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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
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
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
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
My friend, Ralph Smith, has published several excellent books on the Trinity (Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van Til on the Trinity
He makes his case first by examining a handful of explicit Father-son passages in Deuteronomy (1:31; 8:5; 14:1-2; 32:5-6, 18-20). More cleverly, he examines two sets of allusions that run through the entire book.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 14, 2011 at 2:53 pm
When Panikkar writes, “neither the name Father nor the name God is the proper name of the Absolute. They are simply the names by which we designate him. . . . independently of us, in himself and for himself, what is He? Ultimately such a question does not even make sense. . . . God’s re-flection is no longer the Father” – he has taken leave of any recognizable Christian Trinitarianism.
But the argument has the virtue of clarifying the fact that we are faced with two choices: Either a God who is related and re-flected in Himself, a God who is eternally God of, or we a god of whom we can know or say nothing. Trinity is the only alternative to nihil.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:27 pm
There are problems all over the place in Panikkar’s Trinitarian theology, but there are some lovely, profound passages, like this: “A non-trinitarian God cannot ‘mingle’ much less unite himself with Man without destroying himself. He would have to remain aloof, isolated. No incarnation, descent, and real manifestation of any kind would be possible. He would cease to be God if he became Man. A non-trinitarian Man cannot hump outside his little self, cannot become what he wants and longs for without destroying himself. He would have to remain aloof, isolated. No divinisation, glorification, redemption of any kind would be possible. He would cease to be Man if he became God. Man would stifle himself just as God would die of self-consumption if the trinitarian structure of reality were not the case.”
And: The doctrine of the Trinity “connects the immanent mystery with the ‘economic’ God . . . in which the destiny of the whole world is at stake. It is not mere speculation a bout the depths of God; it is equally an analysis of the heights of Man. It is a ‘revelation’ of God inasmuch as it is a revelation of Man.” Nicely done: Trinitarian theology as true humanism.
And finally this, justifying the title of this post: “There are languages which do not have the verb ‘to be’ and others which do not possess the word ‘being.’ In some there is no definite distinction between nouns and verbs. No known language lacks the ‘I, Thou, He/She/It’ with the respective plural forms. It is in this ultimate and universal structure that the Trinity is reflected. . . . The Trinity appears then as the ultimate paradigm of personal relationships (and neither substantial nor verbal).” I like this, so long as we keep in view Jenson’s qualifications about I/Thou and as long as we allow that the personal relations are always already enacted, and therefore the pronomial God is, just for that reason, also verbal.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Why did Jesus refer to the Father as “my God”?
Perhaps to head off reasoning such as this (Panikkar, The Trinity and the religious experience of man;: Icon-person-mystery
Yes, an absurdity, but a Trinitarian absurdity, fighting as always against Nestorian reasonableness.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Like all Trinitarian theologians, Jenson is finally ecstatic: “Our enjoyment of God is that we are taken into the triune singing. Perhaps we may say that we are allowed to double the parts. And here too we must insist on concreteness. That the proclamation and prayer of the church regularly bursts into beauty, indeed seems to insist on music and choreography and setting, is not an adventitious hankering to decorate. A congregation singing a hymn of praise to the Father is doubling the Son’s praise, and the surge of rhythm and melody is the surge of the Spirit’s glorification of the Father and the Son.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:44 am
In the first volume of his Systematic Theology, Jenson notes that the reason why the church has been “lured” by impassibility is the conviction, which Jenson emphatically affirms” that God is “not subjected to created time’s contingencies” and that no “aspect of history could be outside the Lord’s control.”
The issue for Jenson is not whether this is true. He affirms it. The question is “How does God transcend time’s contingencies?” and Jenson’s answer, as always, is to avoid “metaphysical” accounts and point to the gospel. God doesn’t transcend time’s contingencies and transcend suffering by avoiding them but by gaining victory of them.
