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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,…

In Leo the Great’s first Pentecost sermon from the year 444 (Sermon 75), he graphically narrates the details of the advent of the Holy Spirit: wind, flame, foreign speech, and all. The imagery is all quite clear, direct, Biblical, and concrete. And then in the second sermon, he draws back for a moment, in order to clarify for his hearers that all this direct speech about wind and fire should not be misunderstood: the Holy Spirit is not the wind, not the fire, not any physical or experiential phenomenon. The Holy Spirit is God. And the easiest way to lift up Christian minds to confess this is to set the Spirit in Trinitarian context. So, apologizing to his regular audience for covering theological basics, he takes a moment to rehearse the rules by which the mind can follow Trinitarian teaching. And he is especially…

I can easily sing “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” w/a clear theological conscience. Always have. What do I do when I get to the line, “the Father turns his face away?” I instinctively interpret it charitably, in the high-trust environment of my local church. Does this line from the 1990 song drift too close to suggesting that Father & Son are separable, at odds, broken up? A bit. But if I’ve heard good trinitarian theology at church, I know in advance not to hear the line that way. The line wraps trinitarian language (Father-Son) around a biblical image (turning away a face) in order to interpret the moment of crucifixion. All in the context of setting forth the cross as the effective communication of the Father’s love via the Son. Here’s the problem: If you’ve recently heard “broken Trinity” teaching, or Father-angry/Son-merciful…

I recently led a discussion on Jürgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Here are some notes I took as I re-read the assigned text, the 90-page-long chapter six (also bearing the title “The ‘Crucified God’”), and some reflections that came to me after class time. Reading the book in 2022, it definitely feels fifty years old. The German first edition was 1972, and the way Moltmann writes about the “death of God” theology as a current event, the way he interacts with certain forms of existentialism, and the footnotes to only the very early positions of contemporaries like Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel mark this as coming from the early seventies. It was his second real book, after only Theology of Hope. (“Back when I was reading Moltmann in the early nineties, it…

A Biblical Path to the Triune God (CUA Press, 2022): Denis Farkasfalvy (Hungarian-born Cistercian who taught in Texas) finished this 100-pager just before dying in May 2020 (at age 83, of COVID). It’s good stuff. Almost a very long article spanning NT studies into early Christian doctrine. The big idea is to take Jesus’ statement that nobody knows the Son except the Father, or vice versa, as the starting point for the doctrine of the Trinity. Farkasfalvy emphasizes the historical-critical defensibility of this: a well-attested claim of Jesus’ self-understanding. He calls the passage (Matt 11/Luke 10) “the Synoptic Jubilation.” In it he sees the “reproductive metaphor” of messianic thought (“Son of David/of God”) transposed into epistemic terms (mutual knowledge). Interesting link to God showing Peter what flesh & blood could not have done, & Paul saying it pleased God to reveal his Son in…

In his excellent discussion of the Holy Spirit (in volume one of his four-volume The Christian’s Reasonable Service, pages 166-174), Wilhelmus à Brakel places special emphasis on how the Spirit’s name displays his character. There is something breathy about his person and work; his name shows this. A teacher like Brakel, with his keen eye for how to organize, simplify, and apply Christian doctrine, is especially well suited to the task of teaching deep pneumatology in this memorable way. Scripture calls the third person of the Trinity ruach and pneuma, and Brakel admits that in different contexts, these words can mean wind (John 3:8), angels (Heb 1:14), the human soul (Eccl. 12:7), and the motions or attitudes of the soul (Gal 6:1) (166). But when used of this particular person of the Trinity, there are three good reasons: “Because it is His personal property…

In Preface to Paradise Lost Chapter 10, “Milton and Augustine,” C.S. Lewis summarizes, for the instruction of modern literary readers of Milton, just how thoroughly Augustinian Milton is being in most of his epic. Explaining Augustine’s view of the origin of evil (which he mentions is also more or less that of the universal church), Lewis says: What we call bad things are good things perverted (De Civ. Dei, xiv, 11). This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God (ibid, xiv, 11), and wishes to exist ‘on its own’ (esse in semet ipso, xiv, 13). This is the sin of Pride. This is excellent: “more interested in itself than in God.” It cuts straight into the reader’s thought-life, still talking about Milton’s Satan and Augustine’s story of the world, but suddenly also implicating the everyday movements of…

I’m giving the 2022 Norton Lectures at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (I’ll update this page with links as they become available.) The title I’ve chosen for the suite of three lectures is “Union with Christ, Systematically Considered.” Series Description: Nobody can do full justice to the doctrine of union with Christ, but the most insightful treatments of the theme throughout Christian history have in common a certain centripetal energy, a center-seeking tendency that strives to recognize this doctrine as soteriologically fundamental. My goal in these lectures is to join that movement by examining how the truth of union with Christ shapes not only the doctrine of salvation in the narrower sense (including the ordo salutis), but also the overall Christian creed and even the basic forms of Scripture itself. Though necessarily only accomplishing an initial approach, these lectures are an effort to place the…

