Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Scripture: The Bible and the Triune Economy

1.Triune Discourse: Theological Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks, Part 1

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

2.Triune Discourse: Theological Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks, Part 2

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

3. The Gift of the Father: Looking at Salvation History Upside Down

Edith M. Humphrey

Part Two: Community: The Trinity and Society?

4. God Is Love: The Social Trinity and the Mission of God

John R. Franke

5. The Trinity Is Not Our Social Program: Volf, Gregory of Nyssa and Barth

Mark Husbands

6. Does the Doctrine of the Trinity Hold the Key to a Christian Theology of Religions?

Keith E. Johnson

7. Trinity and Missions: Theological Priority in Missionary Nomenclature

Robert K. Lang'at

Part Three: Worship: Church Practices and the Triune Mission

8. The Sacraments and the Embodiment of Our Trinitarian Faith

Gordon T. Smith

9. Preaching as a Trinitarian Event

Philip W. Butin

10. The Church?s Proclamation as a Participation in God's Mission

Leanne Van Dyk

11. What to Do with Our Renewed Trinitarian Enthusiasm: Forming Trinitarian Piety and Imagination Through Worship and Catechesis

John D. Witvliet

(Extract from) Introduction

Daniel J. Treier and David Lauber

In the middle of the twentieth century, Western theologians rediscovered the doctrine of the Trinity. In the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, evangelicals began catching up with this rediscovery of the triune God. So goes the standard story. The purpose of this book is to make sense of such a tale for the sake of church life.This introduction will first sketch the standard narrative, next survey the basics of trinitarian theology to frame what all the clamor is about,then explore some revisionist accounts that challenge the standard narrativeand finally look ahead to the contents of this present work.

The Standard Narrative

On the standard account, the twentieth century renewal of trinitarian theology responds to centuries of doctrinal tragedy. The medieval development of heavily systematic, “scholastic” theologies dealing with ever more abstract, speculative questions began to squelch trinitarian dogma. The metaphysical approaches of Western philosophers gave priority to the one substance of the “unmoved mover” who caused the universe. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit played second fiddle to this monotheistic Most Perfect Being, because the history of salvation, in which the particularity of the three persons is revealed, became an afterthought. The structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica is emblematic in this regard: first he speaks of De Deo uno, the one God, and only later of De Deo trino, the three-personed God. The Protestant Reformers may have resisted scholastic speculation a couple centuries later, but their emphasis on organic biblical theology did not foster a trinitarian renaissance due to the doctrine’s lack of explicit development in Scripture.

Accordingly, in the wake of the Enlightenment’s quest for a universal, rational and natural religion, the tri-unity of the Christian God became a source of embarrassment. Out of obligation, conservative theologians continued to demand adherence to the doctrine and unfolded it in their systematic theologies, but they lacked the confidence to develop the doctrine itself or its implications with rigor and verve. More liberal theologians, meanwhile, increasingly hid the doctrine from public focus or considered it to be unnecessary speculation and denied it entirely. An oft-cited example is Friedrich Schleiermacher. Considering the Trinity to be unnecessary in accounting for the pious experience of redemption, Schleiermacher thus relegated the doctrine to a thirteen-page conclusion at the end of nearly eight hundred pages and, furthermore, rejected its orthodox formulation to some degree or another.

Early in the twentieth century, however, Karl Barth embraced the revelatory scandal over trinitarian theology instead of cowering with embarrassment. Barth’s tendency to think of everything in relation to Jesus Christ as divine revelation brought trinitarian dogma back to the forefront of theological agendas. Beginning at mid-century, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jürgen Moltmann and others followed Barth by developing Trinity-rich approaches to history and eschatology. Feminist and Global South theologians such as Catherine Mowry LaCugna and Leonardo Boff explored the possibilities of trinitarian doctrine for connecting God more closely to the world and its suffering, as well as for constructing models of human community.

The resulting forms of what is often called “social trinitarianism” began to influence evangelicals late in the twentieth century, as Western individualism came under ever more intense criticism. The “postmodern” urge to seek community prodded pastoral accounts of divine fellowship as not only the motivation but also the model for such human communion. Forms of the social emphasis vary widely, as do the ways theologians apply it to the church and society, but at times the appeal to relationality itself seems ubiquitous.

Yet, with rare exceptions, the apparent popularity and pastoral appeal of trinitarian theology for evangelicals has not elicited much depth of doctrinal reflection among us. Hence we took up the subject at the 2008 Wheaton Theology Conference, from which the essays in this book have been collected. Before providing an overview of the chapters themselves,however, it will help to step back and consider what we mean by “trinitarian theology” in the first place, as well as how one might challenge the standard story we have just told.

The Basics of Trinitarian Theology

The doctrine of the Trinity has a history with its roots in Jewish monotheism. The basic pattern of biblical teaching about God starts with the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (NIV). What were the early Christians to make of their worshiping Jesus Christ in light of such Old Testament teaching—in light of the Bible as they knew it? Moreover, just when and how may we speak of “worshiping” Jesus Christ? If there is evidence of such worship in the New Testament,were the early Christians indeed worshiping Jesus as “fully divine” in the sense of which the later creeds speak? The church fathers used the phrase lex orandi lex credendi to say that the “law of prayer” should be the “law of faith”: what we say about God in our creeds should match our worship practices. But is the trinitarian theology toward which the Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creed points a philosophical imposition over the simplicity of Scripture, an imposition deriving from the later clash of Judaism and a form of “Christianity” moving in a Greco-Roman direction?

To the contrary, there is, in fact, New Testament evidence of triadic thinking about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Passages such as 1 Peter1:2; the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19-20; 2 Corinthians 13:14 and a host of such Pauline texts clearly evince a conviction of some threeness in God, giving at least some “divine” significance to the Son and Spirit. Furthermore,the New Testament seems to draw on certain Old Testament hints about plurality or relationality in God, at least about divine self-expressiveness toward the created order: the figures of Wisdom, Word and Spirit are especially relevant in this connection. Perhaps this should be enough to conclude that the earliest Christian teaching, fixed in the New Testament, identifies Jesus with God. But in any case the Gospel of John in places such as 1:1-18 and 8:58 makes this identification more explicitly. And when it comes to the Holy Spirit, the early Christians clearly built on Old Testament texts identifying the Spirit with divine power. Eventually the church concluded as well that the Spirit participates personally in divine identity, as verses such as Acts 5:3 and Romans 8:14-16 seem to indicate with regard to the Spirit’s communicative actions.

From the biblical texts and the arguments about them in light of the Christ event, which initiate this Christian tradition of worship, we gain a strange sense of living in freedom by way of basic rules that exclude error—not excluding disagreements, mind you, but ruling out divisive heresies. For many of us, who know only two ways of handling disagreements—either dividing over them or else dismissing them as irrelevancies due to common piety—this could seem to be a new way of life. Some disagreements are indeed not worthy of division but may nevertheless be discussed and debated as very relevant. Other disagreements, though, are so relevant to Christian life and worship that they require division; otherwise they would rend apart the common fabric of piety. Hence we need creedal language—to set the basic rules within which the community can think and live, rules by which extreme errors are excluded. ...