God the Trinity: Biblical Portraits (Book Excerpt)

Evangelicalism in America has amalgamated for scholars in the organization known as the Evangelical Theological Society. The two parts of its “doctrinal basis” concern the Bible’s truthfulness and God the Trinity. While some evangelicals have addressed the Trinity in terms of systematic theology and others have employed the Trinity in debates over gender relations, few monographs are dedicated to evaluating the biblical source material for the Trinity. This is an odd oversight for a people whose confession centers on only the Bible and the Trinity.

Anecdotal evidence, moreover, suggests such work should begin in earnest, for if a recent survey is correct, most evangelical Christians in the United States are not necessarily Trinitarian. One-fifth of American evangelicals claimed Jesus is the first creature created by God, and more than half claimed the Holy Spirit is a force and not a personal being. That survey gives some credence to Curtis Freeman’s controversial claim that “most Baptists are Unitarians that simply have not yet gotten around to denying the Trinity.” If evangelical scholars are Trinitarian, the people in the churches may not be.

In addition, there is some diversity among Christian scholars regarding whether the Trinity is a necessary doctrine. One well-known evangelical theologian, Roger E. Olson of Baylor University, says the doctrine of the Trinity is a true conclusion, but belief in the Trinity is neither necessary nor part of gospel proclamation. Another, R. Albert Mohler Jr. of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to the contrary classifies the doctrine of the Trinity as “fundamental and essential to the Christian faith.” Leaving to the side the issue of “theological triage,” which both theologians affirm, an evangelical equivocation regarding the Trinity remains.

In writing this book, we set out to answer these two questions: Is the doctrine that God is Trinity a biblical doctrine? Is it, moreover, a doctrine that is necessary to believe? The eight chapters in this book contribute toward the answers.

In the midst of engaging in the close theological exegesis of eight important biblical texts, it became evident that a Trinitarian reading of Scripture also required an evaluation of Protestant hermeneutics. The method of Bible study many evangelicals are taught to use must be substantially revised if the Trinity and the Bible are to coalesce. As a result, there arose the need to wrestle with interpretive method as much as Trinitarian exegesis. Indeed, we almost adopted the subtitle, “The Trinitarian Revision of Biblical Hermeneutics.”

Karl Barth observed this difficulty and opted to diminish hermeneutics out of concern that any interpretive criterion beyond the text necessarily distorts exegesis. While there is much to learn from Barth, and his call to enter “the strange new world of the Bible” warms the heart of this free churchman in his own friendly remonstration toward Protestant evangelicalism, we have opted to revise rather than repress evangelical hermeneutical method.

In the following study, comparison is made with the art of painting as a helping metaphor. This was deemed helpful on several accounts. First, it allows for a focused consideration of the various texts, treating each according to its own authorship, genre, and context. From a modern critical perspective, this properly takes the history and grammar of any text as a distinct phenomenon with utmost solemnity. Second, the appeal to art helps construct a bridge from the rationalism endemic among the practitioners of my own discipline in theology to the more holistic approach of the biblical writers. The critique of any work of literature requires both reason and imagination, but the theological interpretation of Scripture especially requires the graces of both logos and pneuma.

Third, the art metaphor allows this author to function as an appreciative if critical commentator upon each text as a great work of theological literature. Avoiding the extremes of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, we sought to weave a middle way through the judicious employment of both modern and premodern methods. Finally, the meticulous treatment of each text on its own later permits the epilogue to pursue a distinct canonical approach, as when art is gathered thematically for review in contemporary art galleries.

Order God the Trinity at LifeWay, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Christianbook.com.

(This post originally appeared in a slightly different format at my publisher's website, B&H Academic.)

