In this engaging episode, we explore the intricate and profound world of Trinitarian theology with theologian Adonis Vidu. Join us as we explore the key themes and arguments from his latest book, The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology (Eerdmans). Vidu passionately defends the doctrine of inseparable operations, which asserts that all actions of the Trinity are unified and indivisible. Through this doctrine, we gain a deeper understanding of the unity and distinct roles of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Throughout our conversation, Vidu traces the development, challenges, and implications of inseparable operations from biblical foundations and patristic contributions to contemporary theological debates. We address various objections, particularly concerning the incarnation and atonement, and demonstrate how this doctrine can coherently explain complex theological concepts while preserving the unity and distinction within the Trinity.

Adonis Vidu serves as Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where his research and teaching focus on the intersections of historical and contemporary theological thought. Vidu holds a Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College London, and he has authored several influential works, including Atonement, Law, and Justice: The Cross in Historical and Cultural Contexts and the subject of this conversation, The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology.

Watch or listen to gain invaluable insights from one of today’s leading theological minds as we explore the profound depths of Trinitarian theology and its relevance for contemporary Christian life and thought. Whether you’re a seasoned theologian or simply curious about the intricacies of faith, this episode promises to be both enlightening and thought-provoking.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:03:55 Introducing Inseparable Operations
• 00:08:40 Theological Grammar
• 00:14:10 Biblical Teaching on Inseparable Operations
• 00:18:41 The Patristic Tradition
• 00:22:19 The Rise and Decline of the Doctrine in History
• 00:32:49 Augustine and Aquinas
• 00:39:14 The Incarnation of the Son
• 00:43:14 The Person of the Son
• 00:50:46 The Atonement
• 00:56:41 The Holy Spirit
• 01:03:23 Our Experience of God in the Christian Life
• 01:12:23 Eastern Orthodoxy and Mysticism
• 01:18:00 Conclusion

Participants: Adonis Vidu, Camden Bucey

We welcome Dr. Lane Tipton back to the studio on the heels of teaching a new course on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. In this course, Dr. Tipton aims to provide an in-depth understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s trinitarian theology, emphasizing that his entire body of work is governed by the concept of exitus (departure) and reditus (return) in the context of divine and human processions. 

In the course, Dr. Tipton analyzes primary texts such as the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, as well as works by notable Thomistic scholars such as Gilles Emery and Dominic Legge as he dives into the trinitarian structure of Aquinas’s theology, focusing on the eternal and temporal processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and their implications on topics like Christology and sacramentology. This trinitarian framework forms the backbone of Aquinas’s theological system, affecting every doctrinal topic it touches, from the nature of God to the ultimate end of human beings. Tipton contends that understanding Aquinas’s Trinitarian framework is key to grasping his theological system as a whole. The course aims not only to provide a nuanced understanding of Aquinas’s theology but also to offer a Reformed critique and alternative.

The Exitus-Reditus Structure

The exitus-reditus structure serves as the central framework for understanding the theology of Thomas Aquinas. In this structure, “exitus” refers to the process of departure or emanation, while “reditus” signifies return. This dyad is a governing principle not only in Aquinas’s understanding of the Trinity but also in his complete theological system.

In terms of the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit emanate from the Father in “exitus,” and then return to the Father in “reditus.” This trinitarian procession is considered the foundational cause for the existence and return of all creatures. The divine persons’ internal processions serve as the model and cause for the external processions of rational creatures.

In relation to rational creatures, “exitus” refers to their creation and departure from God. God is seen as the efficient cause from whom all things emanate. “Reditus,” on the other hand, signifies the creatures’ return to God, drawn towards their ultimate end—participation in divine beatitude or happiness. This return can be understood at two levels: natural and supernatural. On the natural level, creatures return to God according to their inherent abilities. On the supernatural level, they are elevated through grace to participate in the divine essence itself, surpassing their natural capacities.

The exitus-reditus structure thus provides a coherent, systematic framework that integrates every aspect of Aquinas’s theology, from the doctrine of God to the doctrines of creation, grace, and eschatology.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:01:40 General Thoughts about the Course
• 00:08:01 The Primacy of the Father in Thomas
• 00:14:57 Calvin on the Son at Autotheos
• 00:24:44 Modes of Subsistence and Absolute Personality
• 00:32:37 Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Absolute Personality
• 00:40:35 The Eucharist and the Beatific Vision
• 00:47:29 Contemporary Evangelical Retrievals of Thomas
• 01:02:08 Interpreters of Thomas
• 01:03:48 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Lane Tipton delivers a plenary address from the annual Reformed Forum Theology Conference, which was hosted October 8–9 at Providence OPC in Pflugerville, Texas. Dr. Tipton’s address is titled, “Perichoresis, Endoxation, and the Glory-Spirit: Foundations for Image-Endowment and Covenant Theology in the Work of Meredith G. Kline“

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:02:36 Perichoresis, Endoxation, and the Glory-Spirit
• 00:18:22 Endoxation and Incarnation
• 00:32:50 Endoxation as the Initial Creational Replication of Trinitarian Perichoresis
• 00:46:42 The Glory-Spirit and the Image of God
• 01:01:21 Special Revelation and Covenantal Advancement
• 01:09:16 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Carlton Wynne, Lane Tipton, and Camden Bucey open Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith to pages 40–43, in which Van Til describes the Christian philosophy of reality. While to some degree it is necessary to use categories of God, man, and universe common to unbelievers in order to engage them apologetically and to evangelize, Christians must clearly set forth the distinctly Christian philosophy of reality. Van Til commences that work in chapter two and promptly addresses eternal unity and plurality with regard to the problem of the one and many.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:03:39 The Christian Philosophy of Reality
• 00:09:36 The Infection and Rejection Theses
• 00:14:49 The Belief that God Is Identical with Reality
• 00:28:25 The Reality of God as Self-Sufficient
• 00:31:42 Applying the Philosophy
• 00:34:01 The Problem of the One and the Many
• 00:40:19 Practical Considerations of Particularity
• 00:45:15 The Self-Contained God and the One and Many Problem
• 00:52:32 Equal Ultimacy Precludes an Abstract Essence
• 00:59:41 Bavinck on Diversity and Unity
• 01:02:20 Perichoresis
• 01:05:50 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Jim Cassidy reviews Scott Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Crossway)

From the Publisher

The Trinity is one of the most essential doctrines of the Christian faith.

The eternal God existing as three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—can be difficult to comprehend. While Christians often struggle to find the right words to describe this union, the Bible gives clarity concerning the triune God’s being and activity in nature (creation), grace (redemption), and glory (reward). In this concise volume, theologian Scott Swain examines the doctrine of the Trinity, presenting its biblical foundations, systematic-theological structure, and practical relevance for the church today.

Scott R. Swain (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) serves as president and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He is the author or editor of several books, including The God of the Gospel and Retrieving Eternal Generation. Scott and his wife, Leigh, reside in Orlando, Florida, with their four children. Swain is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

The following books are on our radar for April 8, 2021.

• Barrett, Matthew. Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit (Baker, March 2021). 368 pages. $24.99. Paperback. 
• Van Dam, Cornelis. In the Beginning: Listening to Genesis 1 and 2 (Reformation Heritage Books, March 2021) 384 pages. $30.00. Hardcover.
• Gribben, Crawford. Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, March 2021). 224 pages. $29.95. Hardcover. 
• Kuhn, Chase R. and Grimmond, Paul. Theology is for Preaching: Biblical Foundations, Method and Practice (Lexham, March 2021). From the Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology series. 416 pages. $29.99. Paperback.
• Piper, John. Providence (Crossway, March 2021). 752 pages. $39.99. Hardcover. 
• Waltke, Bruce and Ivan D. De Silva. Proverbs: A Shorter Commentary (Eerdmans, March 2021). 500 pages. $38.00. Paperback. 

Participants: Camden Bucey, Ryan Noha

Lane Tipton discusses “Van Til’s Trinitarian Theology,” the latest on-demand video course released with Reformed Academy. Designed to equip the student to engage critically central issues in trinitarian theology, this course will focus on the architectonic significance of the Trinity both in Van Til’s theology and apologetics. Special attention will be given to Van Til’s historical and theological context, his theology of triune personhood, the structure and function of the representational principle, the distinctively trinitarian character of the transcendental method, and his rejection of all species of correlativism, ranging from Karl Barth to contemporary expressions of Evangelical mutualism.

