The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology - Trinity: Being and Expression

It seems common-sensical that the existence of something logically precedes its self-expression.

Trinitarian theology assaults that common sense.  There is no Father except as He has a Son; no Father who has not always already generated His perfect image and likeness; no God who has not always already expressed Himself in His eternal Word.

It is so for everything.  The table across the room doesn’t intend to express itself visually to me, but if it didn’t then I wouldn’t know it was there.  I think it fair to say that a table that completely and entirely failed to express itself would be a not-table.

For humans, there is often a gap between what we are and what we pretend to be.  There is still an unbreakable link between existence and self-expression, though the self-expression is a false image.  That is our fallenness, or (perhaps) our immaturity.  For God, there is perfect, spontaneous correspondence between what He is and how He shows Himself.

Theology - Trinity: God is Good

Gregory (Against Eunomius, 3.3) insists that only a Trinitarian theology can truly affirm the goodness of God.  He assumes the Scriptural titles for the Son – light, truth, life, glory – and asks whether the Father could ever have been without these goods.  If He was once without the Son, then He was once without these goods.  God is good because God is Triune.

What is God? he asks.  And he answers: “Well, God is a Father. It follows that He is what He is from eternity: for He did not become, but is a Father: for in God that which was, both is and will be. On the other hand, if He once was not anything, then He neither is nor will be that thing: for He is not believed to be the Father of a Being such that it may be piously asserted that God once existed by Himself without that Being. For the Father is the Father of Life, and Truth, and Wisdom, and Light, and Sanctification, and Power, and all else of a like kind that the Only-begotten is or is called. Thus when the adversaries allege that the Light ‘once was not,’ I know not to which the greater injury is done, whether to the Light, in that the Light is not, or to Him that has the Light, in that He has not the Light. So also with Life and Truth and Power, and all the other characters in which the Only-begotten fills the Father’s bosom, being all things in His own fullness. For the absurdity will be equal either way, and the impiety against the Father will equal the blasphemy against the Son: for in saying that the Lord ‘once was not,’ you will not merely assert the non-existence of Power, but you will be saying that the Power of God, Who is the Father of the Power, ‘was not.’ Thus the assertion made by your doctrine that the Son ‘once was not’ establishes nothing else than a destitution of all good in the case of the Father. See to what an end these wise men’s acuteness leads, how by them the word of the Lord is made good, which says, ‘He that despises Me despises Him that sent me’: for by the very arguments by which they despise the existence at any time of the Only-begotten, they also dishonour the Father, stripping off by their doctrine from the Father’s glory every good name and conception.”

Philosophy Theology - Trinity: Nature and Origin

The concept of nature is front-loaded.  Nature is what things are in their origin.  Hence physis sometimes means “birth.”

Hence too Arius: If the Father is ungenerated and the Son begotten, then they must have distinct natures.

Athanasius and the Cappadocians deny the premise.  True, the Father is ungenerated in every sense; He is not even begotten.  The Son is ungenerated in the sense that He is eternal; but He is begotten.  He originates from the Father, while the Father originates from none.  Yet, they are the same nature, and same substance, homoousios.  Origin does not determine nature.

Breaking the link between nature and origin, Trinitarian theology opened the possibility of a back-loaded, eschatological ontology.

Theology - Trinity: The Beholder

What does it mean to call God “God”?  Gregory of Nyssa says (in his letter “On Not Three Gods”) that the word theos is derived from the word for “vision” (theas), so that to call God “God” is to call Him the “Beholder” (theoron).

Insofar as Scripture says that each of the Three Persons “beholds,” thus the Scripture call each “Beholder” or “God”: “Now if any one admits that to behold and to discern are the same thing, and that the God Who superintends all things, both is and is called the superintender of the universe, let him consider this operation, and judge whether it belongs to one of the Persons whom we believe in the Holy Trinity, or whether the power extends throughout the Three Persons. For if our interpretation of the term Godhead, or ??????, is a true one, and the things which are seen are said to be beheld, or ?????, and that which beholds them is called ????, or God, no one of the Persons in the Trinity could reasonably be excluded from such an appellation on the ground of the sense involved in the word. For Scripture attributes the act of seeing equally to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

As John Behr points out (The Nicene Faith: Formation Of Christian Theology, 2 Volume Set (Pt. 1 & 2)), this means that “divinity” refers not to a nature but rather signifies an activity, and a Triune activity.  In a formula that had a great influence on Calvin, Gregory concludes: “Regarding the divine nature, we have not thus learnt that the Father does anything by himself in which the Son is not conjoined, or again that the Son activates anything individually without the Spirit, but that every activity extending from God to creation and named according to [our] manifold conceptions, originates from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.”