Creativity & Discipline

Discipline is necessary to accomplish almost anything worthwhile in this life. Christ Jesus, we are told, 'learned obedience', most likely a reference to his humanity, as an ascription to the divine nature would call into question his constancy and omniscience. So, the human Jesus learned obedience. He grew in his knowledge of the divine will, bringing the human will into conformity. Here is an argument for a free will, a will exercising true freedom in obedience to God. How did he do it? 1) As the revelation of God, he knew the divine will. For us, this requires constant exposure to divine revelation, finding our life in the living word that gives life, exulting in the presence of God in our ears, on our lips, in our hearts, hearing, confessing, believing. 2) He obeyed the divine will, submitting himself to the will of the Father, even when it brought him duress in extremis in the garden. For us, this requires divine grace, since the human heart, having sold itself into wickedness, is locked in its depravity. By faith (itself a grace) we accept this grace into our lives and are thereby saved, being saved by grace, holding onto our salvation until its completion by grace. Christ 'learned obedience' and the restoration of a truly free will among the redeemed is manifested in a similar learning of obedience to God. This obedience is through the Word in the Spirit unto the Father; this obedience is by the Word in the Spirit from the Father. (The mystery of free grace and human response is again before us.) This obedience is otherwise known as discipline, discipleship, taking up the cross and following Him. So far, discipline.

And yet, as beings made in the image of the God who creates, we humans, male & female, also share in creativity. Do we as creatures fashion ex nihilo, out of nothing, as God did in the beginning? No, but we do fashion that which God has made. Surely, God finds joy in his image mimicking his creative acts. Like God's Word, we also use words to name creation--God found delight in Adam naming animals. Like God's Spirit, our spirits become one in the flesh of man & wife and we marvel at the mystery of the gift of a new breath coursing through the body of a newborn child. Beyond these acts of creation, is not work itself, for which God made us, by nature a creative activity? Whether it be the subduing of the earth in rows of corn, or the reporting of responsible capitalism in the columns of an accounting ledger, or the brushing of the swirls of an approaching storm splashed upon a taut canvas, these are acts of creation. Creativity from a human perspective involves taking two or more related yet often seemingly irreconcilably conflicting created things and bringing them together into some new created thing, 'new' in the sense of not previously recognized in our experience. And in that moment of creative action, the artist, the pilot, the scientist has a sense of exhilaration that is fundamentally pleasurable. As when God declared such and such to be good at the end of its creation, we too mimic him. The 'aha' of the creative work of man is a statement of discovery that echoes the 'it was good' declaration of God, an echo diminished qualitatively by the depravity of man, but an echo of goodness nonetheless.

So, what has creativity to do with discipline? Discipline brings the creative acts of male & female closer to the 'it was good' of God. When a human musician disciplines her fingers to pluck the strings of a classical guitar, chords of the divine symphony orchestrating creation throughout all time whispers mystery into our ears. When the architect disciplines his eyes and hands with his mind to connect this line with that circle at that particular angle in a reflection of the perfection of a divine thought, we glimpse behind the maker of the building another Maker whose glory is at the same time overwhelmingly awesome yet only vaguely perceived now. And when Christ disciplined his body and his mind to glorify his father, we see him take with divine authority the most gruesome deformation of wood & metal devised by human depravity for the sake of human torture, the cross of death, and through his human discipline, which he learned, transform that grotesque instrument by his own blood into the most glorious means by which his humanity, our humanity, reaches out and fully embraces and is embraced by the perfection of the God of love who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The discipline of the man who was God recreated humanity again into the image of God. And what cannot a humanity recreated by the cross of Christ itself create to bring us closer to the knowledge of his perfect formation of creation? Greater works than the miracles he performed in his first ministry upon the earth he promised his people would do. The key to the grace of creativity is the grace of discipline, a discipline with its eyes set on the revelation of God in Christ, and its hands wrapped around the pain of brokenness of whatever cross he lays upon his own, and its feet moving whither the Spirit would take them, and its mouth opening to speak nothing but his Word, for his glory, by his power. This is the discipline of Christian creativity. What ugliness, Lord, would you have transformed through the instrumentality of this body, which is learning the beauty of discipline to your will? Speak, Lord, your servant is ready to be disciplined for the sake of your creation.

(I offer this piece only at the encouragement of my bride, who read this entry from my private diary.)