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Category Archive: Theology - Trinity

Ontology of Personhood - November 13, 2007
John Zizioulas summarizes his "ontology of personhood" in an article in Christoph Schwobel's volume, Persons – Divine and Human. Zizioulas begins with the question of the relation between being and personal identity: "It is all too often assumed that people...

Knowing God Twice - November 13, 2007
Barth has a stimulating discussion of Israel's double-knowledge of Yahweh in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics. He begins with a discussion of what he calls the "hypostases" of God, a usage he takes from "religious science" rather than...

Unity or Revelation - November 12, 2007
Barth says that non-Trinitarian theology inevitably deny either the unity of God or His revelation. If it maintains the unity of God "it has to call revelation in question as the act of the real presence of the real God....

Vestiges of Perichoresis - November 09, 2007
FCN Hicks offers this wonderful summary of human perichoresis: "The ordinary man is apt to say that, for him, the idea of 'mutual indwelling' is unreal, a thing, perhaps for 'saints,' or of exceptionally religious people, but without meaning in...

The Point of Trinitarian Theology - November 06, 2007
Jenson's article "What is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?" in Chrisoph Schwobel's Trinitarian Theology Today offers one of the most succinct statements of Jenson's theology. He begin with the observation that "theology" and particularly "Trinitarian theology" is not second-order discourse...

Jenson on Trinity - November 06, 2007
Veli-Matti Karkkainen offers a good summary of Jenson's Trinitarian theology. He begins with seven propositions that describe Jenson's particular contribution to Trinitarian studies. First, the Trinity is about the identity of Israel's and the church's God among the gods of...

Circumcised theology - November 05, 2007
Robert Jenson says "It was the great single dogma of late Mediterranean antiquity's religion and irreligion, that no story can be 'really' true of God, that deity equals 'impassibility.' It is not merely that the gospel tells a story about...

More on Panennberg - October 30, 2007
Christoph Schwobel has a dense but helpful overview of Pannenberg's theology in David Ford's The Modern Theologians. Pannenberg insists from the beginning of his career that history is revelation, and his whole theology is an effort to hammer out the...

Pannenberg on Trinity - October 30, 2007
In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen has a concise summary of Pannenberg's Trinitarian theology. He begins by noting that Pannenberg's entire program for theology is to establish the "truth of Christian doctrine." Theology is a public discipline that...

Trinitarian justice? - October 25, 2007
For Aquinas, the ideal situation of justice is a situation of equality. Only when the persons acting toward each other are equal is there "justice without qualification." For an act to be an act of justice per se, it's necessary...

Moltmann, II - October 23, 2007
Richard Bauckham has written two books on Moltmann, and he summarizes his findings in a general article on Moltmann in David Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians. He first traces the development of Moltmann's work, from the early trilogy (Theology of...

Moltmann - October 23, 2007
In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen gives a superb detailed summary of Moltmann, and offers some pointed, even devastating, criticisms. Moltmann puts the cross as the center of his understanding of God: "the cross of the Son stands...

In defense of Augustine - October 23, 2007
One of the main critics of contemporary interpretations of Augustine has been Michel Rene Barnes of Marquette. He summarizes the case against Augustine, and the fundamental problems with that case, in a 1995 article from Theological Studies. I am also...

Evangelical attributes - October 20, 2007
Robert Jenson attempts to expound the attributes of God as explications of the statement "God raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit." He objects to the traditional "bipartite classification" systems prevalent in Protestant dogmatics, citing John Gerhard's distinction between...

Holiness and Absolute - October 20, 2007
In his Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge quotes the following from DF Strauss's Dogmatik: "The ideas of the absolute and of the holy are incompatible. He who holds to the former must give up the latter, since holiness implies relation; and,...

Real Hellenist Stand Up - October 16, 2007
During much of the modern period, the development of Trinitarian theology has been seen as a "Hellenization" of the original Christian faith. Harnack for instance, "asserts that Logos Christianity, the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, and the Chalcedonian dogma of...

On Trinitarian Revivals - October 15, 2007
Lewis Ayres offers some important historical perspective to the claim that there has been a Trinitarian revival in the last several decades: "it is important to notice that claims for a revival of Trinitarian theology have been made in a...