Enroll for free at https://www.reformedforum.org/courses/van-tils-trinitarian-theology

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Dominic Legge, O. P. speaks about the deep connection between Thomas’s Christology and his trinitarian theology. Dr. Legge is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Thomistic Institute Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dominic Legge, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy

Pierce Taylor Hibbs speaks about language and the Trinity. His book, The Trinity, Language, and Human Behavior: A Reformed Exposition of the Language Theory of Kenneth L. Pike is available in P&R Publishing’s Reformed Academic Dissertations series. Hibbs describes Kenneth Pike’s linguistic theory and compares it to the theology of Cornelius Van Til, demonstrating shared Trinitarian themes. Pierce Hibbs is the Assistant Director of the Theological English Department at Westminster Theological Seminary. He writes at piercetaylorhibbs.com.

Links

• Who is Kenneth Pike?

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Mary was not so green when she mistook Jesus for a gardener (John 20:15). God is a gardener: he sows; he waters; he grows (Gen. 1:11; 2:6; Ps. 104:14; 1 Cor. 3:6). To him belongs horticulture and humanity. Yet, in another sense, God is a garden in himself. He is our environment, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The Word of the Father, who stood before Mary at the empty tomb, is the life-giving person in whom, to whom, and through whom are all things (1 Cor. 8:6), and that Word is ever spoken in the potent breath of the Holy Spirit. It is in the Trinity—more specifically, God’s verbally manifested and linguistically mediated reality—that we dwell and thrive. All of this, no doubt, is quotidian for today’s theologian. Especially in Protestant circles in the last twenty years or so, the Trinity has taken a place of prominence. Everywhere one looks, new books and journal articles are finding their way onto the shelves—person and relation; ontology ad intra and ad extra; immanent and economic; vestigia trinitatis; the list goes on. The surge of interest in Trinitarian paradigms and doctrinal minutiae, for some, is little more than a fleeting fancy, the latest love affair for Protestants, and old news to Catholics and Greek Orthodox. Perhaps the latter parties are wondering where Protestants have been for the last few hundred years. The questions we must ask ourselves, on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, are the following. First, why has the Trinity come roaring back into our dogmatic discussions and, second, how can we ensure that this indispensable truth of Christendom remains the main hall in which we gather for global theological discourse rather than serving as a vestibule to other dogmatic concerns? Perhaps the answer to both questions lies in a metaphor. Trinitarian theology, like ivy, has always wound its way up a trellis. By “trellis,” I mean a historical and theological dilemma of the day that serves as latticework upon which the deep and eternal things of God can stretch out and climb in human history. Knowing what one such trellis is in our own day provides an important clue as to why Trinitarian studies have been so popular of late for Protestants, and how we can ensure that this turns into a tradition rather than a trend. Before introducing what I believe is a trellis for Trinitarian theology in the twenty-first century, it would help to review some of the church’s history in light of this metaphor. And to find a trellis or two from a bygone era, all one needs to do is pick up a decent volume on Christian history and start turning the pages. Jonathan Hill’s The History of Christian Thought (2003) is a fine place to start. In the early church, the trellis for Trinitarian theology was the burning question of what it meant to proclaim Jesus as Lord in the context of a rigid monotheism, and, of course, what it meant to say that the Spirit was God as well. Justin Martyr, attempting to wrest the early church from Platonic errors while still drawing on terms familiar to Platonists, brought attention to Christ as the Logos of God, the Father’s thought communicated to men. Irenaeus followed suit with a striking, albeit problematic analogy, of the Son and Spirit as the “hands” of the Father, bringing the third person of the Godhead more into purview. But it was Tertullian who broke new ground by coining the term Trinity and developing the “substance” and “persons” language we still find in today’s creeds and confessions. Athanasius continued this tradition by stomping out the weeds of Arianism, drawing on Origen’s exposition of the eternal generation of the Son. Then, from the heart of Turkey, came the Cappadocians, led by Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great. The Cappadocians laid the groundwork for the persons of the Trinity to be differentiated by their mutual relations—a concept carried through the middle ages and well into the twenty-first century. But we could not in good conscience proceed any further without mentioning Augustine, who rightly rebuffed the residual semi-Arianism of his predecessors, opposing any claim that the Father was the source of divinity. He thus brought out the consubstantiality and distinctness of the persons simultaneously, especially when he emphasized the famous (or, for some, infamous) filioque clause: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In doing so, as Hill puts it, he “purged the doctrine of every trace of subordinationism” (87). This was a fitting contribution to the continuing development of what came to be called perichoresis, the teaching that the persons of the Godhead mutually interpenetrate, indwell, or are “in,” to use Augustine’s language, each of the others (De Trinitate 6.10). This is one of the Trintiarian teachings that is so prominent today, and we owe this, in many ways, to the Cappadocians and to Augustine, among others (Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, who came later). Cyril of Alexandria followed Augustine by addressing the issue that had led to the building of the trellis centuries earlier: Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity: the Son come into flesh. In all of this, then, Christology was in large part the trellis that gave Trinitarian dogma room to stretch and climb. But that trellis would be exchanged for another in Byzantium and the medieval era. A fixation on Christology eventually lead to mystical speculation on how one comes close to a three-personed God (a second trellis for Trinitarian theology). How can man have communion with the transcendent, triune Lord? That was a question that burned in the hearts of Psuedo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and Symeon, to varying degrees. The resulting mysticism and negative theology came to an end with Gregory Palamas, whose discourse on the “energies” of God sought to explain how, exactly, we could experience the Trinity: we do so only by God’s acts upon us—the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit. This was to have echoes in the twentieth century with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. In the medieval and scholastic era, we still find remnants of mysticism, especially with Erigena, which is to be expected—history is a stream, not a string of puddles. But the trellis of experiential communion with God, by and large, traded for the trellis of rational exposition. It can be difficult to see how the latter might be a trellis for Trinitarian theology, which is inherently mysterious. But while it is easy to categorize Anselm’s arguments for the existence of God as “Unitarian” (pointing to Aquinas’ de Deo uno), there were clear Trinitarian threads in his thought, such as his work on the necessity of God’s becoming man in the person of Christ. Peter Abelard’s work, Theologia, is perhaps a better example. Abelard follows the path of rational exposition, but seems to have gone too far in trying to erase all mystery from the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas, though he sought to preserve mystery in Trinitarian dogma, fell into a similar trap with his unbound reliance on Aristotelian philosophy. In attempting to articulate the relation of the persons to the essence, he let mystery become more nominal than normative for Trinitarian theology. Much of Aquinas’ work, along with that of Anselm and Abelard, built Trinitarian theology on the trellis of rational exposition. And though this was countered by later medieval mystics (Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart), it seems to have nevertheless held sway until the early Reformers set their hands to building a third trellis: the trellis of soteriology. For many of the mainstay Reformers, discussions of Trinitarian dogma were set on the trellis of salvation and sin. Luther, for example, focused much of his theology on personal, faith-wrought union with Christ, who was given by the Father, and whose work of redemption and sanctification, applied internally by the Spirit, always led grace to triumph over law. Calvin, as well, though markedly different from Luther in his thought and mannerism, focused much of his attention on depravity and salvation in Christ. And this was set within its Trinitarian context. Calvin even went so far as to say that if we do not grasp that we serve and are saved by one God in three persons, then “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God” (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.13.2). Salvation, as many in our day have reminded us, is Trinitarian. The trellis of salvation and sin that was so prominent in the Reformation would wane with the waxing of a new trellis in the modern era: a return to rational exposition, but of a different sort, fueled, in large part, by the Enlightenment. This trellis, admittedly, would keep the ivy of Trinitarian theology all but out of sight. With attacks on the logical coherence of Trinitarian dogma by figures such as Voltaire, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, and with the unparalleled rise of deism, Christian philosophers and theologians felt compelled to rearticulate Christian dogma in a manner that at least acknowledged the so-called “Age of Reason.” Sadly, oftentimes they sold their heritage of belief