. Ernst Käsemann famously asserted that “apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology,”28 and it is true in the case of the exegetical foundations of the doctrine of the Trinity. Eschatology is the mother of all Trinitarian theology.
We are about to consider the most fruitful sort of navigating of the canonical hinge for the doctrine of the Trinity, which is prosoponic exegesis. It is a Trinitarian rereading practice with much to commend it, and it delivers a great deal of insight. As we shall see, it is founded on the recognition of the unique character of the actual sendings of the Son and the Holy Spirit, which retrospectively illuminate the Old Testament with Trinitarian light. But the uniqueness of the sendings can also have a negative or critical effect on certain rereading practices, and here I want to identify one of the rereading practices that is less promising.
There is an ancient practice of identifying Old Testament theophanies as manifestations of the second person of the Trinity in particular, that is, as the pre-incarnate Son. Pre-Nicene theologians frequently identified a wide variety of divine appearances in the Old Testament, especially anthropomorphic ones, as the Logos of God becoming accustomed to tabernacling among men. Justin Martyr and even Irenaeus glimpsed in these theophanies a foreshadowing of Christ and declared the appearances to be manifestations of the Logos alone, sent as an intermediary by the Father. In some cases, while the authors were orthodox, they took their positions based on a kind of naive (by which I mean not quite ontological yet in the years before the Arian crisis) subordinationism according to which the Father was too exalted to appear to creatures but the Son was not. By the fourth century, Arian interpreters understandably claimed this line of reasoning as a support for their Christology. Henry Chadwick even claims Augustine had to revise the interpretative approach to all of these Old Testament passages, because the history of their exegesis had become so closely entangled with the history of subordinationism.29
Augustine countered the Arian interpretation by emphasizing that the Son is no less invisible than the Father, and therefore either of them could well have been appearing to the patriarchs. On the other hand, there is no reason it could not also have been “the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit,” or “sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit,” or “simply the one and only God, that is the Trinity without any distinction of persons.”30 In part, Augustine is simply appealing to the lack of definiteness on this subject in the Old Testament revelation. Even as a rereader who knows the Trinitarian end of the story and can retrospectively identify persons based on their subsequent clear manifestation, Augustine’s judgment is that we do not have clear enough warrant to say what is actually happening in these most mysterious events of the Old Testament. But his more substantive reason for rejecting the idea that these are appearances of the Son (not the Father or the Spirit) has to do with the uniqueness of the visible mission of the Son in the incarnation. If the Father sent the Son repeatedly during the old covenant, it derogates in some way from the uniqueness of the incarnational sending. The question is not so much where the Old Testament Jesus got the body he appeared to the patriarchs in (though that surely calls for some speculation). It is more a matter of the unrepeatable uniqueness of the incarnation of the Son. With Augustine, we might admit that the Son, based on his inner-Trinitarian status as the one who is eternally from the Father and expresses the Father, might be the appropriate messenger of God even in the old covenant. But even that admission would only dictate that the special anthropomorphic theophanies of the Old Testament must mean, but not be, the Son. That is, as we saw with the dove and the voice at Christ’s baptism, a created manifestation signifying the divine presence is the work of the entire Trinity together rather than one particular person. But it may signify the presence of one particular person of the Trinity. This would be a long way to go for Augustine’s kind of analysis. It would place the Son in the old covenant under the form of an economy of signs and intentions,31 but not in a personal mission parallel to the incarnation.
In modern times these Old Testament manifestations have come to be called christophanies.32 At the popular level, many conservative Christians have so high a regard for them and such certainty about the identification of the pre-incarnate Christ as the subject of them that they seem to serve as an indicator of a high Christology and a robust Trinitarianism. The underlying idea seems to be that if God is the Trinity now, he must have always have been the Trinity, and therefore his human manifestation must always have been the Son. Even in academic theology, Colin Gunton has accused Augustine of anti-incarnational bias for denying that the Son would encounter the patriarchs in this way.33 But it seems wise to maintain the uniqueness of the personal visible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the incarnation and Pentecost. This is not to deny that God is active in the Old Testament or in creation at large—in fact, that the Trinity, the entire Trinity, is active and present in appropriate ways. But it is to reject the notion that before or apart from the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity was the subject of visible mission.