Divine energies - October 15, 2007
Lossky summarizes the problem for which the doctrine of divine energies is the solution as follows: "If we were able tat a given moment to be united to the very essence of God and to participate in it in the...

Spring, River, Lake - October 06, 2007
Anselm compared the Trinity to the Nile. Water arises from a spring, travels as a river, and empties into the lake. As Dennis Ngien summarizes, "The spring is not the river nor is the lake; the lake is not the...

Solitary God - October 06, 2007
Richard poses a dilemma to unitarians: "if we say that in true Divinity there exists only one person, just as there is only one substance, then without doubt according to this He will not have anyone with whom He could...

Wasted love - October 06, 2007
Richard of St. Victor presents an argument for the Trinity that starts with human love. Self-love is not the highest form of love; perfected love is self-transcending love, and ultimately the love of two directed toward a third, who returns...

Essentialist and personalist - October 05, 2007
Western Trinitarian theology develops from Augustine, but because Augustine is complex the Western tradition develops along different - equally Augustinian - pathways. That is the argument of Dennis Ngien's 2005 study of the filioque in medieval theology. Anselm, he says,...

Homoousios - August 28, 2007
We fondly look back at the Council of Nicea as a solution to the problem of Arianism, and see the homoousios as the key to this solution. Things are not nearly so tidy. Robert Letham neatly summarizes the problems associated...

Whatever happened to the Trinity? - August 21, 2007
What happened to Trinitarian theology between the Reformation and the eighteenth century. The closest thing I've found to an answer is Philip Dixon's Nice and Hot Disputes, which summarizes some of the developments in seventeenth-century England. Here are some of...

Vestigia trinitatis - August 21, 2007
In an article on vestigia trinitatis in early modern thought, Dennis Klinck notes that the early 17th century saw a flowering of Trinitarian theology in England. Theologians, poets, and others saw the Trinity reflected in political life, human psychology, every...

Donne on the Trinity - August 21, 2007
In stanza 4 of Donne's "Litanie," he addresses the Trinity: O Blessed glorious Trinity, Bones to Philosophy, but milke to faith, Which, as wise serpents, diversly Most slipperinesse, yet most entanglings hath, As you distinguish'd undistinct By power, love, knowledge...

Trinity and Judgment - June 19, 2007
Is the denial of judgment according to works implicitly binitarian? If we are judged according to Christ's imputed righteousness, then at the judgment, Jesus' works are approved but not ours. the judgment is Father-Son. But where's the Spirit? If our...

Responsive God - June 14, 2007
How can God respond to prayers, and yet not have a "real" (ie, a reciprocal, dependent) relation with the creation? Perhaps there's a Trinitarian answer to this: In the creation, God responds to His own work. He makes light, and...

Trinitarian concursus - February 15, 2007
In the latest IJST, Paul Nimmo of Cambridge discusses Barth's doctrine of divine concursus, contesting the idea (advanced by George Hunsinger among others) that Barth's concursus doctrine is "Chalcedonian." Early in the article, he summarizes Barth's treatment in the Church...

Trinity and forgiveness - February 08, 2007
The doctrine of the Trinity is the pre-condition for forgiveness. Consider: "If a man sins against another man, God will mediate for him; but if man sins against God, who can intercede for Him" (1 Samuel 2:25). God stands between...

Father and Son - January 24, 2007
Tom Smail's Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Eerdmans 2005) has a lot going for it. Written for a general Christian readership, it reflects a thorough familiarity with both tradition and contemporary work on the Trinity,...

Kantian modalism? - January 20, 2007
Post-Kantian thought cannot make room for undistorted revelation of God in history. History, creation, is necessarily a distorting medium. Is this just a form of modalism? Doesn't this just create an unbridgeable modalist gap between God-in-Himself and God-as-revealed? Isn't this...

Double Procession - January 05, 2007
No generation ought to be determined by the spirit of the sons. As a matter of simple fact, the world is never occupied by a single generation. For a generation to be healthy, the spirit of the sons must mingle...

I and We - December 21, 2006
Auden said that "protestantism is correcte in affirming that the We are of society" is false unless each individual "can say I am." At the same time, what he called catholicism is also correct that anyone who cannot "join with...