for day’s wage in the empirical market. As Lessing and Reimarus excised the miraculous from Scripture, one could see it was only a matter of time before something as complex and mysterious as Trinitarian dogma would become suspect. It was Immanuel Kant who questioned the practicality of belief in the Trinity, and his phenomenal/noumenal distinction may not have helped matters here. By relegating God to the realm of noumena, he could effectively turn Christianity into a kind of pragmatic moralism. Such a context was not conducive to the growth or maturation of Trinitarian thought, which is perhaps why we see so little Trinitarian work emerging from that era. The work of the Puritans—masterpieces from the pen of Francis Cheynell, Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, and the like—would carry the church until the Protestant Trinitarian revival in the twentieth century. And by that time, the Protestant church was in need of a return to its Trinitarian roots, crippled as it was by rampant moralism, still evident in the thought of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. It needed a new trellis on which Trinitarian truth could bud and blossom, and Karl Barth’s “theology of revelation” seemed to fit the bill (Hill, 269). Thus, the doctrine of revelation became the new trellis: enveloping general revelation, Scripture, and proclamation, according to Barth (Church Dogmatics, 1.4.4). The wholly other God of Barth’s theology was proclaimed to be wholly “for us” in his triune self-revelation, namely in the “event” of Christ, which transcended time. But Barth’s understanding of revelation in the context of the Trinity, while refreshing, was riddled with fissures that would only widen with time. Part of this was due to the debris of existentialism: the shift in thinking of truth as experiential and subjective rather than external and objective. Certainly, Barth opposed all of this, but his focus on an encounter with the “event” of Christ left the door open for those who sympathized with the existentialist movement. Following the footpath of twentieth century theology at the time, Rudolph Bultmann attempted to “demythologize” the revelation of the New Testament, extracting moralistic kernels from mythological husks. From there, it is not too difficult to see how and why Reinhold Niebuhr would ignite the twentieth century with a call to ethics and morality, nor how Paul Tillich would call on Christians to engage their culture with an apologetic existentialism. In fact, we can even see how Karl Rahner would end up arguing for the concept of “anonymous Christians.” Those who have experientially witnessed the truth of God need not cling to the Christian Bible, or even the name of Christ, for, in Justin Martyr’s terminology, all people have within them the “seed of the Logos” anyway. Such a conclusion cannot be divorced from Rahner’s view of the Trinity. In claiming that the economic Trinity (what God does) is identical with the immanent Trinity (who God is), Rahner was working out one of the implications of an existentialist view of revelation. If the truth of the triune God’s revelation can only be subjectively experienced, then what sense would it make to ponder God as he exists “in himself,” apart from his creation? That logic is directly linked to Barth’s prior claim that God is only ever “for us” in Christ. In other words, there is no Trinity “behind” or “prior to” Christ’s work for us. This set the stage for Jürgen Moltmann to emphasize the centrality of the cross, claiming that God is a “suffering God.” While this had the benefit of drawing people’s attention to the unfathomable empathy God has for us in our own suffering, it posed a plethora of problems for orthodox Christianity by binding God to his creation and practically effacing the Trinity of independence. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s contention that all of history is, in fact, revelation in which we choose to believe enabled him, like Barth and Bultmann, to embrace critical scholarship and symbolic interpretations of revelation because what really mattered was the subjective commitment of the individual to the truth of a particular event. The influence of existentialism here is still evident. In sum, the trellis of revelation, leading from Barth to Pannenberg, did indeed give the dogma of the Trinity room to climb, but it also did no small amount of damage to the orthodox understanding of God’s ontology, not to mention the existential blight it spread to other doctrines. All of this brings us to the Trinitarian trellis of our day: language. This is not too far afield from the trellis of revelation, since all revelation, in many ways, can be considered profoundly linguistic. As Jonathan Edwards pointed out centuries ago, not only is the truth of Scripture linguistically delivered to humanity, but also the entire cosmos, which was uttered into being and is upheld by the God who speaks. Scripture is God’s word, but the rest of creation is a “word” from God in another sense. A scad of material has been emerging in the last decade or so on God as a communicative being, and on human language as a derivative and analogical behavior. This, it seems to me, is quite fitting, since the Trinity is the hearth of communion and has eternally communicated with himself in the “speech” of love and glory (Frame 2013, 480–81). Of course, we still have our issues to work out—issues that have long been part and parcel of every theologian’s curiosity: in what sense is the Son the “Word” of the Father? Should we adopt a consciousness model of the Trinity—in which the Father speaks the Son in the power of the Spirit—or an interpersonal model—in which the persons of the Godhead are understood as mutually engaging communicative agents? Or are both models valid? In answer to the former question, there is room for Trinitarian dogma to grow as we work out how the Son is both the thought of the Father, which stretches all the way back to Justin Martyr, and how he is the communication of the Father, which can be traced back to Augustine. And more work needs to be done to explore precisely in what sense the Spirit is involved in this communication. As for the latter question, we seem hard pressed to resolve the age old quandary between the east and west. The stale rumor that the Latin west defaults to a consciousness model while the Greek east upholds an interpersonal model has been dispelled. And thank God it has, for the church is now in an age of unprecedented global awareness and intercontinental communication. That is why linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, hermeneutics) is such a fitting trellis for Trinitarian theology: global communication is no longer burgeoning; it has blossomed. In such a setting, the nature and function of language is replete with implications not only for our understanding and development of Trinitarian dogma, but for our practical engagement with one another in the gloriously diverse, communicative body of Christ. We have, no doubt, just rushed through a cornucopia of theological discourse spanning two thousand years, and scarcely done it justice. But the point in considering what the trellis was for Trinitarian dogma in each era is to notice that we are at an opportune place for global discussion in the church, and we would be remiss if we wrote off the current surge of interest in linguistics and the Trinity as a passing trend. In my opinion, we are in the midst of one of the most appropriate Trinitarian discussions in the history of the church: a discussion of the nature and work of a communicative God for, in, and through his communicative creatures. At the outset, I proposed two questions on which Protestants, in particular, need to meditate, both of which are related to the twenty-first century’s trellis for Trinitarian dogma. Why has the Trinity come roaring back into our theological discussions? In brief, I would say that this can be attributed, in part, to the rise of interest in linguistics, for language and the Trinity are inextricably intertwined: the triune God is a communicative being, and humans are image-bearing communicators. It would be strange indeed to witness a rising interest in linguistics without seeing any corresponding interest in the God of language. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century interest in linguistics has thus built a worthy trellis on which Trinitarian dogma can grow, but we need to continue exploring the relationship between divine and human communication, and use the results of such study to enhance and support the communion of the global church. The second question, however, is perhaps more critical: how can Protestants ensure that Trinitarian dogma retains a prominent place in theological discourse? The answer here seems tied to what we have already said: language must, as it has, stay in the limelight of our theological discussions. We must vigilantly guard the trellis of language from those who would, with Derrida, derogate language as a labyrinth of différence. We must dwell on the divine roots of human discourse, ever remembering the ancient truth that language is not simply something we do but is a vital part of who we are. We are creatures of communion. And the communion we long for is structured on the Trinity itself, both the consciousness and interpersonal models. We are speakers with thoughts and breath, persons who thrive in a web of relationships. In light of what has been said, there seems to be no better place for our discussions of the Trinity than in the context of language, for our speech reflects the Speaker, our words the Word, and our breath the Spirit of the speaking God. At this moment in history, we have become deeply aware of ourselves as communing persons bound to the self-communing, tripersonal God. What better time for the global church to unite against a world hell-bent on disrupting and destroying the communion of the body of Christ? Language, I say, is at the roots of the Trinity, the roots of humanity, the roots of the church. Let us tend to this trellis together.

Dan Ragusa speaks about Herman Bavinck’s Trinitarian theology and its implications for a revelational epistemology and worldview. Bavinck argues for an organic connection between general and special revelation, which results in a “triniformity” in both.