RETROSPECTIVE PROSOPONIC IDENTIFICATION
Taking our stand on the ground of the New Testament, looking back through its witness to the events of the incarnation and Pentecost, we are able to ask relevant questions of the Old Testament witness. Having met Christ and the Spirit, we can look for them in the Old Testament in a way we could not have without having met them in person. This practice is retrospective prosoponic identification. It names a strategy for reading the Old Testament initiated in the New Testament and carried forward by the postapostolic church. Patristics scholar Michael Slusser has described it in similar terms as prosopographic exegesis, a “practice of discerning the speakers or prosōpa in reading Scripture.”34 The right question in various complex Old Testament passages is, in general, “Who is talking?” Slusser says that for the church fathers, this inquiry after prosōpa was not only “a tool for literary analysis and historical identification, but also and especially one of spiritual perception and theological elaboration.” One reason this is important is that this practice is the source of basic Trinitarian vocabulary like the word person. It was “the source of the use of the word persona/prosōpon in Christian theology.”35
Prosoponic exegesis is a pervasive feature of the New Testament’s use of the Old and is especially pronounced in what we would call Trinitarian contexts. The most striking instance of the prosoponic question being applied as a reading strategy in the New Testament itself is the Ethiopian eunuch asking about Isaiah 53: “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (Acts 8:34).
The most advanced, blatant, and densest examples are in Hebrews. But it occurs at every stratum of the New Testament text. Consider, for example, the opening of Mark. Mark opens with “The beginning of the gospel,” as written in Isaiah. Not with a genealogy going back to Abraham (as Matthew), not with an author’s preface, the conception of John the Baptist, or a genealogy going back to Adam (as Luke), and not with high-flown theological dicta about what happened “in the beginning” (as John). Mark’s thirteenth word is a quoted prophetic word. His good news is good news “as written in Isaiah the prophet.” That prophetic voice speaks a complex word: it actually seems to be put together from Exodus 23:20; Malachi 3:1; and Isaiah 40:3. Perhaps the kernel is Isaiah 40 (thus Mark attributes the whole saying to Isaiah), but the development of this kernel plays on “the way” of the Lord. And to prepare that way, God “apostles his angel” (to cognatize the Greek) before the face of whom?
“I send my messenger before your face.” God is speaking, and he sends a messenger to prepare a way for the Lord. What we are hearing at the thirteenth word of Mark is the voice of God the Father speaking to God the Son. In Isaiah, by the inspiration of the Spirit, the Father is telling the Son that he is making a way for him and straightening his path. And when the Son comes into the world, he says to the Father, “A body didst thou prepare for me . . . Lo, I am come (in the roll of the book it is written of me) to do thy will, O God” (as Hebrews 10:5, 7 [ASV] renders Psalm 40:6–8). “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus,” for Mark, is the Father describing the economy of salvation to the Son in the prophetic Spirit. Putting it this way may be too explicitly Trinitarian, for characteristically Mark leaves much unsaid. Can we really treat an Old Testament citation as inner-Trinitarian discourse, the Father addressing the Son while we overhear their speaking? Yes, for three reasons.
1. It is written . . . “Behold, I send . . . before your face.” God speaks to the Lord. It is simply a matter of tidying up our referents to clarify who “God” is and who “the Lord” is, using Mark’s own ideas. “God” is the one who sends Jesus (that is, the Father), and “the Lord” is the one whose coming is prepared by the message of John the Baptist (that is, the Son).
2. Elsewhere in Mark (12:34–37), Jesus interprets an Old Testament passage as conversation between YHWH and the Messiah: he takes Psalm 110 to be David saying that YHWH told David’s master, the Messiah, to sit at YHWH’s right hand. Other New Testament authors presuppose that certain passages of the Old Testament are to be read as inner-Trinitarian discourse. Hebrews 10 is the boldest, but “prosopological exegesis” is an important mode of interpretation throughout the New Testament, pioneered by Jesus, who provoked the Pharisees with the question about Psalm 110 (“The LORD says to my Lord . . .”).
3. Within a few verses, the Father speaks to the Son directly: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Though this time it is a voice from heaven, it is again the words of the Old Testament.36 And the Spirit is near at hand when this inner-Trinitarian dialogue is spoken aloud for us to overhear (note: not the third-person “this is my beloved Son,” as in Matthew, but the second-person “you are my beloved Son,” in agreement with Luke and in line with the second-person address of the Isaiah quotation of verse 2).