Theology - Trinity: Defining Love again

Thomas Oord, whose Defining Love I briefly and sharply criticized here yesterday, writes to tell me that his forthcoming book will fill in some of the gaps I complained about in his book.  He writes,

“You may like to know that the book was published in the same month and year as my other book, The Nature of Love: A Theology.  The books were meant to be read together.  Some of your criticisms of Defining Love – e.g., lack of Trinity ruminations – will be overcome or at least muted significantly if you read my other monograph. You still may not like what I write, but you’ll understand my theology much better after reading the other book.”

Theology - Trinity: Defining Love

Thomas Jay Oord’s Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement is bizarre.  He draws on physical and social sciences in his effort to define love, has a chapter on love and biology and love and cosmology, talks about kenosis a good deal, and concludes with a chapter outlining “A Theology of Love Informed by the Sciences.”

For all the talk about kenosis as essential to God’s character, the self-emptying Oord has in mind is always a self-emptying and self-limitation in relation to some creation or another.  The index has only one lone reference to the Trinity, and that’s in a footnote.

This leads him to some odd conclusions, and produces odd tensions.  He wants to affirm God’s freedom, and wants to say that the world is itself a product of love, but he has dispensed with the traditional theological means for underwriting that freedom, namely, creation ex nihilo.  Instead, he argues that God necessarily exists, but that He necessarily exists in relation to a world.  The freedom of God’s love consists not in “that” he loves, but in “how” he loves.  He might have created a different world, but He could not not have created.  Oord bites the bullet of this account, acknowledging that such a God is “influenced by the ups and downs, joys and sorrows, sins and loves of others,” but somehow His “eternal nature is fixed.  God’s nature is love, and that nature never alters.”

Christian theology has always had ways to affirm both that God is the Lord Creator and that He is compassionate and sympathetic.  The doctrine of the Trinity has been central to the task of harmonizing those two, apparently paradoxical, confessions.  Oord has tried to define Love without much attention to the Father, Son, and Spirit whose life is a communion of love.

Theology - Trinity: Harmony in God

The Triune God is a God of peace.  Father, Son, and Spirit live in eternal and undisruptible harmony with one another.

But harmony is not the same as the sheer “peace” of stasis.  We ought not, I think, figure the harmony of the Persons by analogy with the harmony of figures and colors on a canvas.  It is rather a harmony precisely of Persons, the harmony of perfect conversation, harmony like the harmony of music, movement ever eternally already resolved.  But if that’s not going to collapse back into the peace of stasis, the eternal sounding of a single resolving chord, then we’ve got to think of the harmony of the Persons as involving actual movement, life, boundless life.  Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: One God

Of the atonement, Robert Jenson writes: “We do not want to share the Son’s relation to the Father, we do not want there to be a Father; and that is why the one who said, ‘When you pray, say ‘Our Father,’ had to die.  The Father sends servant after servant and finally the Son.  The vineyard-keepers kill each in turn; given the project that defines their lives, to have no one over them, they could not do otherwise.”

Again: “The eternal inner-triune decision made at the Crucifixion and Resurrection was between the parable as told, with a dead son and slaughter of the vineyard-keepers, and raising a Son who insists rather on forgiving them.  The Father can have his Son and us with him into the bargain, or he can abolish us and have no Son, for there is no Son but the one who said, ‘Father, forgive them.’”

Does this mean that there was a separation of Father and Son that has to be repaired in the resurrection?  Jenson says No.  The Spirit was the once and future bond of union between Father and Son.  Why then the confusing flirtation with the impossible possibility of a separation of Father and Son?

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Jewish Arians again

Burrus, summarizing the argument of Maurice Wiles, notes: “For Wiles, the viability of Arianism, whether in fourth-century Egypt or eighteenth-century England, was partly dependent on the existence of a worldview that could accommodate ‘spirits’ mediating between divine and earthly realms, and thus also find a place for an ontologically subordinate (but still sovereign) Christ.  Trinitarian orthodoxy—which is arguably no more scripturally grounded or logically coherent than Arianism (and perhaps considerably less so)—rests on the rejection of such a mediating christology and cosmology in favor of the concept of a fully transcendent Son, co-essential and co-eternal with the Father, whose problematic status as a ‘second’ divinity is defended in large part by being represented as under attack.”

Leave the “coherence” question to the side.  This, it seems to me, is key evidence in favor of describing Arianism as a form of Judaizing.  Judaizing is a return to Egypt, the effort to return to the system of the law after the law has died and risen in Christ.  The law was a covenant mediated by angels (Acts 7; Galatians 3; Hebrew 2); insofar as Arianism was a return to a world of mediating angels, it was a Judaizing theology.  Athanasius’ charge is not (as Burrus suggests) hate speech, but a substantive theological claim.