Links

• The Bavinck Review
• Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship (URCNA), Manhattan

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa

I’ve come again, afresh, to the writings of Cornelius Van Til. Lord willing, my plan is to compose a monograph on Van Til’s critique of Karl Barth over the next several years. In light of relentless criticism, from both Barthians and evangelical Calvinists, I would like to offer a fresh reading and defense of Van Til’s critique, on his own terms. To that end, I have begun reading Van Til outside of his works that specifically target Barth.[1] This approach is purposeful. I believe that the best way to understand how and why Van Til criticizes Barth is to understand his thought as a whole. If one tries to abstract Van Til’s critique of Barth from his theology as a whole – and the apologetic/polemic approach that arises from it – then Van Til’s critique will never be properly understood. So I have begun with two of the newly released annotated versions of Van Til’s works published by P&R Publishing, Common Grace and the Gospel (annotated by K. Scott Oliphint) and An Introduction to Systematic Theology (annotated by William Edgar). I have also made use of the digital version of Van Til’s works by Logos. If you do not have Logos, and you want to engage in serious study of both the Bible and theology, do yourself the favor and save your pennies for it. And, while you’re saving, save also for the digital Van Til set! So, what I would like to do here is offer a series of posts containing some of the best quotes I come across in Van Til’s writings and offer some brief commentary. I hope you enjoy it, and benefit from Van Til’s faithfully and consistently Reformed insights. The first quote comes from Common Grace and the Gospel, p. 13:

To use a phrase of Kierkegaard, we ask how the Moment is to have significance. Our claim as believers is that the Moment cannot intelligently be shown to have any significance except upon the presupposition of the biblical doctrine of the ontological trinity. In the ontological trinity there is complete harmony between an equally ultimate one and many. The persons of the trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another and of God’s nature. It is the absolute equality in point of ultimacy that requires all the emphasis we can give it. Involved in this absolute equality is complete interdependence; God is our concrete universal.[2]

One of the common misconceptions out there about Van Til’s apologetic approach is that his great insight was that everyone has presuppositions. That no one comes to the process of thinking about anything neutrally. And so the believer presupposes the existence of God, while the atheist does not. And God is the believer’s basis for ethics, logic, etc. The atheist, however, has no basis. All that is true enough, as far as it goes. But the misconception is due to the fact that it does not go far enough. Van Til does not offer a generic deity as the Christian’s presupposition. It is not as if Van Til’s God can be swapped out for the God of Islam, Judaism, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Rather, Van Til presupposes the self-contained ontological Trinity as he reveals himself in the Bible. That is important because a generic deity cannot account for anything in the universe – unity or differentiation, universals or particulars, the subject-object relationship, etc. A generic deity yields only a meaningless and unintelligible creation. For Van Til only God as absolutely self-contained (i.e., a se) can render anything and everything intelligible. I hope to be able to unpack that idea some more in future posts.

[1] The several works I have in mind here are The New Modernism, Barthianism and Christianity, Has Karl Barth Become Orthodox?, The Confession of 1967, Karl Barth and Evangelicalism, and Barth’s Christology. Of course, he has critical statements about “the new modernism” all throughout his writings. But these are particularly focused on the thought of Karl Barth (and others). [2] Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2015).

The doctrine of the Trinity is the architectonic principle of the whole theological and apologetic enterprise of Herman Bavinck. While it may be debated as to how consistent he was in the application of this principle with his occasional nod to realism, it cannot be denied that he was self-consciously committed to the triune God of Scripture as the alpha and omega point of his thought. In his chapter on the Holy Trinity, he concludes with a useful section entitled, “The Importance of Trinitarian Dogma,” in which he provides a global comment that warrants this claim. He writes,

The thinking mind situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity. A Christian’s confession is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed. And it is the task of Christian theologians to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life. The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life.[1]

This approach avoids the incept nature/grace dualism that has plagued scholasticism with an impassable chasm between the natural and supernatural and the monism of secular philosophy that seeks a common, unifying element at the expense of all diversity. Both will come directly into the crosshairs of Bavinck’s apologetic, which has its epistemological grounds in the self-revelation of the triune God in whom unity and diversity are equally absolute. Bavinck writes, “In God … there is unity in diversity, diversity in unity. Indeed, this order and this harmony is present in him absolutely. … [I]n God both are present: absolute unity as well as absolute diversity.”[2] The point, then, is that the ontology of the creation finds its archetype in its triune Creator-God, in whom absolute unity and absolute diversity are eternally harmonized. The creation, understood according to the basic Creator-creature distinction of Scripture, possesses a relative unity and relative diversity, with neither destroying or canceling out the other. This agrees with what James Eglinton has labeled Bavinck’s “organic motif”: “Trinity ad intra leads to organism ad extra.”[3] He explains, “God as the archetypal (triune) unity-in-diversity is the basis for all subsequent (triniform) ectypal cosmic unity-in-diversity.”[4] The organic motif enables Bavinck to communicate a distinctly trinitarian worldview.[5] Nathaniel Gray Sutanto writes, “Creation displays an organic ontology of diversities in unity precisely because in God there is an archetypal unity and diversity.”[6] More concisely, Eglinton states, “Theological organicism is the creation’s triune shape.”[7] For this reason, any investigation of the creation, whether scientific, historical, sociological, psychological, etc., must expect to encounter and be able to harmonize its ectypal unity and diversity in keeping with its very nature. Herein is the force of Bavinck’s apologetic: it is only by a revelatory epistemology that begins with the triune God, as he has revealed himself in Scripture, that any true knowledge, whether of nature or humanity, can be arrived at without sacrificing its unity for its diversity or its diversity for its unity. Special revelation is necessary for general revelation to be interpreted correctly. Bavinck does not employ the term in the above quote, as he does elsewhere, but the doctrine of the Trinity—derived from special revelation alone—provides this organic link between nature and grace, general revelation and special revelation. This doctrine of special revelation becomes the mountaintop vantage point from which the general revelation of God in creation, which stands before us as a most elegant book, is properly read and interpreted.[8] They are neither isolated from, nor set in opposition to one another, but complement each other in an organic manner, the one requiring the other. “Special revelation should never be separated from its organic connection to history, the world, and humanity.”[9] It is “in the light of Scripture we know it is the Father who by his Word and Spirit also reveals himself in the works of nature and history.”[10] With the glasses of Scripture on, the believer is able to discern the “creation’s triune shape.”[11] Herman Bavinck’s organic ontology, which holds that the archetypal unity-in-diversity of the triune God of Scripture requires an ectypal unity-in-diversity in the creation, provides the theological rationale for his philosophical apologetic.[12] Because the creation is not amorphous, conforming to the subjective and variegated philosophies of man, but has an objective unity-in-diversity ontology, both monism and dualism are unable to account for the full-orbed life of the world and humanity. The former destroys all diversity at the expense of unity and the latter posits a diversity that never arrives at a unity—neither can satisfy both the heart and the mind. Such satisfaction is reserved only for the revelational epistemology of Scripture that takes the doctrine of the Trinity as its alpha and omega point. This is evident in the failure of both pantheism and materialism succumbing to a monism that dissolves all distinctions “in a bath of deadly uniformity.” Bavinck observes,

Pantheism attempts to explain the world dynamically; materialism attempts to do so mechanically. But both strive to see the whole as governed by a single principle. In pantheism the world may be a living organism, of which God is the soul; in materialism it is a mechanism that is brought about by the union and separation of atoms. But in both systems an unconscious blind fate is elevated to the throne of the universe. Both fail to appreciate the richness and diversity of the world; erase the boundaries between heaven and earth, matter and spirit, soul and body, man and animal, intellect and will, time and eternity, Creator and creature, being and nonbeing; and dissolve all distinctions in a bath of deadly uniformity. Both deny the existence of a conscious purpose and cannot point to a cause or a destiny for the existence of the world and its history.[13]

In contrast, only the Christian worldview maintains that in the creation there is “the most profuse diversity and yet, in that diversity, there is also a superlative kind of unity.”[14] Bavinck explicitly locates the foundation of this diversity and unity in God.[15] The world has its beginning in God’s act of creation, its continuation in his governing power and finds its consummation in him as its ultimate goal.

Here is a unity that does not destroy but rather maintains diversity, and a diversity that does not come at the expense of unity, but rather unfolds it in its riches. In virtue of this unity the world can, metaphorically, be called an organism, in which all the parts are connected with each other and influence each other reciprocally. Heaven and earth, man and animal, soul and body, truth and life, art and science, religion and morality, state and church, family and society, and so on, though they are all distinct, are not separated. There is a wide range of connections between them; an organic, or if you will, an ethical bond holds them all together.[16]

For further study check out the address Dr. Jim Cassidy gave at the 2016 Reformed Forum Theology Conference: The Trinity, Image of God, and Apologetics: Bavinck’s Consistently Reformed Defense of the Faith. We also have an interview with Dr. Carlton Wynne reviewing James Eglinton’s book Trinity and Organism and numerous podcast episodes with Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, a PhD Candidate at New College, University of Edinburgh.