We should not lose sight of the retrospective aspect of this reading strategy: only because of the advent of Christ and the Spirit can we seek to go back and identify them. If we immerse ourselves in the Old Testament world itself, without reference to our place in progressive revelation, we would not draw securely Trinitarian conclusions. For instance, the Old Testament is gloriously replete with an array of poetic personifications of God’s presence and power. God characteristically uses evocative circumlocutions to describe the way he is personally present and active among his people: Moses asks God for a promise to accompany him, and God responds that he will send his angel, in whom he will put his name. God is present by presence; “the Presence” becomes a way of referring to God. His hand, voice, will, wisdom, glory, arm, breath, law, and so on, are all put forth as his way of being God with us. And sometimes these terms are strikingly personified or hypostasized. To take the Trinitarian step of selecting two of them as actual persons, distinct subsistences eternally abiding within the one divine nature, seems arbitrary and capricious. If we are to promote any of these “figures of speech” to full personhood, why not all of them, leading to a dozen persons in the Godhead?
The answer can only be that we are to approach the Old Testament from this side, asking not “Which of these personifications is somebody?” but “Can Christ and the Spirit, whom we have met at the turning of the ages, be picked out retrospectively from among the many rays of God’s old-covenant glory?” And in asking this, we are trying to interpret not simply the events of God’s self-revelation, but also the text of his self-revelation. For we are told clearly enough that it is the Word who became flesh. We may also affirm that the wisdom became flesh, or that the arm of the Lord was revealed in Christ, but in each case we are only underlining the same retrospective prosoponic identification.
The principle obviously needs to be extended to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. This pneumatological extension is not simply parallel to the work done with the Son of God, because the Spirit is a different person from the Son, and his difference is registered on both sides of the canonical hinge. In the Old Testament, the range of possible allusions to him, and the relevant semantic domains, are considerably more extensive and indefinite than is the case with the Son. And in the New Testament, the Spirit continues to be revealed in more oblique ways, always with reference to the more direct manifestation of the Son. Nevertheless, the exegetical materials are sufficient for carrying out the pneumatological extension of the process of retrospective prosoponic identification. When this is done at a sufficient level of detail and correlated systematically with the christological investigations, Trinitarian interpretation reaches a kind of conceptual stabilization. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are discernible in their structured, revelatory, economic relations to each other. This pattern of relation can then be recognized as a free self-communication of God in salvation history.
Prosoponic exegesis has been almost the exclusive property of patristics scholars for decades, and we will see below just how sophisticated their analysis of it has become. No doubt it was prominent for patristics studies because it is an almost unavoidable phenomenon in the writings of the church fathers. But the church fathers did not invent it; they took it from Scripture. They were tutored by the New Testament’s use of the Old, which frequently indulges in prosoponic construals. Of course, the New Testament also makes use of a host of other interpretive strategies, most of which are also appropriated and extended by the early church. Irenaeus scholar Stephen Presley points out “literary readings, typological readings, prophecy and fulfillment, verbal connections, organizational functions, illustrative applications, narratival or creedal, prosopological interpretations, and general-to-particular connections” as the tool kit available in the early centuries of Christian theology.37 But prosoponic exegesis has been overlooked for a long time and is set to make a comeback. In recent years, the good news of prosoponic exegesis is finally making its way across the disciplinary boundary from patristics to biblical studies. The major studies in this field are both by Matthew Bates. He laid the foundation in The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation38 and then carried out an ambitious program in The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament.39 In the former book, Bates restricted his analysis to Paul, explored the classical and Hellenistic background of the interpretive practice, and worked very hard to abide by the rules of historical-grammatical interpretation. This caution will no doubt commend prosoponic interpretation to New Testament scholars; there is much work to be done using these tools. The latter book is more adventuresome, offering “a window into the inner life of God as discerned via person-centered reading of the Old Testament in the early church.”40 Bates ranges through the entire New Testament and organizes his material around the life of Christ, including his preexistence and extending to his enthronement at the right hand of God—a topic that cannot be bypassed in prosoponic exegesis because of its foundation in Psalm 110:1, the Old Testament passage most frequently cited by New Testament authors. Bates has also devised a set of categories for working out the complex relations of implied speakers and their temporal locations, which can be quite complex when prophecy and retrospection are taken into account. It is remarkable that prosoponic exegesis, a New Testament phenomenon, had to make its way into biblical studies by way of a long sojourn in patristics.