Nice and Hot Disputes - November 22, 2006
For a number of years, I have wanted a historical study of the decline of Trinitarian theology between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. James Buckley tells part of that story in his history of atheism, but his interests are broader....

Vestigia trinitatis - November 16, 2006
Keith Johnson gave a solid exposition of Augustine's views on the vestigia trinitatis in an ETS session this morning. He argued that Augustine is not using the vestigia to prove the Trinity or as a "second root" (Barth) in addition...

Room in God - October 03, 2006
It seems that we can dwell "in" God only if He is Triune. To put it pictorially, and somewhat quaintly: Is there any space in a god like Allah where we might find a place? It seems that at best...

Trinity and Self-Gift - September 05, 2006
One of Barth's main contentions that only a Triune God can give Himself. A monadic God might give, but would give something less than Himself. Only if God is both Himself and another, and only if that other is fully...

Individuality and Communion - September 04, 2006
TF Torrance (The Christian Doctrine of God) writes that "Human beings do not exist within one another, but this is precisely what the divine Persons of the Holy Trinity do." A page later he explained that since the Persons dwell...

Divine Love - August 26, 2006
The Persons of the Trinity live out an eternal round of self-sacrificing love. If a proof text is needed, John 15 supplies it. 1) Jesus says, "as the Father loved Me, I have also loved you" (v. 9). Jesus' love...

Mutual Coinherence - April 11, 2006
John Webster (in an essay in Volf and Welker, God's Life in Trinity) prefers the term "fellowship" to "communion" in describing the way creatures participate in the perfect life of God: "God communicates his absolute life. This communication does not...

Totality and Dialogue - January 19, 2006
In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida says that no "logos as absolute knowledge can comprehend the dialogue and the trajectory toward the other" because "the other is the other" and "all speech is for the other." For Derrida, "A total logos...

Why the Son? - November 20, 2005
James Jordan suggests that the reason the Son enters the world to take the bride has to do with the structure of the Triune life and with the factor of time. History is about the human race growing from the...

Sophia - November 19, 2005
John Milbank gave a very long, very dense lecture (amusingly interrupted by microphone problems and a fire-alarm evacuation of the hotel) on Sophiology and theurgy, drawing mainly on Bulgakov. I can't say that I understood all that was going on,...

Father of Joy - October 26, 2005
The following thoughts came largely from a PCA minister from Virginia with whom I enjoyed a recent, stimulating conversation. The Triune fellowship is a fellowship of eternal infinite joy. The Father delights in His beloved Son, and eternally pours out...

Sex as vestigia trinitatis - September 22, 2005
Barth famously argues there is an I-Thou within humanity itself that manifests the inner reciprocity, the differentiation and union, that is the life of the Trinity: "that it is in the differentiation of man and woman, the relation of sex,...

Holy Trinity - August 30, 2005
Holiness is separation, or so we are told. Let's accept what we're told. How then is God eternally and unchangeably holy? From what is He separated? If we say "the world," then prior to the world's existence God was potentially...

Triune trust - July 06, 2005
Trust in any circumstances is a paradox. On the one hand, trust requires intimacy. We grow in trust by sharing things with a trusted friend that we would not with others. Trust demands that protective veil be drawn between those...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - June 25, 2005
This is out of order from the other posts on Hart. David Hart, Beauty of the Infinite Part 2, section 1: Trinity Thesis 2: Different and distance in Christian understanding are understood in Trinitarian terms. In this light, peace is...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - June 22, 2005
Hart, Beauty of the Infinite Part 2, section I: Trinity Proposition 3: The Christian God shows the beauty of the infinite, and thus can be "traversed" by way of beauty. i. Desire's Flight. God, Hart suggests is "all" but not...

more on Hart, The Beauty of the infinite - June 07, 2005
Part II, I.1: Trinity ii. Divine Fellowship. In the previous section, Hart addressed one of the dangers of misreading Rahner�s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In this section, he discusses the opposite danger...