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:330. [2] Bavinck, RD, 2:331, 332. [3] James Eglinton, Trinity and Organism, 80. [4] Ibid., 54. [5] Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” International Journal Of Systematic Theology 18, no. 2 (April 2016): 175. [6] Ibid. [7] James Eglinton, “Bavinck’s Organic Motif: Questions Seeking Answers,” Calvin Theological Journal 45, no. 1: 66. [8] Belgic Confession art. 2 notes the two means by which God is made known to us, which are typically denoted as general and special revelation. With regard to the latter, it reads in part, “First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book.” [9] Bavinck, RD, 2:353, emphasis mine. [10] Bavinck, RD, 2:340. [11] Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” 174. [12] The phrase “organic ontology” was taken from Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” 174. [13] Bavinck, RD, 2:435 [14] Bavinck, RD, 2:435-36. [15] Bavinck, RD, 2:436. [16] Bavinck, RD, 2:436.

God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

In developing this doctrine, Ragusa draws upon Cornelius Van Til’s Trinitarian theology, covenant theology, and representational principle. Ragusa writes,

According to Van Til’s representational principle, for man’s will to operate and for an act of his will to be significant and meaningful it must take place within an exhaustively personal environment, that is, it must take place within the sovereign and eternal plan of the self-sufficient triune God. The absolute freedom of God does not take away or limit man’s freedom, but rather establishes it in an analogical fashion.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa, Jim Cassidy

All heresies with respect to the Trinity may be reduced to the one great heresy of mixing the eternal and the temporal.

— Cornelius Van Til

Cornelius Van Til cut through the densest theological controversies like a hot knife through butter. What some readers dismiss as daft conclusions or graceless criticism, others learn to appreciate as incisive critical synthesis. You might say, some wince at Van Til’s work while others whistle at it. I put myself in the latter group. After years of reading his work, I’m still struck by his theological acumen. Van Til’s discussion of Trinitarian heresies is a case in point. Throughout his chapter on the Trinity in An Introduction to Systematic Theology, he keeps coming back to the same point: at base all Trinitarian heresies are the result of mixing the eternal and the temporal. This is tied to his emphasis on the Creator-creature distinction. He reminds us that

all non-Christian thought would have us think of God as one aspect of the universe as a whole. In one way or another, all heresies bring in space-time existence as the other aspect of the universe as a whole. … Here, in fact, lies the bond of connection between ancient and modern heresies. For this reason, the church has emphasized the fact that the ontological Trinity, that is, the Trinity as it exists in itself, apart from its relation to the created universe, is self-complete, involving as it does the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality. But it was a long and arduous road by which the church reached its high doctrine of the Trinity.[i]

Indeed, the church is still walking that road, ever vigilant of its feet, for a precipice lies on each side of the doctrine. Every century the church has stamped the dust of dogma and left footprints for the faithful to follow. It was in looking at such footprints, I believe, that Van Til drew out his incisive critique of Trinitarian heresies.

Gnosticism

He first takes aim at the Gnostic notion of the Logos (not to be confused with the biblical understanding of the Logos in John’s Gospel). The Gnostics could not see how the eternal God could be self-contained and yet still engage with creation. To solve this problem, they understood the Logos to be “the self-expression for God in the universe.”[ii] In other words, the Logos for them was a middleman between eternity and time, the divine and the human. But their conclusion merely muddied the water by making God dependent on creation. The Gnostics had mixed time and eternity by making the latter inextricable from the former. It was Irenaeus who would step onto the road of orthodoxy to claim that “God did not in any wise need the universe as a medium of self-expression; he was self-expressed in the Trinity.”[iii]

Sabellianism and Arianism 

Van Til next set his sights on Sabellianism and Arianism, showing that they were two sides of the same coin. The Arians refused to let go of the Son as a creature. Put differently, they refused to let the self-contained eternal Trinity engage with the dependent temporal world on God’s own terms. God was, in some sense, made correlative to the world. We might even say that Arianism attempted to force time into eternity by demanding that the Son be understood as a creature. Sabellianism, too, tried to force Trinitarian doctrine to fit the confines of temporality. In attempting to harmonize God’s threeness with his oneness, Sabellius and his cohort opted to make the three persons temporal manifestations of an eternal unity. For Van Til, this meant that they wanted to have “the temporal world furnish the plurality as a supplement to the eternal world, which furnished the unity of reality as a whole.”[iv] The plurality of persons in the Godhead was thus made correlative to the plurality we find in creation. This is drastically different, mind you, from the eternal unity and plurality of the Trinity being the basis for the temporal unity and plurality of creation.[v] In both Arianism and Sabellianism, adherents were guilty of “uniting the temporal in a correlative union with the eternal.”[vi] To say that the Son is a creature is to say that God must follow the norms of creaturely reason (Arianism); to say that the divine persons are merely modes of the one God is to say the same thing, really. In both cases, God is denied as the self-contained three-in-one; he cannot house in himself unity and plurality in perfect harmony, apart from creation. But, as Van Til affirmed frequently, he does. That is what the true church came to confess.

Nestorianism and Eutychianism 

Van Til then turns to Nestorianism and Eutychianism, which seem strange victims for a critique of Trinitarian heresy. Yet, Van Til saw these blunders as “no more than modified forms of opposition to the church’s doctrine of the Trinity.”[vii] Nestorius conceived of two persons in Christ (which is linked in a sense to equating time and eternity), while Eutyches argued that Christ only had one, divine nature (not a divine and a human nature), thus segregating eternity (Christ’s divine nature) from time (Christ’s human nature). In both cases, the deity of Christ was not properly related to his humanity and there is a false conception of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, which in Christ are neither confused nor divided. Mixing up the relationship of the temporal and eternity in Christ is, in essence, an offshoot of mixing up the temporal and eternal in the Trinity.

Deism and Pantheism

But Van Til does not stop here. He moves on to link Nestorianism and Eutychianism to deism and pantheism. “Any doctrine that denies God’s providence (as deism does) or his providence and creation (as Greek thought did) must in the end become a confusion of the eternal and the temporal. Deism and pantheism are no more than two forms of the one basic error of confusion of the eternal and the temporal.”[viii] Van Til’s critique here is a classic example of how what was often obvious to him was not so self-evident to the rest of us. What does he mean here? Deism supposes that God is outside of and distant from created reality, which runs like a clock thanks to the laws of nature that God himself has instilled within it. God exists, for deists, but only as a hazy figure just within earshot of creation’s ticking clockwork. This belief system allowed deists to clutch a form of theism (which was not by any means Christian) without having to accept the rationally suspect claims of Scripture: that God became incarnate in the person of Christ and continues to work in his people through the power of the Spirit. These claims of the Bible assaulted the rules of human reason, so deists left them behind and supported a clear distinction between the clockmaker God and his gear-grinding world. Deists, in other words, enforced an extreme form of separation between the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporal. Thus, the “confusion of the eternal and the temporal” here is simply the practical removal of the former from the latter. God is stripped of his Trinitarian economy because that economy does not seem to cohere with the standards of temporal (human) reason. For Van Til, this is linked to Nestorianism. Just as the temporal is not divorced from the eternal in God’s economy, neither is the eternal divorced from the temporal in the person of Christ. This may be why Van Til suggested that Nestorianism was “the deistic form of opposition to the true doctrine.”[ix] The distant heretical step-sister of deism is pantheism. Deism segregates the eternal from the temporal; pantheism blends them together so that we cannot distinguish them anymore. For pantheists, God is in everything. The divine is mixed into the fabric of creation. This mixture thus frustrates all efforts to distinguish between God and the world. In the end, pantheists simply resolve the issue by concluding that creation is divine. This parallels the attempt of Eutyches to show that Christ only had one, divine nature. The human is dissolved into the divine. With Nestorius, the human and divine were set apart; with Eutyches the human is collapsed into the divine. In both cases there is confusion of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal.

