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This is actual reader mail from 2021. I’m pulling it out of the drafts folder and posting it because (a) there’s been some online chatter lately that suggests some readers might be interested in the clarification it attempts, and (b) I’m doing a little exercise where I blog every day for a while to get my writing-in-public mojo back, and here it sits, 500 already-written words that aren’t too shabby. Now that your expectations are stratospheric, here it is. A friend who teaches in a theological field somewhat removed from the churn of contemporary discussion wrote to me and said, I’m getting wind of a distinction the modern theologians are making between ‘classical’ trinitarianism and ‘relational’ trinitarianism, and I’m hearing that the theologians are calling the second of those ‘revisionist.’ It is surprising—and more than a little alarming—that modern theologians are saying that the…

If you’re in the business of rejecting every Trinitarian analogy you’ve ever heard (and I do recommend getting into that business), you might get a reputation for being anti-analogy altogether. People who would prefer that you offer them a good analogy for the Trinity, or maybe just endorse their personal favorite, sometimes think that only somebody whose entire cast of mind is dead set against analogical thinking could possibly be so stingy on this front. But in fact, it’s possible to make generous use of analogies as helpful intellectual tools in Trinitarian theology, while still rejecting analogies for the Trinity as unhelpful. What’s the difference? The difference is one of scale. You can make good use of analogies in thinking about all sorts of details and sub-sections of ideas within the doctrine of the Trinity, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to come…

Websites that talk about how Plato teaches that there’s the form of chair, Chair Itself, chairness: A billion. Places I found the word “chair” in a CTRL+F search of the complete works of Plato: 3 Number of times anybody in Plato was talking about the Form of Chair Itself: 0. What a strange habit to have become so widespread in explaining Plato’s forms. Chairs. Heck, everybody knows about Plato’s chair. Everybody but Plato, apparently. Plato does have a section in Republic book II where Socrates makes a first move in the direction of teaching about forms by asking about how craftsmen make furniture. But what he asks about are beds and tables. With surgical precision he avoids mentioning chairs. I will now provide an exhaustive survey of chair references in Plato in English. 1. In Euthydemus, Socrates says you can pull chairs out from…

“Perfect in power, love, and purity.” This line from the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy is a great example of the theological move called trinitarian appropriation. Trinitarian appropriation is when you take something common the three persons & ascribe it to one person in particular. You can use an action (like election, redemption, or sanctification) or an attribute (like, well, power, love, or purity) belonging to the whole Trinity. You can never use it exclusively, as if you were denying that it belonged also to the full Trinity (or to the same divine essence held in common by the 3). But you can say that it is an especially helpful or resonant term for bringing insight into that one person. Christians are fluent at doing this in creedal habits of thought like calling the Father the creator, the Son the redeemer, & the Spirit the…

Gregory of Nyssa, in his work Refutation of Eunomius’ Confession,1 has a powerful set of arguments for the deity of the Holy Spirit. Most of them involve gathering and linking places in Scripture that affirm the same divine things as applying to the Father, Son, and Spirit. For example, he notes the word “fullness” as applying both to the incarnate Son (“in him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead,” Col 2:9) and to the outpoured Spirit: “So also when the Lord by breathing upon His disciples had imparted to them the Holy Spirit, John says, “Of His fulness have all we received.” Notice that this last citation shows that Nyssa reads John 1:16 as written in the time of fulfilment of John 20:21: Since the risen Lord breathed out the Spirit on the apostles, one of them could write that he had received the…

Here’s a diagram I sometimes use when teaching Plato’s Symposium. Using the whiteboard, I only capture the elements that class participants notice. If nobody has noticed anything by the time of the Great Hiccup Disruption, I’ll usually cajole them into it with a few, y’know, Socratic questions.

You have three choices if you want to read Augustine’s De Trinitate in English: Haddan, McKenna, or Hill. I’m not aware of any full English translations of Augustine’s De Trinitate before the 19th century. While the book exerted plenty of influence on English-language theology down until then, it probably did so by way of key ideas and substantial quotations. But scholars may have thought, with some justification, that anybody interested enough to read all XV books of it straight through should just do so in Latin. The Haddan Translation The first full translation I know of is the one published as volume 7 of the series The Works of Aurelius Augustine: A New Translation, edited by Marcus Dods and published by T. & T. Clark. As the series title shows, the editor and translators were aware that Augustine’s anglophone fortunes needed some attention. Here…

There’s a crucial text from Gregory of Nazianzus on the unity of the Trinity, found early in his third theological oration (Oration 29, section 2). Coming to terms with this passage is probably worth something like a one-unit course in seminary. Here are the two most common English translations: Monotheism, with its single governing principle, is what we value – not monotheism defined as the sovereignty of a single person (after all, self-discordant unity can become a plurality) but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action, and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity – none of which is possible in the case of created nature. The result is that though there is numerical distinction, there is no division in the substance. For this reason, a one eternally changes to a two and stops…

The Moyer Lectures were a series of eighteenth-century London lectures on the doctrine of the Trinity. The lectures were endowed by Lady Rebecca Moyer (d. 1727, widow of Sir Samuel Moyer, a merchant). Daniel Waterland (1683-1740) was both the first lecturer and an influential adviser to Lady Moyer in the selection of lecturers. I would like to do some work on the kind of trinitarian theology propagated by the Moyer lectures. In addition to reading the published sermons, it would be good to discern the visionary philanthropy of Rebecca Moyer. What moved her to fund a fifty-year lecture series on the Trinity? 1719 to 1774. (Some sources claim they started later, but a Waterland biography argues that they were already in place by 1719. See William van Mildert’s Works of Waterland, w/a life of Waterland in vol. 1. There are some good footnotes on…