Jenson writes, ”God the Son suffers all the contingencies and evils recorded in the Gospels, and concludes them by suffering execution. God the Father raises him from the dead; nor do we have any reason to think of this act as dispassionately done. So and not otherwise the Father triumphs over suffering. God the Spirit is the sphere of the triumph. And ‘triumph’ is the precise word: the Father and the Spirit take the suffering of the creature who the Son is into the triune life and bring from it the final good of that creatures, all other creatures , and of God. So and not otherwise the true God transcends suffering – whatever unknowably might have been.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 26, 2011 at 11:06 am
Jeremy Begbie has pointed out that, though a physical phenomena, music has different spatial qualities than solid objects. Music is present in a place, but it’s not localized in a way a visually perceptible object is. I can give my attention to listening to the sound, but I can’t say it’s “here” or “there” or “not here.” ”What I hear occupies the whole of my aural space,” so that the acoustic world, with very slight variations, stays the same no matter what direction I turn. Aural space is a space, since I can eventually move far enough away from the sound source that I no longer hear it. But it is a space where objects are not locatable, and therefore provides a neat set of illustrations of theological realities.
Begbie uses musical categories to speak of perichoresis:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:56 am
Jenson has a neat summary and response to the Palamite distinction between energies and essence. Gregory, he notes, aimed to defend “Byzantine monastic teaching that the sanctified truly participate in God; that grace is not a mere matter of God’s effects upon us or our knowledge of and obedience to him, but is rather his ontological self-sharing with us.” Jenson thinks this is just fine.
But, “Palamas thought he should also reserve some final reality of God from creaturely participation,” and therefore introduced the distinction of energies and essence. Palamas could find the distinction in the Cappadocians, but there “these distinctions are flexible” and nowhere do the Cappadocians think of God’s ousia as anything but the divine life itself. Palamas uses Nyssa’s distinction to “differentiate God as he can be participated in from God as he remains immune to this.” As a result, “the ousia is not the deity of the identities and their mutual energies but has become ‘God himself,’ the chief reference of discourse about ‘the one God.’” For Gregory, “this entity is immune even to the life of the creature who is hypostatically one with the Son; also the events told by the gospel narrative do not tough it.”
The “disaster,” as Jenson calls is, is the notion that “God himself is a static essence.” And the irony is that “Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his activities.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:36 am
In his Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God
This is a problem, as Jenson’s typically deft summary of Hegel’s “Lord and Master” shows: “If you and are to to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our converse. If I am present in our converse as myself, I am a subject who have you as my object. But if I am not also an object for you as subject, if I in some way or degree evade reciprocal availability to you as one whom you in turn can locate and deal with, I enslave you, no matter with what otherwise good disposition I intend you.”
Jenson wants to know how we escape this dilemma, how the I-Thou doesn’t collapse into an interpersonal form of Foucault’s panopticon, me elusive in my tower watching you as the object of my gaze. He doesn’t think that we can escape this on purely I-Thou grounds: “Most postmodern thought, carrying out Hegel’s insight under the tutelage of horror, has given up such questions except as rhetorical, and supposes that in fact all personal converse is openly or hiddenly a struggle for domination” – open struggle often seen as superior because more honest. Secular postmodernism thus has an uncanny similarity to pneumatically-deprived Trinitarianism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:16 am
Timothy Gorringe (A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption
Barth of course has a Trinitarian account of spatiality: “The origin of all space, according to him, is to be found in the Trinitarian relations. It is the fact that God is present to Godself [ugh! again PJL], that there is a divine proximity and remoteness, which is the basis and presupposition of created proximity and remoteness. God’s omnipresence is to be understood primarily as a determination of God’s love, in so far as God is not only one, unique and simple but as such is present to Godself [dittos] and therefore present to everything which by God is outside God.” In Barth’s words, ”God’s omnipresence is the perfection in which he is present, and in which he, the One, who is distinct from and preeminent over anything else, possesses a place, his own place,which is distinct from all other places and also preeminent over them all . . . God’s presence necessarily means that he possesses a place, his own place, or . . . his own space . . . If God does not possess space, he can certainly be conceived as that which is one in itself and in all. But he cannot be conceived as the One who is triune, as the One who as such is the Lord of everything else.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 4:21 pm
The Cappadocians described the personal distinctions within God by reference to “relations of origin.” Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are from eternity past.
Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jenson all want to reverse this: Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are in eternity future. God’s eternity is not the persistence in the way he started but His power to achieve al His aims.