Solution: God Exists as Triune

What is the solution to this confusion? It is our recognition of the biblical truth that “God exists as triune. He is therefore self-complete. Yet he created the world. This world has meaning not in spite of, but because of, the self-completeness of the ontological Trinity. This God is the foundation of the created universe and therefore is far above it.”[x] The Trinity is properly understood and worshiped only with a biblical understanding of God’s transcendence and immanence. The ontological Trinity is independent of creation, and yet all of creation has meaning because of God’s independence and sovereignty over it, even as he is present with us in it. The triune God created the world and stands above it, and yet all of reality has meaning because he is involved with it. The Trinity might be likened to a gloveless gardener. He is responsible for planting the rose bushes and the rhododendron, but he is not thereby dependent on them. Yet he also chooses to fill his fingernails with the dirt that hugs the roots of what he has made.

Calvin and Arminius

Modern Trinitarian heresies followed in the same path as the ancient ones. They once again fumbled with a “false conception of the Trinity, the self-contained God of Scripture.”[xi] The issues may have changed over time, but the problem was perennial. In Calvin’s day, the biblical doctrine of the Trinity was distorted by Arminius, who—again, following principles of strict rationalism—tried to resurrect the specter of subordinationism. Like Origen, Arminius wanted to push the taxonomy of the Trinity too far, ultimately reducing the divine to a unity rather than a Trinity. Calvin, in contrast, “was strongly interested in asserting the consubstantiality of the three persons of the Godhead.”[xii] While this was in some senses novel in Calvin’s day, it was really nothing more than a re-articulation of the ancient catholic doctrine that God is both one and three.

Idealism and Unitarianism

Continuing his critique, Van Til chastises Arminius for opening the door to “more radical departures” from the biblical doctrine, which came in with the idealists. “The idealist philosophers have identified the Trinity with the principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in reality as a whole.”[xiii] This Hegelian principle, once more, leads to an ultimate unity, not an ultimate Trinity. It leads to Unitarian faith rather than Trinitarian. What’s worse, it binds God to his creation so as to render him dependent. So, Van Til restates his synthetic summary of Trinitarian heresy.

Unitarianism is nothing but a new form of the old error of mixing the eternal and the temporal. Modernism is the happy heir of all heresies, and basic to all its heresies is the denial of the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father; or rather, its error is even deeper than that, since the Father himself is for modernism no more than an aspect of reality. If ever there was need for reaffirming and teaching the true doctrine of the Trinity, it is now.[xiv]

Indeed, the same is true for us today, especially in light of the longstanding liberal push to forsake the immanent Trinity for the economic—to seek God for us rather than God in himself. Such a push could easily be translated into Van Til’s vernacular: we should seek the God in time rather than the God of eternity. But it is exactly at this point that orthodox Christianity must check its feet and follow the straight and narrow. It is only because God is in himself that he is for us. God is for us in time by a loving and gracious decision, and such a decision emerged from the eternal Trinity who is love.

Conclusion

T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Only through time time is conquered.”[xv] I always interpreted this to mean that the God above time entered time in order to redeem time. But time did not always need to be conquered. Indeed, time did not always exist. Seconds were spoken into motion by the voice of the Trinity. Before there was time, before there was such a thing as history, there was simply the Trinity. I end with Fred Sanders’s words.

God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world of the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed.[xvi]

In remembering these words, let us continue in the footsteps of orthodoxy, never mixing the eternal and the temporal, the God who is love in himself with the God who is love for us. As Van Til wrote, it has been “a long and arduous road by which the church reached its high doctrine of the Trinity.” Let us continue to walk it, in praise of the self-contained tri-personal God.

[i] Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 353. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Ibid., 354. [iv] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 356. [v] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 4th ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 47–51. [vi] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 356. [vii] Ibid., 358. [viii] Ibid., 359–60. [ix] Ibid., 360. [x] Ibid., 359. [xi] Ibid., 360. [xii] Ibid. [xiii] Ibid., 361. This is a reference specifically to Hegel’s dialectic, the notion that history is in the process of moving towards an ultimate unity as a result of the continuous cycle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. [xiv] Ibid., 362. [xv] T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), 16. [xvi] Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 62.

On this episode, we are joined by Ryan McGraw, who speaks about the foundational role and practical significance of Trinitarian theology to John Owen. Dr. McGraw is Professor of Systematic Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Caroline. His article, “Trinitarian Doxology: Reassessing John Owen’s Contribution to Reformed Orthodox Trinitarian Theology” was published in The Westminster Theological Journal, Vol. 77, No. 2. Dr. McGraw joined us on a previous episode of Christ the Center to speak about the meaning of the phrase “good and necessary consequence” in the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.6.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy, Ryan McGraw

In a previous episode of Christ the Center, we threw our oar in the water on the recent discussions regarding the proposed Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) of the Son to the Father. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, I would encourage you to do so. One of the helpful contributions of the panelists was their call for the inclusion of the pactum salutis (also known as the covenant of redemption or the counsel of peace) in our discussions on the Trinity, especially as it helps us to properly distinguish between (1) God’s necessary processions ad intra (which cannot be otherwise) and (2) God’s free and voluntary missions ad extra (which can be otherwise). The covenant of redemption is that work of God ad extra in which the three persons of the Godhead (each knowing themselves in distinction from the other two persons) freely and voluntarily covenant in person-to-person relationships to undertake the decrees of creation and redemption. As a work ad extra, the covenant of redemption is not natural or essential to God. In other words, it is not something eternally necessary to God. The processions ad intra are eternally necessary, since God cannot be otherwise than triune, but the covenant of redemption as a work ad extra is freely and voluntarily undertaken by each person of the Godhead. There is no ontological subordination obligating or requiring any of the persons to enter into this covenant. It is freely and voluntarily entered into by all three persons of the Trinity. In the episode, Dr. Tipton sheds further light on the covenant of redemption and expresses the importance of it for addressing the current issues at large. He says,

Built into the idea of the pactum salutis are three distinct self-conscious persons (not separate self-conscious persons since that would be tritheism) within the unity of the Godhead undertaking the decrees of creation and redemption, and doing so freely and voluntarily. That moves us into the idea that even though we want to affirm without compromise that there is one God and one essential will in the Godhead, there are nonetheless also three self-conscious distinct persons hypostatically, personally willing certain things. The Father wills to send the Son; the Son wills to be sent; the Father and Son will to give the Spirit; and the Spirit wills to be given. Understanding this as a background gives you a Reformed, theological, and trinitarian-covenantal context for addressing some of these issues.

The remainder of this post will look to briefly summarize and explain some aspects of Geerhardus Vos’ formulation of the covenant of redemption from his formative article “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology.”

Perfect Freedom in the Trinity

The first major point Vos makes is that

the covenant of redemption is nothing other than proof for the fact that even the work of redemption, though it springs from God’s sovereign will, finds its execution in free deeds performed in a covenantal way.

The freedom of God’s execution of redemption is important because for Vos the covenant idea demands this freedom. The demand is met with the perfect freedom that dominates in the triune Being. And it dominates in the triune Being because the three persons covenanting are of absolute ontological equal ultimacy. In other words, there is no necessary or ontological subordination in which one person of the Godhead is “duty bound” to receive the covenant arrangement. The Father doesn’t come to the Son, for example, with a covenant proposal that the Son is obligated to enter into and submit himself to on the basis of and because of his eternal generation. Rather, the Son submits freely, voluntarily and willingly to the covenant arrangement as One equally ultimate with the Father and Spirit. To say that the Son is obligated because of his eternal generation is to confuse God’s processions ad intra (which cannot be otherwise) and God’s missions ad extra (which can be otherwise). Vos clarifies this by contrasting the parties of the covenant of redemption (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and the covenant of works before the fall (God and Adam). The covenant of works, writes Vos, “had to be regarded as one-sided to the extent that man, as God’s subordinate, was in duty bound to act upon the covenant that was proposed.” Adam couldn’t debate the terms of the covenant, nor could he reject and refuse entrance into it; rather, he was “duty bound” to the covenant that God sovereignly imposed upon him. This, however, is not true of the parties of the covenant of redemption because it is between the equally ultimate persons of the Godhead. For this reason Vos refers to it not as “one-sided,” but “two-sided.”[1] While Adam was duty bound to the covenant of works, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit exercised perfect freedom in their coming together in the covenant of redemption. No person was duty bound. There was no necessarily subordinate party in the covenant of redemption as there was in the covenant of works (i.e., Adam). Thus, the covenant of redemption was arranged, as Vos is going to say, between the three persons “judicially.”