Jenson has a say - June 01, 2005
Since I posted a lengthy summary of David Hart's sharp critique of Robert Jenson, it's only fair to note that Jenson disputes Hart's account of his theology. In a review in Pro Ecclesia, Jenson claims that Hart "seriously misrepresents me,"...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - May 31, 2005
Part 2: A Dogmatica Minora Section 1: Trinity Hart ended the previous section emphasizing that Christianity offers a story of the infinite that is also, contrary to all paganism, a story of beauty. To fill out this Christian narrative of...

Not One and Many - May 27, 2005
Is the Trinity a solution to the "problem of the one and many"? I think not. It is less a solution than a subversion of the problem itself. In Trinitarian theology, "one" no longer means what "one" means in the...

Dynamic theism - May 27, 2005
Rhetorically, many of the recent attacks on "classical theism" gain a foothold by characterizing classical theism as presenting a Hellenistic, static, and immobile God very much at odds with the dynamic, very Live God of Scripture. It is time to...

Subsistent relations - May 20, 2005
Thomas explained the Triune Persons as subsistent relations: "As to essence, the Father is in the Son because the Father is his essence and he shares it with the Son without any change taking place in himself." Stephen Long explains...

Creator and Reconciler - January 11, 2005
Barth interestingly (CD 1.1, p. 410) suggests a correspondence between soteriology and Trinitarian theology: "reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond creation, so we have also to...

Perichoresis Overload? - December 22, 2004
Princeton's Bruce McCormack protests against the "uncritical expansion of the concept of perichoresis today on the past of a good many theologians." He suggests that the term "is rightly employed in trinitarian discourse for describing that which is dissimilar in...

Escher and the Trinity - December 18, 2004
Thinking about perichoresis or about Gregory Nazianzen's famous "No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendour of the three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one"...

Salvation as Communion - December 17, 2004
Mark Heim has a fine piece on salvation as communion in the October 2004 issue of Theology Today. He begins by distinguishing various sorts of relations that human beings have with one another. It is possible for two persons to...

Letham on Trinity - December 17, 2004
Robert Letham�s book, The Holy Trinity (P&R, 2004) is a superior introduction to Trinitarian theology, certainly the most complete, reliable, and best treatise on the subject to come from a Reformed theologian for I don�t know how long. It covers...

Sermon Outline, Fourth Advent - December 15, 2004
INTRODUCTION Jesus came to reveal the Father, and claims that He is capable of revealing the Father because �I am in the Father and the Father is in Me�E(John 14:6-9). This notion of �mutual indwelling�E(the technical term in theology is...

Eternal Father, Sermon Notes, Third Sunday in Advent - December 08, 2004
INTRODUCTION According to Jesus�Econsistent testimony, the Father sent Jesus into the world (John 3:34; 5:24, 30; 7:28-29; 15:21; 16:5; 17:3). Jesus didn�t come to protect us from an overbearing and hostile Father. He came in obedience to the Father�s commission....

Barth on Trinity - December 04, 2004
A few reflections on Barth's discussion of the Trinity in CD 1.1, ch 10. Thanks to Joshua Appel, Josh Davis, and especially Toby Sumpter who clarified several of these points. 1) Barth insists that Trinitarian theology developed not as a...

Word "Voiced" by the Spirit - November 28, 2004
The Son became flesh through the work of the Spirit. Once this pattern is fixed in our minds, we can see foreshadowings of this throughout the OT: God works through His Word, but it is a "voiced" Word, a Word...

Trinitivium - November 11, 2004
Luther writes: "The Father in divine things is Grammatica, for he gives the Word and is the pure fountainhead from which, if one may so speak, floweth good, excellent, pure speech. Ths Son is Dialectica; for He giveth the arrangement...

Trinity and Story - November 02, 2004
The proposition: We tell stories only because God is Triune. The argument: 1) A story depends on an initial breach. There must be something to separate from, and something separating. There must be some move that takes hero from the...

Thomas Weinandy - October 25, 2004
Thomas Weinandy�s 1995 The Father�s Spirit of Sonship makes an important contribution to Trinitarian theology. Weinandy�s distinctive contribution is to reconceive the place of the Spirit in the Triune life. This small book has many virtues. Weinandy gives an extensive...

Nitzsch on Trinity - October 22, 2004
Barth quotes one CJ Nitzsch on the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity: �So long as theism only distinguishes God and the world and never God from God, it is always caught in a relapse or transition to the...