Does the Cappadocian emphasis on origin arise from a residual tragic metaphysics?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 12, 2011 at 7:42 am
In the current issue of The Heythrop Journal, Brian Trainor analyzes the uses of Trinitarian theology among evangelical egalitarians and among evangelical “conservatives.” He finds both wanting, and offers some fresh reflections in an effort to break the impasse. He charges egalitarians with “‘homogenizing’ the three Divine Persons” and for failing to endorse “true and genuine differentiation in the inner life of the Trinity.” On the other side, “conservatives” have retreated into forms of subordinationism. Everyone distinguishes ontology from role or function, but the results are not satisfying:
Bruce Ware “claims that the position or proper role of the Son of God in this functional hierarchy vis-a-vis the Father is to be ‘equal in being, eternally subordinate in role,’ for there is an ‘eternal relationship of authority and obedience grounded in the eternal immanent inter-Trinitarian relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ In a similar vein, George Knight III speaks of a ‘chain of subordination’ in the inner life of the Trinity.” Grudem claims that “while the Father and Son are both divine, yet the Son is eternally subordinate in role and authority to the Father, for the Father has ‘the role of commanding, directing, and sending’ and the Son has ‘the role of obeying, going as the Father sends, and revealing God to us.’” Functional difference, sure; functional superiority and inferiority, not good, for Filial Godhood is equally valuable as Paternal Godhood.
Some conservatives acknowledge the “mutual submission” or “mutual deference” of the Persons, but as Trainor sees it, this motif “is not emphasised and it seems that it has, indeed, become increasingly de-emphasised.” He cites Grudem’s claim that “‘supreme authority always belongs to the Father’ and that the expression ’seated at the right hand of the Father’ indicates that Jesus is second to God the Father in authority.” That is alarming to say the least.
By contrast, Trainor argues for a “triple sovereignty.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Mark McIntosh, as he often does, puts the well-known very well (Mysteries of Faith (New Church’s Teaching Series)
What does it mean to share this life? It means that we resist the tendency of our “chameleon souls” that try “to blend into the prevailing muzak.” To be in Christ is to “be in a place where the slow and sometimes painful struggle to love one another would draw us out of those cramped caricatures we think of as ourselves and into a new pattern of life, a new identity. . . . the Christian life is a journey from baptism into our new identity toward a deeper discovery of who we really are by means of our relationships with God and one another, celebrated in the eucharist.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 10:53 am
Luigi Gioia (The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate
As Gioia says, this is the furthest thing possible from a “cold, detached, controlled” notion of intellect. Rather, “there is no inquisitio which is not driven by a form of eagerness or desire.” Knowledge “entails union or rather copulation.” The “sexual overtones” of Augustine’s account of knowledge betray “a strong affinity with that of the Old Testament, where the verb ‘to know’ is used to indicate both epistemological and sexual activity.”
Augustine understood, better than we, why the Song of Songs ended up with the wisdom literature.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Anatolios again: He argues that Augustine’s psychological analogies for the Trinity (memory, intellect, will in one mind, eg) do not represent a retreat from an inter-personal model of the Trinity. He acknowledges that the love of lovers gives a “sight” of the life of the Trinity. He simply thinks it gives an inadequate sight, since human lovers are not consubstantial in the way the Triune Persons are. It gives inadequate sight too because Scripture itself teaches that the individual human is the “image of God,” the God who says “let us.” So, the psychological analogies give sight of the Trinity, but from a complementary perspective.
Besides, for Augustine knowledge is never merely cognitive, but always volitional.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 6:38 am
Anatolios again, on Augustine’s “analogy of love” from Book 8 of de Trinitate. Contrary to some interpreters, “this trinity of love is not simply a self-standing structure that ‘pictures’ the divine Trinity.” Anatolios insists instead that “it manifests the mind’s radical relatedness to God, since the love by which we love anything genuinely, according to Augustine, is God himself. . . . In loving another human being, we are first of all loving to love, and the love by which we love another human being is more present and inward to us than the human object of this love. This inward presence of a love by which we love others is the presence of God. Thus the trinity of ‘lover, beloved, and love’ manifest in human experience attains a certain participation in God, who is Love.”