The One, Undivided, Divine Will

Vos sheds further light on the covenant of redemption by distinguishing it from predestination. “Although this covenant of redemption may now be included in God’s counsel in that it operates within the Trinity, it should still not be confused with predestination.” He continues,

In predestination the divine persons act communally, while economically it is attributed to the Father. In the covenant of redemption they are related to one another judicially. In predestination there is the one, undivided, divine will. In the counsel of peace this will appears as having its own mode of existence in each person. One cannot object to this on the basis of the unity of God’s being. To push unity so strongly that the persons can no longer be related to one another judicially would lead to Sabellianism and would undermine the reality of the entire economy of redemption with its person to person relationships.

While Vos unequivocally affirms that God’s will is one and undivided, he nonetheless is able to speak of this “one, undivided, divine will” as appearing to have a mode of existence in each person. This allows the persons to relate to one another judicially, as they do in the covenant of redemption. If we don’t allow for this, then we fall into the error of Sabellianism (which is a form of modalism).[2] We cannot pit unity over against diversity. Instead, we need to maintain the equal ultimacy of the unity and diversity in the Godhead. These equally ultimate persons are able to relate to one another “judicially” with each being self-conscious and, therefore, knowing themselves in distinction from the other two persons and freely willing to the covenant arrangement: the Father, knowing himself as Father, wills to send the Son; the Son, knowing himself as Son, wills to be sent; the Spirit, knowing himself as Spirit, wills to be given. There is, then, in the covenant of redemption “person to person relationships.”

The Glory of the Triune God

While we have only scratched the surface of Vos’ article, one last point is in order. After tracing the history of the covenant concept, Vos asks an important question at the outset of his study: “To what … does one attribute the fact that from the beginning this concept of the covenant appears so much in the foreground of Reformed theology?” He answers that it was the Reformed principle of “the preeminence of God’s glory in the consideration of all that has been created,” “which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the Scriptures.” These treasuries of course included the great opulence of covenant theology. It is only fitting then to conclude this post with Vos’ articulation of how this Reformed principle interlocks with the covenant of redemption:

The fact that redemption is God’s work by which He wills to be glorified can in no wise be more strongly expressed than by thus exposing its emergence from out of the depths of the divine Being Himself. Here it is God who issues the requirement of redemption as God the Father. Again, it is God who for the fulfillment of that requirement becomes the guarantor as God the Son. Once again, it is God to whom belongs the application of redemption as God the Holy Spirit. In the clear light of eternity, where God alone dwells, the economy of salvation is drawn up for us with pure outlines and not darkened by the assistance of any human hand. It is a creation of the triune One from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.  

[1] Here is the full quote from Vos, “For it is only in the triune Being that that perfect freedom dominates which the covenant idea appears to demand. Here the covenant is completely two-sided, whereas before the Fall it still had to be regarded as one- sided to the extent that man, as God’s subordinate, was in duty bound to act upon the covenant that was proposed.” [2] “Sabellius believed God is like the sun that emanates light and heat. At different points in history we see God differently, just as we experience the sun’s light and heat differently. Ultimately, Sabellius erased all distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he taught that the Father is the Son is the Spirit: in ages past, God was the Father; during Jesus’ ministry, God was the Son; today, God is the Spirit. There is no eternal, personal communion between three distinct persons. We have one God who wears three masks, not three distinct persons in relationship with one another even though they share the same essence, according to Sabellius.” http://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/modalistic-monarchianism/.

For the last couple of weeks, many people have been discussing the doctrine of the Trinity, especially as various theologians have linked a doctrine of complementarianism to the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. This relationship has been characterized by some as an eternal relationship of authority and submission or by others as an eternal subordination of the Son. In this episode, we address the current controversy by looking at the eternal relationship among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three persons are one God, equal in power and glory. Their essential relationship entails no relationship of authority, subordination, or submission. They are related by an irreversible taxis: the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Theologians often call this the immanent or ontological Trinity. Yet, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit freely will to create, and eventually to redeem a people unto himself. This free, yet still eternal agreement, to redeem is known as the pactum salutis or Covenant of Redemption. This is an economic relationship that involves willful submission. The persons of the Godhead espouse different roles for the accomplishment of redemption. Theologians often call this the economic Trinity. How does divine ontology relate to the economy? Listen to this important discussion as we establish important doctrinal categories en route to a genuine advancement of the conversation. After listening to this discussion, please consider two previous episodes of Christ the Center that deal with similar issues:

• Christ the Center episode 245, Eternal Generation of the Son
• Christ the Center episode 295, The Aseity of the Son

Catch up on the entire discussion by consulting Adam Parker’s omnibus post.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

Van Til’s trinitarian theology is at the heart of his apologetic. Yet there are several aspects of his theology difficult to understand and others that are left undeveloped. We speak with Dr. Brant A. Bosserman about these issues. Bosserman has written The Trinity and Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, which seeks to explain not merely why God is and must be one and many, but also why he is equally both one and three.

Links

• Van Til’s Trinitarian Theology
• Van Til’s Trinitarian Distinctives
• Trinitarian Personality
• Charles Hodge on Trinitarian Personality
• Trinitarian Personality in the Theologies of Barth and Rahner

Participants: Brant Bosserman, Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

The evangelical Internet is abuzz with discussion about ad intra relations within the Trinity. Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem have been recognized as presenting forms of Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) of the Son to the Father in their respective books, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Crossway) and Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Zondervan). Owen Strachan and his co-author Gavin Peacock hold to what they term Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS) in their book, The Grand Design (Crossway). This current discussion is bound up with complementarianism, an articulation of God’s design for the relationship between men and woman. Eternal subordination or submission is appealing to many, because it seems to bolster the case for complementarianism by rooting it in divine ontology, or at least the divine economy. It raises the issue above any conjecture of being arbitrary. Strachan is the president of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). Grudem serves as a board member, and Ware serves as a council member. Many recognize that there are potential serious theological consequences for traveling this path. Carl Trueman, Liam Goligher, and Fred Sanders have written notable responses. Our colleague Jeff Waddington reflected on the issue as well. Regrettably absent from most of the discussion is the pactum salutis, or covenant of redemption (Jeff is the sole exception I’ve seen [UPDATE: and Mark Jones]). I suspect that a deeper familiarity with this historic Reformed doctrine would answer some of the questions proponents of EFS and ERAS raise. But at the end of the day, rooting complementarianism in the pactum salutis is problematic as well. We plan to treat the subject thoroughly on a future episode of Christ the Center. In the meantime, I encourage you to listen to two previous episodes of Christ the Center that deal with the issues at hand:

• Christ the Center episode 245, Eternal Generation of the Son
• Christ the Center episode 295, The Aseity of the Son

Catch-Up on the Conversation (updated)

• D. Glenn Butner, Jr., Eternal Submission and the Story of the Seven Ecumenical Councils
• D. Glenn Butner, Jr., “Eternal Functional Subordination and the Problem of the Divine Will” in JETS 58/1 (2015) 131–49
• Mark Jones, Why Did the Son Become Incarnate? Because He Submitted?
• Liam Goligher, Is it Okay to Teach a Complementarianism Based on Eternal Subordination?
• Liam Goligher, Reinventing God
• Carl Trueman, Fahrenheit 381
• Wayne Grudem, Whose Position on the Trinity Is Really New?
• Carl Trueman, A Rejoinder to Wayne Grudem
• Bruce Ware, God the Son—at Once Eternally God with His Father, and Eternally Son of the Father
• Carl Trueman, A Surrejoinder to Bruce Ware
• Owen Strachan, The Glorious Godhead and Proto-Arian Bulls
• Fred Sanders, 18 Theses on the Father and the Son
• Mark Jones, Propositions & Questions (for Fred Sanders) on the Trinity

Christians profess that God is triune. Many understand the importance of maintaining this doctrine. But many may also wonder where the doctrine is found in Scripture and what practical difference it makes being “Trinitarian” regardless. Brandon Crowe joins us to remedy this ill as he speaks about The Essential Trinity: New Testament Foundations and Practical Relevance, a new book he has co-edited with Carl Trueman. The book includes many excellent contributors. We’re excited to welcome this book, and hope it has an impact upon the Church’s life and understanding of historic Christian orthodoxy. Dr. Crowe is Associate Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Participants: Brandon Crowe, Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington

Jim Cassidy reviews Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity (Zondervan) Stephen Holmes, Paul Molnar, Thomas McCall, and Paul Fiddes.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, and Jim Cassidy discuss John Murray’s article, “Who Raised Up Jesus?” from The Westminster Theological Journal 3.2 (May 1941): 113–123. An answer to Murray’s question requires a search of the biblical text, an analysis of Greek grammar, a discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity—in short, the use of all the resources that Christian students of the Bible have at their disposal. Listen to this informative discussion.