Trinity and Quadriga - October 05, 2004
Doug Jones suggests the following, promising Trinitarian account of the quadriga: Literal - Father (origins) Allegorical - Son (obvious enough) Anagogical - Spirit (completion) That of course leaves the tropological, but this has to do with the formation of the...

Begotten, Not Made - August 30, 2004
Barth argues in CD 1/1 that the generation of the Son is not only antecedent to and the eternal ground of the act of creation, but that it is a superior act of the Father. The Son's generation points to...

Exhortation, June 20 - June 20, 2004
According to the traditional church calendar, we are several Sundays into Trinity season. Trinity season begins with Trinity Sunday, which is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and Trinity season stretches through the summer and into the autumn, until the beginning...

Distance - June 17, 2004
Can there be a Creator-creature distinction without the Trinity? It would seem not. For a unitarian theology "distance" is introduced only with the world; for a unitarian god to be at a distance, there must be something to be at...

Spirit As Fragrance - March 03, 2004
Cyril of Alexandria developed an intriguing conception of the Spirit as the "fragrance" of God. The Spirit is "a living and active fragrance from the substance of God, a fragrance that transmits to the creature that which comes from God...

Barth's Trinitarianism - January 12, 2004
From Barth, Dogmatics in Outline: "For Christian faith is faith in God, and when the Christian Confession names God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, it is pointing to the fact that in His inner life and nature...

Studebaker on Pauw - November 05, 2003
Steve Studebaker writers in the Scottish Journal of Theology (56:3) about Edwards's trinitarian theology, and includes an extended critique of Amy Plantinga Pauw's treatment of Edwards's incipient "social trinitarianism." According to Studebaker, Pauw's analysis only works if one assumes that...

Unitarianism - October 29, 2003
The internal contradictions of unitarianism: If God is finite, then there is a boundary, and he is hardly worthy of the name God. If he is infinite, then there is no boundary, but there is also no outside. But if...

Chosen in Christ - September 26, 2003
Lecture #3: Chosen in Christ: Election and Trinity INTRODUCTION Scripture teaches that God does all things according to the purpose of His will (Ephesians 1:11), and that the God who does this is the Triune God. How are those...

Surplus at the Origin - September 26, 2003
Lecture #2: Surplus at the Origin: Trinity, Eschatology, and Story INTRODUCTION This is going to be difficult. I hope it's worth it. I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive,...

The Dance of God, the Dance of Life - September 26, 2003
Here's lectures notes on the first of my lectures on the Trinity at the upcoming Ministerial Conference in Moscow. The next two posts will be notes for my other two lectures. Lecture #1: The Dance of God, the Dance of...

The "Hands" of God - September 23, 2003
Irenaeus's claim that the Son and Spirit are the "hands" of God can sound subordinationist, but with due qualification it contains an important insight. A monadic god can only stand over-against the world as a ruling and commanding power. Anything...

Trinity and Biblical Theology - September 20, 2003
It was one of those "blinding flashes of the obvious" that Jim Jordan often talks about (and apparently, experiences). I was asked the other day if the effort to formulate a thorough-going Trinitarian theology was an exercise of systematics, and...

Perichoresis - September 10, 2003
Perichoresis has been used historically to describe God's relationship to the world, as a way of expressing the immanence and transcendence of God. It is true, on the one hand, that God is contained by nothing, and is instead the...

God's Attributes - September 09, 2003
I work on the assumption that all the attributes of God are Trinitarian, relational attributes. How does this work with an attribute like "holiness," which, by most definitions, describes God as wholly un-related? The key is to notice that the...

Anatolios on Perichoresis - September 04, 2003
A truly amazing article by Khaled Anatolios of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (Cambridge, Mass) in the most recent issue of Pro Ecclesia. Anatolios is exploring the perennial question of the Spirit, and defends the traditional characterizations of the...

Trinity in Reformed Orthodoxy - August 20, 2003
Some very interesting material in Richard Muller's book on the Trinity, the fourth volume of his monumental Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. First, a couple of quotations about the treatment of the Trinity in early Reformed Orthodoxy: One of the major features...

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