PROSOPONIC EXEGESIS OF THE PSALMS
The most sophisticated study of prosoponic exegesis to date remains the work of Marie-Josèphe Rondeau,41 whose two-volume investigation of its use in patristic Psalms commentaries has far-reaching implications. Rondeau’s focus on the Psalms gives her a privileged position in several respects: In all of the Old Testament, the Psalms feature the richest mixture of different modes of speech, juxtaposing divine and human, oracular and confessional, with and without discourse markers to signal the changes in speaker. Probably as a result of this, Psalms texts are used with special frequency in the New Testament, sometimes in the mode of prosoponic exegesis. And for both reasons, the church fathers were especially attracted to the Psalms as the locus of retrospective discernment of the persons of the Trinity.
Rondeau makes the work of Hilary of Poitiers the touchstone of her study. This fourth-century Latin pro-Nicene theologian wrote the great treatise On the Trinity, which made abundant use of prosoponic exegesis, but he also wrote a commentary on the Psalms whose opening words are the classic patristic manifesto on prosoponic exegesis:
The primary condition of knowledge for reading the Psalms is the ability to see as whose mouthpiece we are to regard the psalmist as speaking, and who it is that he addresses. For they are not all of the same uniform character, but of different authorship and different types. For we constantly find that the Person of God the Father is being set before us . . . while in what we might call the majority of Psalms the Person of the Son is introduced . . . [Elsewhere, however], we are to recognize the person of the Prophet by whose lips the Holy Spirit speaks, raising us by the instrumentality of his lips to the knowledge of a spiritual mystery.42
Rondeau recognizes in this opening statement something with “the value of an epistemological manifesto” because of the way it insists, “in principle, on the necessity of prosopological method for understanding the Psalter.”43 As “the work of an exegete conscious of his methods,” Hilary’s introduction “is a piece unique among all the patristic Psalms commentaries that have reached us.”44 It is his hermeneutical self-awareness that makes Hilary’s introduction stand out: “Not only does he use the method with remarkable heuristic efficacy, but he takes the opportunity to explain and justify the operation in a way that proves he has a clear awareness of the mechanisms brought into play.”45 And yet, as Rondeau documents in the main body of her book, Hilary is not the inventor of any element of prosoponic exegesis. It is widespread among other pro-Nicene theologians, who picked it up from Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian, and has its ultimate foundations in the New Testament’s use of the Old.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Psalms are a microcosm of the whole Bible, and a rich storehouse for allegorical and typological readings. But patristic commentaries on the Psalms uniquely elevate prosoponic exegesis to the status of equal player with these other modes of interpretation.46 Rondeau claims that her study is a contribution that can “bring balance to our view of ancient exegesis,”47 but in fact her work is more revolutionary than that. Prosoponic exegesis opens up a third avenue of access to Bible interpretation. Typological interpretation, “which makes use of the pair ‘promise and fulfillment,’ or typological recurrence of the saving acts of God, is based on history, which is surely a fundamental category of Christianity.”48 Building on this, allegorical interpretation is more a purely literary technique, collating textual correspondences for doctrinal or moral ends. But “prosopology . . . is based on the concept of person. This is a category as constitutive for Christianity as is history. Patristic commentaries on the Psalter thus reveal that ancient exegesis has, besides a historical dimension, also an equally legitimate dimension that is ‘personalist.’ ”49
The fact that ancient interpreters had at their disposal a method of discerning persons, including divine persons, explains a great deal about the doctrinal presuppositions and results of their interpretive work. The lack of such a method explains much about modern cultures of interpretation. Modern interpreters do, of course, identify speakers, but always within the horizon of historical reconstruction: “who laments; what is the author’s intention; is this a first-person articulation of the community’s experience; is it a collective ‘I,’ etc.”50 Prosopology, as Rondeau argues, “identifies the persons who speak according to the discourse they hold and thus uncovers a whole set of distinctions and relationships,” which she lists:
• between the author and the speaker
• between interlocutors
• between the speaker and the aspect of himself which speaks the word
• between the speaker and the community in whose name he speaks51