Links

• John Murray’s Collected Writings
• OPC Church Plant in Austin, TX.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

We welcome Dr. John M. Frame, Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, FL. Dr. Frame has written a new book, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (P&R Publishing). Listen as we speak about the importance of theology, the nature of theological methodology, and the foundational doctrines of the faith. Dr. Frame has written extensively over the years, and you may access many of his resources online at frame-poythress.org.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, John Frame

Scott Oliphint speaks about the aseity of the Son of God, following up on a review of Brannon Ellis’ book Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son. The thesis of the book, which Dr. Oliphint takes up, is that Calvin’s teaching on the Son’s aseity was a way of maintaining orthodoxy but also of advancing and clarifying orthodoxy. The question was, if God the Son is “God of God,” as the Nicene Creed teaches, is he therefore not God of himself? Listen and hear how Calvin answered that question. Dr. Oliphint’s full-length review of Ellis’ book is in the Spring 2013 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal. For more on the doctrine of God, see Dr. Oliphint’s book God with Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God. 

Participants: Camden Bucey, Deryck Barson, Jared Oliphint, K. Scott Oliphint

Dr. K. Scott Oliphint reviews Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son by Brannon Ellis and published by Oxford University Press. In this excellent volume, Ellis investigates the various Reformation and post-Reformation responses to Calvin’s affirmation of the Son’s aseity (or essential self-existence). Listen as Dr. Oliphint, who wrote a more detailed review of the book for the Spring 2013 issue of The Westminster Theological Journal, describes the book’s salient features and provides his assessment of its worth.

Participants: Camden Bucey, K. Scott Oliphint

In this episode, Jeff Waddington covers God Is a Communicative Being: Divine Communicativeness and Harmony in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards by William M. Schweitzer and published by T&T Clark. The book explores Edwards’s statement, “The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate himself. God is a communicative being.” Listen as Jeff provides an overview of the issues, but if you’d like to go deeper, read Jeff’s review in the Spring 2013 issue of The Westminster Theological Journal.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington

Rev. Carlton Wynne reviews Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif by James Eglinton and published by T&T Clark. Eglinton demonstrates how Herman Bavinck connected doctrines such as Christology, general and special revelation, ecclesiology. Carlton recently reviewed the book in The Westminster Theological Journal.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne

Dr. Paul Lim, Associate Professor of the History of Christianity, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, and Affiliate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, speaks about his book Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England. The book is published by Oxford University Press and features two related issues. In a historically sensitive way, Dr. Lim deals with the role of mystery in dealing with the nature of who God is (ie, Trinitarian) and the nature of the doctrine of sola Scriptura. The historical context is the 1500s-late 1600s in England and Lim concentrates on the rise of Socianism and the debates between anti-trinitarians (Paul Best and John Biddle) and trinitarians (Francis Cheynell and John Owen). Related to this discussion is concern for church councils and the powers of bishops and the influence of Platonic philosophy.

Participants: Camden Bucey, David Filson, Jeff Waddington, Nick Batzig, Paul Lim

On this episode, we discuss the eternal generation of the Son of God within the context of Trinitarian theology and church history. The subject of the Son’s relationship to the Father is no less important today than it was during the Council of Nicea in 325. Nonetheless, several evangelical scholars have rejected the doctrine. Listen as we discuss what the doctrine means, its importance, and the theological consequences for rejecting it.

Links

• Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

In this in-house episode, Camden Bucey leads a discussion on Trinitarian personality in the theologies of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. Though the theologians approach the subject from different traditions, both theologies converge at several key points. The panel discusses the issues surrounding the traditional immanent/economic distinction and God’s relationship to creation before moving to Cornelius Van Til’s method for navigating common Trinitarian errors. In addition to the main discussion, the panel begins the episode with a discussion of several new books including the forthcoming Kingdom through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Nick Batzig

If you’ve had a chance to peruse Andrew Hoffecker’s biography, Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton or Hodge’s own works, you’ll know that Charles Hodge is an old school giant. In my opinion, his three volume Systematic Theology belongs on every pastor’s shelf. The following excerpts come from Hodge’s discussion on the Trinity and are great examples of Hodge’s mind in action. Though he delivers the goods on orthodoxy, he does so with a deep biblical sensitivity and a desire for creative, yet faithful theologizing within the tradition.

As the essence of the Godhead is common to the several persons, they have a common intelligence, will, and power. There are not in God three intelligences, three wills, three efficiencies. The Three are one God, and therefore have one mind and will. This intimate union was expressed in the Greek Church by the word [perichoresis], which the Latin words inexistentia, inhabitatio, and intercommunio, were used to explain. These terms were intended to express the Scriptural facts that the Son is in the Father, and the father in the Son; that where the Father is, there the Son and Spirit are; that what the one does the others do (the Father creates, the Son creates, the Spirit creates), or, as our Lord expresses it, “What things soever” the Father “doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” (John v. 19.) So also what the one knows, the others know. “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” (1 Cor. ii. 10, 11.) A common knowledge implies a common consciousness. In man the soul and body are distinct, yet, while united, they have a common life. We distinguish between acts of the intellect, and acts of the will, and yet in every act of the will there is an exercise of the intelligence; as in every act of the affections there is a joint action of the intelligence and will. These are not illustrations of the relations of the persons of the Trinity, which are ineffable, but of the fact that in other and entirely different spheres there is this community of life in different subsistences,—different subsistences, at least so far as the body and soul are concerned. (Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 461–462)

Hodge develops the doctrine of perichoresis, particularly as it bears upon divine consciousness and the three hypostases. Relating these is no small ordeal, but Hodge does so in a way that preserves Trinitarian orthodoxy, while also maintaining the personality of God as God. Hodge continues,

This fact—of the intimate union, communion, and inhabitation of the persons of the Trinity—is the reason why everywhere in Scripture, and instinctively by all Christians, God as God is addressed as a person, in perfect consistency with the Tripersonality of the Godhead. We can, and do pray to each of the Persons separately; and we pray to God as God; for the three persons are one God; one not only in substance, but in knowledge, will, and power. To expect that we, who cannot understand anything, not even ourselves, should understand these mysteries of the Godhead, is to the last degree unreasonable. But as in every other sphere we must believe what we cannot understand; so we may believe all that God has revealed in his Word concerning Himself, although we cannot understand the Almighty unto perfection. (Hodge, 462)

Speaking more in philosophical vernacular, Hodge argues that God—as unity—is addressed as a person, while God as three is also three persons. It’s important to note that Hodge is not departing from Nicean and Constantinopalitan orthodoxy here. In the creedal usage, God is three persons (hypostases) in one essence. He’s drawing out the implications of the notion of perichoresis, that is, the mutual indwelling of the hypostases in the divine essence. Cornelius Van Til built upon Hodge’s work on Trinitarian personality. If you would care to read more on Van Til’s use of Hodge, find a copy of Dr. Lane Tipton’s dissertation “The Triune Personal God: Trinitarian Theology in the Thought of Cornelius Van Til”. Ph.D. dissertation, Westminster Theological Seminary, 2004. You may also listen to Christ the Center episodes 49 and 152.

Christ the Center explores the incomprehensible and doxological subject of Trinitarian personality. Dr. Tipton previously discussed the subject on Christ the Center episode #49.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Jared Oliphint, Jeff Waddington

Panel

• Lane Tipton
• Nick Batzig
• Jeff Waddington
• Jim Cassidy
• Camden Bucey

Bibliography

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton, Nick Batzig

Panel

• Carl Trueman
• Nick Batzig
• Jeff Waddington
• Camden Bucey

Bibliography

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carl Trueman, Jeff Waddington, Nick Batzig