There is a brief appendix in Joseph Dalmau’s On the One and Triune God (1955), entitled “On the Twofold, as they say, Trinitarian Theology—Latin and Greek.” Dalmau begins, “today…there is a widespread opinion that there is a twofold trinitarian theology’, Greek and Latin. …It will be worth the effort to consider this matter and to evaluate the main foundations of this opinion.” Dalmau identifies Théodore de Regnon as the most influential proponent of this view, whose main points he summarizes thus: Nature vs. Person: The former [the Latins] consider the nature first, afterwards the person; on the contrary, the Greeks fix their attention on the person first, afterwards on the nature; that is, the Latins consider the nature directly and the person indirectly, while the Greeks consider the person directly and the nature indirectly. For the Latins a person is “personified nature”; for the…

Rudolf Stier wrote nine volumes (4500 pages) of detailed commentary on every word spoken by Jesus and recorded in the Bible. You might imagine how seriously such an author would take the very first words spoken by Jesus, hearing in them the deep implications of what it means for God to speak in the flesh. Those very first words are recorded in Luke 2:49 “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” The first recorded words of Jesus are addressed to Mary, and he is asking her a pair of questions. In these words, Jesus “begins to find out His own mystery, and it is not merely a first word to His parents and to us, but also a first word of the Eternal Spirit in the human spirit of the person of the…

I came across something helpful in Aquinas (ST Iª q. 42 a. 1 ad 3). Check it out: Should we call the persons of the Trinity equal? Well of course we should. But one of the objections he considers (obj 3) is that a relation of equality is reciprocal. But to say the Father is equal to the Son sounds weird and backwards; it might be as wrong as saying the Father is the image of the Son (which he’s not). So Aquinas makes a distinction: “Equality & likeness in God may be designated in two ways–namely, by nouns and by verbs.” Huh. (It’s nomina et verba in Latin.) If you use nouns, like essence or greatness I guess, then equality is mutual and reversible, “because the divine essence is not more the Father’s than the Son’s.” It makes sense to say the Father…

Every so often I get to teach the kids at church (K-5) the intro lesson before they head off to their main classes. Okay, “every so often” means when the Trinity rolls around in our sequence of Core Concepts. Here’s the 5 minute lesson I taught this time: Core Concept 4 is my favorite! “God eternally exists as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” What I love about this is that even though I know what it means, it reminds me that God is more than I can understand, and greater than I can grasp. “God eternally exists as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” means that there is only one God, but existing as three persons. This part is easy, because we read in the Bible about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Since…

[This blog post is an archive of a thread I posted on Twitter, Nov 2021. I’ve left it in Twitter format (ten tweets, 475 words) because the temptation to expand and improve it is a temptation to write something rather long.] Father, Son, & Spirit are the almighty God, having the identical divine power & authority over creation. If you take a formal relational structure of power & authority & import it into the life of God, using it to distinguish between Father & Son, you are going to have problems. The error is especially tempting if you start w/a theology of what sonship is in general in the Bible, and then claim it must apply to the unique Son. Sons are younger than dad, have moms, start out smol, obey, etc. None of these characterize the unique Son. What does characterize that Son,…

I have sometimes wondered about the doctrine of God’s blessedness: to which of the persons of the Trinity should this divine attribute be appropriated? Appropriation is “a process…by which certain absolute divine attributes and operations, which are essentially common to the entire Trinity, are ascribed to one of the Divine Persons in particular, with the purpose of revealing the Hypostatic character of that Person..”1 The main positive rule of its use can be stated as requiring that “between the Hypostatic character of the Divine Person to whom an attribute is appropriated, and that attribute itself, there must exist some special intrinsic relationship.”2 Among the negative rules governing it are warnings that nothing appropriated can ever be treated as exclusively belonging to a single person of the Trinity, or even of belonging to that person to a greater degree than to others. Appropriation is not…

For those of us whose theological home base is Paul, pondering First John is wonderful but strange. There’s no contradiction between John & Paul, but the voice is astonishingly different. One major difference: I John is not structured by the “once lost, now saved” schema. Where Paul frequently reminds his readers what they once were, what they left behind, how they have been transformed, what they have now turned to, John doesn’t bring it up. In fact, John doesn’t provide any terms or structures that even invite reflection on these things. That old-vs-new structure is replaced, for the most part, by the dynamic of light vs darkness (which in turn is developed and applied via other categories, like love vs. hate). There’s some salvation history (the darkness is passing), but no ordo salutis or conversion. This Johannine way of thinking takes some getting used…