Theology - Trinity: Emanation and Relation

In his lucid, concise Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham, Russell Friedman contrasts two different medieval accounts of personal distinction within the Trinity, one rooted in personal relations of opposition and the other rooted in relations of origin or “emanation.”  He illustrates by discussing the “flashpoint” issue that divided Thomas and Bonaventure, the issue of the place of the Father in the Trinity.

For Bonaventure, “the Father is the Father because he generates.  The absolutely fundamental reason that the Father is established in being as the Father . . . is that he generates the Son.”  This is an “emanation” account of the Father’s personality.  The Father is the Person he is because of the emanation that proceeds from Him.

Thomas disagrees.

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Autonomy and Determination

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Jenson raises the question of God’s impassibility (how could he not!?).  Israel’s God is not impassible if that connotes, as it usually did for extra-biblical thought, timelessness.  Yet, Israel’s God is also not passible in a straightforward sense, since passibility connotes passivity.  ”Passion could be unambiguously good only in a person in whom free self-determination and determination by the other were one.”  That’s not true of us, but it is true of God because He is triune:

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Rehabilitating Garrigou

It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone would work to rehabilitate the reputation of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, perhaps the most prominent neo-Thomist assaulted by the nouvelle theologie.  Aidan Nichols does a fine job of it in his lucid Reason with Piety, Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought, but Nichols’ quite objective account pretty much confirms everything one had picked up from de Lubac.

The problems are neatly illustrated by Nichols’ summary of Garrigou’s Trinitarian theology.

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Theology - Trinity: Looking glass God

At the heart of Milbank’s response to Zizek is the insistence that Christianity is fundamentally paradoxical, but not fundamentally dialectical.  For Milbank, the latter partakes of the ontology of violence that he sniffs out beneath classical, modern, and postmodern systems.  In Zizek’s case, it’s fairly overt, and overtly Hegelian.

Milbank argues that the logic of Trinitarian theology is different: “for the most classical Christian perspective, as developed from Gregory of Nyssa through Augustine to Aquinas, the Father in his absolute plenitude as arche nevertheless can never even be considered ‘in himself’ as the first ‘moment,’ since this origin is entirely exhausted in the filial image which it expresses.  This does not, however, mean that it is abolished or negated in what it expresses, since the paradoxical logic of substantive relation also operates with absolute symmetry the other way around: the Son, as expressed image, is only that which he images or expresses.  It is perhaps no accident that it was an orthodox Anglican clergyman who invented looking-glass logic: for the logic of the Trinity suggests that the Father is only his image in a mirror, and yet that this image is indeed a ‘mirror image’ – in itself entirely transparent and containing only its reflected source.”

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: “Platonic Pragmatism”

In his dialog with Slavoj Zizek (published as The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits)), Milbank cites Meister Eckhart’s suggestion that there is an analogy between the Father/Son relation and the relation of justice to a just man: “if the Father and the Son, justice and the just man, are one and the same in nature, it follows . . . that the just man is equal to, not less than, justice, and similarly with the Son in relation to the Father.”  According to Eckhart, without a just man “there would be no justice at all, since justice must be done.  All justice must be expressed justice, performed justice, since justice as a mere idea would not be existing justice at all.”

In short, “a Platonism concerning justice is not denied, as with Hegel, but rather redoubled within the Trinitarian notion by a kind of ‘Platonic pragmatism.’”

Theology - Trinity: Quasi-Jensonian musings

God is identified “by” and “with” temporal events, Jenson argues.  What can we make of that?

Perhaps this: Yahweh is compassionate, slow to anger, in the Hebrew idiom “long of nose.”  He is kind to the weak, generous to the needy.  These are all biblical descriptions of God that describe Him in relation to creation.  What can we say about these?

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Triune Goodness

Bonaventure works up to a description of the Trinity by contemplating what it means for God to be good.  Good is self-diffiusive, and the highest good must be supremely so.  Supreme self-diffusion must involve the complete gift of one’s entire being to another, which is what the Father diffuses to the Son.  Perfect goodness must produce what is “actual and substantial, and a hypostasis as noble as the producer.  Following Richard of St. Victor, he says that this must have a triune character: “from an eternal principle eternally coproducing so that there would be a beloved and a cobeloeved, the one generated and the other spirated.