There are a few things wrong in this, but try to catch the main point: The widespread desire for an independent doctrine of the Holy Spirit can be satisfied on trinitarian theological grounds only at the expense of complicated misinterpretations. The Spirit itself is what is to be understood and expressed in faith; it does not stand over against God or believers as a separate entity. Guarantees are needed not only to avoid tritheism or a division of God into three epochs of time or activity, but above all to avoid an objectification of the Spirit, which is possible in either (Stoic-) materialistic or idealistic form. …. Legitimate regulative statements about the Holy Spirit must start from the insight that no statements about God at all are possible ‘outside’ the Holy Spirit, i.e. that the material content of a doctrine of the Spirit of…

The Nicene Creed (381) calls the Son “begotten from the Father” and also “same-in-substance with the Father.” These two phrases can be treated as two claims that are distinct from each other, or perhaps as two ways of arguing to the same conclusion (the full deity of the Son). It can be analytically helpful to isolate them this way. To claim that the Son is begotten from the Father is to make a claim about his hypostatic relation to his necessary principle or origin. But to claim that he is same-in-substance is to make a claim about his substance. The former is eternal generation, the latter consubstantiality. Both converge on the judgement that the Son is God, but they are different paths to that insight. It might especially be helpful to distinguish these things if you were inclined to affirm one but not both….

One of the objections we sometimes hear to the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is that it seems like a story. To say that God the Father begat, begets, or has begotten God the Son sounds like saying “once upon a time, these events happened.” It’s a good objection, especially when both parties of the discussion agree in advance that we shouldn’t be telling any origin stories about how God came to be God. A God with a narrative of how he came to be God cannot be God. There are several possible replies to the story objection. Before I suggest the one that I think is most effective, let me list four others. The first is to insist that this is exactly why we always put the adjective “eternal” in front of the noun “generation” when we talk about this…

Thomas Manton (1620–1677) had a lot to say about human blessedness. His megamassive three-volume commentary on Psalm 119 takes its keynote from that opening beatitude, “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” But his doctrine of human blessedness is firmly based on a doctrine of divine blessedness, the blessedness of God, which he makes explicit when he turns his attention to Ps 119:12, “Blessed art Thou, O LORD, teach me thy statues.” As a preacher, Manton was reliably focused on letting his text pose the key questions. Accordingly, what he is most interested in Ps 119:12 is what the first statement has to do with the second: What is it about God’s blessedness that leads the Psalmist to ask God, “teach me thy statutes?” It’s a good question. And it opens up into a rather finely elaborated…

Erasmus’ first best-seller was his Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier. He wrote it in 1501 and published it in 1503, safely before the Reformation began rumbling. It was apparently universally popular in a divisive era, but as the world around it changed, it became a special favorite of Protestants for some time. Stylistically, one thing that made the book unique was its flowing, uninterrupted, discursive style. Erasmus used an easy Latin style, and the book was translated into multiple vernacular languages. As someone who has assigned this book for college students to read, I can testify that modern readers do not find the flowing style as attractive as early modern readers did. In fact, it kind of drives them crazy. Perhaps to compensate for the free-flowing style, Erasmus introduces some structure into the work: he offers twenty-two (mostly) numbered rules, of unequal…

Athanasius’ In Illud Omnia is fantastic. Too bad it got stuck w/no context & a non-title. Personally, I refer to it as “What the Son Has from the Father.” Here’s a thread on what I saw as I worked through it recently. It’s just about 2k words long; may have been a sermon; may be from 342. There’s a wooden ET in NPNF2, 4:87-90 by Newman and/or Robertson; Greek in PG 25:208-20. Athanasius starts by reading Matt. 11:27, “All things have been given over to me by my Father,” & then takes up the question of what the Son receives from the Father. Arians might pounce on the text as proof that the Son used to lack all things, but that once upon a time the Father gave them over to him. They take it as a kind of origin story of how the…

To what shall we compare God? This is a question about analogies. And we shouldn’t treat God as an inert entity about which we can only know by way of analogies. To do so misses the “agential idiom” which alone is appropriate to God, since God acts, and makes himself known. So if we know God by way of how he represents himself in acts, we could say God is like what God does. But of course it would be even better to say that what God does is like God. Still better: Those actions of God in which God intentionally makes himself known are like God. The main divine actions in which God intentionally makes himself known are the Father sending the Son and the Holy Spirit. These sendings show the character of God’s eternal life. So God is like what God does…

I was invited to give the charge to the graduates at the 56th annual commencement service for the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Here’s the main point I made. It’s tailored to laypeople in an urban setting, but it concerns the spiritual value of Biblical and theological education more generally. Turn with me to Ephesians 4, verses 20 to 21. 20 But you did not learn Christ in this way,21 If indeed you have heard himand have been taught in him,just as truth is in Jesus. Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus about “the way they learned Christ.” And here I am, speaking to the graduates of Los Angeles Bible Training School about “the way you learned Christ.” You have learned Christ, heard him, and been taught in him, just as truth is in Jesus. So I want to congratulate you. You…

Gregory of Nazianzus has a very special way of using the phrase, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” in his Five Theological Orations. The phrase is of course from the end of Matthew’s Gospel, where the risen Jesus gives the command to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in this name. Nazianzus’ Five Theological Orations are a classic work of patristic trinitarian theology, immensely influential and justly famous for their rhetorical polish and power. So it is interesting to see how Nazianzus handles the baptismal name in this work. He uses it exactly seven times. If you’ve got the SVS edition of the Five Orations, you can find the passages on pages 37, 70, 118, 123, 138, 141, and 143. In each occurrence, he uses the formula in a climactic fashion, or at a summative moment in his argument. It has,…