This snugly fits with the overall thrust of Augustine as Anatolios (like Rowan Williams, Milbank, Michel Rene Barnes, and others) interprets him: The knowledge of the Trinity that Augustine aims to convey in his treatise is not exhausted by affirmation of a set of propositions about three-in-oneness, person-and-substance. Rather, the knowledge is union with God, the knowledge of imitation of divine life that comes only through following the purifying way of Jesus. The analogy of love is designed to show that there is no knowledge of God that is not also communion with Him.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 6:27 am
Anything by Khaled Anatolios is an event, worthy of deep and careful reading. From my initial perusal, his recent Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine
Early on, for instance, he locates his discussion of patristic Trinitarian theology within contemporary discussions, and has this comment on Rahner’s difficulties in carrying out “his own trinitarian Grundaxiom“: “Rather complains about the ‘isolation’ of trinitarian doctrine ‘from other dogmatic treatises telling us something about ourselves conducive to our real salvation.’ However, his own approach does not so much delve into the continuities and discontinuities between the biblical narrative of creation and salvation and the Trinity as the subject of this narrative; rather, he comprehensively enfolds the dialectic of history and spirit/transcendence into divine life and being [ironic, in light of the ways Rahner has been used, by Lacugna, for instance - PJL]. Thus, in actual practice, his identification of the immanent Trinity with the economic Trinity pays little attention to the narrative peculiarities of the economy. All this is not to deny that his trinitarian theology is substantially biblical in its deepest thrust. My point is that his axiom needs to be more thoroughly integrated with particular details of scriptural narrative.” Rahner’s trinitarian theology is abstracted “from the concrete particularities of the scriptural narrative.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 6:21 am
“Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power,” sing the twenty-four elders and four living creatures in the heavenly throne room (Revelation 4:11). The reason the Lord is worthy of glory, honor, and power is that He created all things (a chiastic clause: create / all things / Your will / they are / were created).
Worthy to receive? Doesn’t God always already possess glory, honor, and power? Isn’t that what being God means? Yes, God has always already had that power, and the song points to the His worthiness to receive recognition from creatures.
Still, God is praised as a God who receives. And how can a God who always already has everything receive anything in any sense? The answer, of course, is Trinitarian: The Father always already has glory, honor, and power because He has always already received it from the Son in the Spirit, and the Son always already has all glory, honor, and power because He has received it from the Father in the Spirit. This internal receptiveness makes it possible for God to receive glory from creatures.
Only the Triune God can be worshiped: Not ought, but can. Worship is only coherent if we creatures worship a God who can receive, who has always received, who would receive and give whether or not we ever existed.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 5, 2011 at 4:11 am
Austin Farrer makes the simple observation that “What was expressed in human terms here below was not bare deity; it was divine sonship.”
Then he adds this beautiful passage: “God cannot live an identically godlike life in eternity and in a human story. But the divine Son can make an identical response to his Father, whether in the love of the blessed Trinity or in the fulfillment of an earthly ministry. All the conditions of action are different on the two levels; the filial response is one. Above, the appropriate response is a co-operation in sovereignty and an interchange of eternal joys. Then the Son gives back to the Father all that the Father is. Below, in the incarnate life, the appropriate response is an obedience to inspiration, a waiting for direction, an acceptance of suffering, a rectitude of choice, a resistance to temptation, a willingness to die. For such things are the stuff of our existence; and it was in this very stuff that Christ worked out the theme of heavenly sonship, proving himself on earth the very thing he was in heaven; that is, a continuous perfect act of filial love.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Susanna Wesley thought Aristotle mistaken for positing eternal matter, but she thought that Aristotle was driven to this conclusion by the true supposition that “a true notion of the goodness of God” must lead to an idea that God “must eternally be communicating good to something or other.” God must be somehow social; matter must have been around to socialize with.
Wesley concluded that Aristotle would not have driven to this error if he had possessed “knowledge of revealed knowledge”: “had he ever heard of that great article of our Christian faith concerning the Holy Trinity, he had then perceived the almighty Goodness eternally communicating being and all the fullness of the Godhead to the divine Logos, his uncreated Word, between whose existence and that of the Father there is not one moment assignable.”
Anyone with a mother who can do that is destined for greatness.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 3:27 pm
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