Such relations are in one way more modest than historical questions, but in another way more expansive. They simply are not pursuing historical answers, but rather are seeking the discernment of persons related by discourse. In its broadest scope, prosoponic exegesis of the Psalms was preoccupied with discerning in any particular psalm “whether David, held in general for the author of the whole collection, speaks on his own behalf or on behalf of another and, in the latter case, on behalf of whom.”52 The person of David thus loomed large over the entire collection and made himself felt in each psalm. How the church fathers got from David to Christ is too familiar a topic to need rehearsing: they read in light of New Testament fulfillment and of Christian doctrine. “Thus prosopology in their hands, is not only an instrument of literary analysis and historical identification, but also and especially an instrument of spiritual perception and theological elaboration.”53
Among the church fathers, nobody more fully integrated prosoponic exegesis into the doctrine of the Trinity than Hilary of Poitiers. In fact, it is hard to know whether his prosoponic reading strategy with the Psalms gave his treatise on the Trinity its distinctive form, or whether his convictions about the revelation of the Trinity gave him insight into the right way of approaching the Psalms. Whichever direction the current of influence flows, it is Hilary who announced programmatically in his On the Trinity that “since we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of Himself, and bow with humble reverence to His words. For He Whom we can only know through His own utterances is the fitting witness concerning Himself.”54 And that triune self-testimony inevitably took the form of testimony by one divine person about another. In proving the divine sonship of Christ, he announced that it is a doctrine which “we prove by the witness of the Father, by Christ’s own assertion,” and only then “by the preaching of Apostles, by the faith of believers.”55 Throughout his development of the doctrine of the Trinity, Hilary took frequent recourse to prosoponic exegesis, but the ultimate reason for his doing so was his fundamental commitment to the interpersonal character of the testimony of the persons to each other: “Since no one knoweth the Father save the Son, let our thoughts of the Father be at one with the thoughts of the Son, the only faithful Witness, Who reveals Him to us.”56
Although her focus is on the church fathers, Rondeau does not miss the fact that “the New Testament puts into the mouth of Christ, explicitly or indirectly, a number of psalm verses.”57 We do not normally think of the church fathers as lacking confidence in their exegetical hypotheses, or as casting about for reassurances that their applications are warranted. But Rondeau notes that they seemed to draw special inspiration from the fact that Jesus prayed the Psalms, and New Testament authors put psalms on his lips at several crucial points: “In light of these indications, the exegete, extrapolating from the isolated verse to the entire poem, imputes to Christ the entire Psalm in question.”58
REREADING THE PSALMS AS TRINITARIAN PRAISE
The Psalms are indeed a sacred province not only for prosoponic exegesis but for all manner of Trinitarian interpretation. All the necessary components are abundantly present there and are poetically stated in a way that enables them to transcend their original setting. We have already seen how some exegetes in the second and fourth centuries made use of the Psalms as a bearer of Trinitarian theology. An especially artful variation on this usage occurs in the medieval period. As we mentioned in chapter 1, the Carolingian theologian Gerhohus the Great (1093–1169)59 concluded his commentary on each of the psalms with a customized Trinitarian Gloria Patri keyed to the vocabulary and themes of each psalm.60 It is a very sophisticated maneuver. Gerhoch is not finding the Trinity revealed in each psalm, but is making use of the psalm’s discrete witness, its distinctive way of speaking, in a canonical celebration of the full counsel of the Bible. Here are examples from five well-known psalms:
1. Psalm 1: Wherefore: Glory be to the Father, Who knoweth the Way of the righteous; glory be to the Son, Who is the Way of the righteous, the Man Who is blessed, and prosperous in whatsoever He doeth; glory be to the Holy Ghost, Who is the Wind that scattereth the ungodly. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
2. Psalm 8: (“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”) Wherefore Glory be to the Father, Who hath put all things under the feet of the Son of Man; glory be to the Son, Who, though Son of God, vouchsafed to become Son of Man, and to be made lower than the Angels, and now is crowned with glory and honour as Priest and King; glory be to the Holy Ghost, the Finger of God, by Whom the heavens were made. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
3. Psalm 15 (“Who shall abide in thy holy hill?”) Wherefore Glory be to the Father, Whose is the holy hill; and to the Son, Who shall abide in it for ever; and to the Holy Ghost, by Whom only we are to reach it. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
4. Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God”) Wherefore Glory be to the Father, from Whom was the going forth of the Sun; and to the Son, Who cometh forth as a Bridegroom out of His chamber; and to the Holy Ghost, the spiritual heat, from which not anything is hid. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
5. Psalm 23: And therefore: Glory be to the Father, Who anoints our head with oil; and to the Son, the Shepherd of His people; and to the Holy Ghost, Who provides for us that inebriating chalice which is so excellent. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.61
Gerhoch’s Trinitarian psalm doxologies are models of Trinitarian interpretation of the Old Testament. They are rereadings in light of the later developments of the story of salvation told in the canon. They negotiate the canonical hinge expertly, letting the Old Testament maintain its discrete witness rather than ignoring the unrevealedness of the Trinity under the old covenant. The rich vocabulary of the psalms infuses and enriches the Trinitarian theology in such a way that the Old Testament actually influences Trinitarian theology. While they include many fanciful leaps of association, they are fundamentally grounded in Jesus’ own appropriation of the Psalms as his personal voice. They point forward to the events of the incarnation and Pentecost, permitting us to distinguish adumbration from revelation. They are uniquely creative, yet grounded in a widespread tradition of Christian use of the psalms; Isaac Watts did robustly christological versions of the psalms in rhyming and metrical English.62 They set us into the biblical movement of Trinitarian praise, with its vast stretch of reflection on the deep realities antecedent to our salvation: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
1. Aquinas, ST I, q. 32, a. 1c.
2. William Greenhill, An Exposition of the Prophet Ezekiel with Useful Observations Thereupon (Edinburgh: Nichol, 1864), iv. Nodos are knots, or difficult passages; δυσνόητά are “things . . . that are hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16).
3. William Burt Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology, vol. 1 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1877), 260.
4. Geerhardus Vos, Theology Proper, vol. 1 of Reformed Dogmatics (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2014), 38.
5. B. B. Warfield, “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952), 22.
6. Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 38–41.
7. This discussion was somewhat stormier in Lutheran scholasticism, for complex reasons including the hotter conflict in those quarters between rationalism and pietism. The flashpoint was theologian George Calixt (1586–1656) and his 1649 Dissertatio de mysterio trinitatis, an ex solius Veteris Testamenti libris possit demonstrari (Treatise on the mystery of the Trinity: whether it can be demonstrated from the books of the Old Testament alone). His answer, negative and inclined toward rationalism, provoked many responses and may be responsible for an overcorrection in the opposite direction among Lutheran interpreters.
8. E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 6.
9. Northrup Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), xii.
10. Bonaventure, The Breviloquium, vol. 2 of The Works of Bonaventure (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963), Prologue, 11–12.
11. Matin Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 45.
12. A helpful set of essays is found in David Galef, ed., Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998).
13. The best treatment I have seen of rereading in biblical theology is found in Karoline M. Lewis, Rereading the Shepherd Discourse: Restoring the Integrity of John 9:39–10:21 (New York: Lang, 2008). Lewis is theory heavy, and this book has something of the transgressive attitude of avant-garde literary criticism, but her approach definitely yields results for reading John’s gospel in canonical context.
14. R. T. France, “The Writer of Hebrews as a Biblical Expositor,” Tyndale Bulletin 47.2 (Nov. 1996): 250.
15. Matthew Malcolm, ed., All That the Prophets Have Declared: The Appropriation of Scripture in the Emergence of Christianity (Exeter: Paternoster, 2015).
16. Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 14.
17. Warfield, “Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” 32–33.
18. On top of the wealth of journal articles, see the comprehensive reference work titled Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); and the important survey Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. Kenneth Berding and Jonathan Lunde (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).
19. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997). The work is from about the year 175.
20. C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” Pro Ecclesia 11:3 (Summer 2002): 308.
21. Ibid., 299.
22. G. E. Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM, 1952), 29.
23. Thomas Dehany Bernard, The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament (1864; repr., Wenham MA: Gordon College Press, 1972), 3.