Then he expounds with mystical excitement on the mystery (I am using the translation of Ewert Cousins, found in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis (The Classics of Western Spirituality):

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Between the Cherubim

In his book on Bonaventure (Great Medieval Thinkers), Christopher Cullen argues that Bonaventure does not separate the treatise de deo uno from one de deo trino.  Cullen’s explanation would not, I suspect, satisfy Rahner, since he distinguishes two approaches, one which “fixes the soul’s gaze primarily and principally on Being Itself” leading to the “first name of God,” namely “He Who is” from a second approach in which the soul gazes “on the Good Itself, saying that this is the very name of God.”  That sounds very close to the double approach that Rahner condemns.

Still, Bonaventure’s intention is certainly not to separate being and good, and he combines the two approaches with a Levitical image: “Having considered the essential attributes of God, we must raise the eyes of our intelligence to the contuition of the Most Blessed Trinity, so as to place the second cherub facing the first.  Now just as Being itself is the principal source of the vision of the essential attributes of God, as well as the name through which the others become known, so the Good itself is the principal foundation of the contemplation of the personal emanations” (emphasis added).

Treatises de deo uno and de deo trino are thus inseparable, complementary views of the glory that is enthroned above the cherubim.

Theology - Trinity: Wedding Sermon

Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”

Let us pray

Almighty God, our Father: You dwell in an eternal fellowship of love with your Son and Spirit, and in Your grace You have created and redeemed us so that we might share in that communion.  Before the foundation of the world, You chose us in the Beloved, and made us your own that You might also become ours.  We pray that You would fill Ryan and Courtney you’re your Spirit, so that they might live together manifesting Your life, which is Your love.  For the sake of Jesus Christ, Your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages.  Amen.

“How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you.  How can you answer?  Happy?  Excited?  Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day.  You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.”

The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.”  That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future.

Continue reading…

Theology - Trinity: Election

McIntosh quotes this passage from Barth, saying that this reflects “the very heart of Barth’s understanding of the Gospel”:

“In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God which could be the object of the love of God or the setting for His acts of freedom, God anticipated and determined within Himself . . . that that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him.  In the beginning it was the choice of the Father Himself to establish this covenant with man by giving up His Son for him, that He Himself might become man in fulfillment of His grace.  In the beginning it was the choice of the Son to be obedient to grace, and therefore to offer up Himself and to become man in order that this covenant might become a reality.  In the beginning it was the resolve of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God, of Father and Son should not be disturbed or rent by this covenant with man, but that it should be made the more glorious, the deity of God, the divinity of His love and freedom, being conformed and demonstrated in this offering of the Father and this self-offering of the Son.  This choice was in the beginning.  As the subject and object of this choice, Jesus Christ was at the beginning.”

One would like to make some moves to head off the universalist import of this statement.  Otherwise, this would be hard to surpass, and equally hard to imagine this coming from anyone but Barth.

Theology - Trinity: Trinity and incarnation

Mark McIntosh (Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell Guides to Theology)) points out that the most dramatic and clearest revelation of the Trinity in the gospel story occurs at the beginning, in Jesus’ baptism: “It is precisely as he unites himself with the people in their longing and need that Jesus is depicted as sensing fully his identity as God’s beloved.  It is then that the gospels describe him as being marked externally by an outpouring and anointing of God’s Spirit.” And this means that “the loving abundance that Jesus knows as the very root of his being . . . is the expression within our world of an eternal abundance.  It is the expression in our world of an infinite giving, the free self-sharing of the Father to the Son and in the Spirit, or what Christians call the Trinity.”

McIntosh’s book is full of neat twists.  Like this: In emphasizing the unity of God, Augustine and Aquinas are not trying “to confine trinitarian theology within some kind of philosophical preconception about divine essence,” but rather insisting on the continuity of Israel and the church: “they want to show that the God whom Christians adore as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is non other than the one God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth.”  And this, summarizing Barth’s view of election and Trinity: “the trinitarian pattern of divine life is not simply a making space for the other, but an active and eternal choosing of the other.”

In addition to his own explorations of basic topics in theology, he includes fairly extended treatments of key historical figures and debates (“Landmarks”) and sketches out the contours of current debate (“Pathfinding”).  The whole book is premised on the notions that “Christian theology is an expression of an ongoing transformation of the world in encounter with God” and that to be done rightly, theology must be more than a “respectable discipline managed by theologians” and become “a mysterious sharing in God’s way of life, God’s talk . . . , God’s knowing and loving of Godself.”  And he assumes, somewhat radically orthodoxly, that “assimilating theology’s own mode of reflection to those of, say, cultural anthropology or philosophy or psychology, will only short-circuit theology’s unique aptness for getting at truth in certain ways that other disciplines do not.”

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