24. C. Kavin Rowe, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).
25. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
26. Benedict T. Viviano, O.P., “The Trinity in the Old Testament, from Daniel 7:13–14 to Matthew 28:19,” in Trinity – Kingdom – Church: Essays in Biblical Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).
27. Henri de Lubac, “Spiritual Understanding,” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen E. Fowl (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 7.
28. Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1969), 102.
29. Henry Chadwick, “The Beginning of Christian Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 163. For a detailed analysis of the continuity and discontinuity in this tradition, see Kari Kloos, Christ, Creation, and the Vision of God: Augustine’s Transformation of Early Christian Theophany Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
30. Augustine, Trinity 2.3.13, 106.
31. This interpretation fits well with the framing provided by Michael Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figural Exegesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
32. Andrew Malone, Knowing Jesus in the Old Testament? A Fresh Look at Christophanies (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2015), has traced the usage to James A. Borland, Christ in the Old Testament: Old Testament Appearances of Christ in Human Form (Chicago: Moody, 1978).
33. It is an ironic charge. See Keith E. Johnson, Rethinking the Trinity and Religious Pluralism: An Augustinian Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 112–13.
34. Michael Slusser, “The Exegetical Roots of Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 49 (1988): 462.
35. Ibid., 463. Stephen O. Presley points out that Slusser’s contribution here is that “he calls attention to the dominance of analytical analysis in Trinitarian discussions and reminds us that the very terms of the debates (prosōpon, hypostasis, ousia, and physis) are derived from the exegesis of Scripture. Thus there is a genetic exegetical discussion underlying the analytical one and the analytical Trinitarian debates should recognize their inherited exegesis” (“Irenaeus and the Exegetical Roots of Trinitarian Theology,” in Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy, ed. Paul Foster and Sara Parvis [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012], 165).
36. See Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 42:1.
37. Stephen O. Presley, The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1–3 in Irenaeus of Lyons (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 4.
38. Matthew Bates, The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012).
39. Matthew Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
40. Ibid., 7.
41. Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie, vol. 2 of Les Commentateurs patristiques du Psautier (IIIe-Ve siècles) (Rome: Oriental Institute, 1985).
42. St. Hilary of Poitiers, “Homilies on the Psalms: Psalm 1,” in vol. 9 of NPNF, 2nd ser., ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 236.
43. Rondeau, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie, 37.
44. Ibid., 38.
45. Ibid., 74.
46. The only other book with such prosoponic intensity is the Song of Solomon, “the most read and most frequently commented [on] in the medieval cloister” (Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture [New York: Fordham University Press], 84). Leclercq explores the way monastic Canticles commentaries were meditative and affective; in short, personal, allowing the reader to discern the voice of the beloved speaking directly. One literary feature the Song of Solomon shares with many psalms is the technique of shifting among speakers, with or without discourse markers, calling for similar reading techniques. Rondeau reports Origen’s prosoponic approach to the Song of Solomon, of which he says, “This little book, this epithalamium, is a nuptial poem, like a drama” (Rondeau, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie, 44).
47. Rondeau, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie, 9.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid. She goes on to describe the purpose of her book: “Besides the study of an unknown exegetical method and its theological fertility, our investigation in patristic commentaries on the Psalter pursues a third track: the word and the concept of person.” “Christian revelation deepens and specifies this concept” (11).
50. Ibid., 9.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity 1:18.
55. Ibid., 1:25.
56. Ibid., 2:6.
57. Rondeau, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie, 9.
58. Ibid., 9–10.
59. Also rendered Gerhohus Magnus and Gerhoch of Reichersberg.
60. These can be gathered from J. M. Neale and R. F Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms: from Primitive and Mediaeval Writers (London: Masters, 1869).
61. J. M. Neale and R. F. Littledale, Psalm 1–38, vol. 1 of Commentary on the Psalms (London: Masters, 1869), 95–96, 146–47, 197, 263, 315–16.
62. See Samuel Worcester, The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Rev. Isaac Watts, new ed. (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1859). Watts’s psalms can be quite heavy-handed in making David into a Christian, but they are not as daringly Trinitarian as one might hope. Watts entertained some doubts about the clarity of Trinitarian revelation; this hurt his poetry, as well as his ministry.