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.

Both Van Til and Barth rejected all forms of bare theism. That is, they denied a generic view of God. Both believed this “god” was an idol. This is the god of human autonomy and philosophy. It comes from an apologetic approach which seeks to first prove or show that there is “a god” before it seeks to prove that this god is in fact the Triune God of Christianity. The blame for this approach may, arguably, be placed at the feet of Thomas Aquinas who first seeks to prove “an unmoved mover” on the ground of reason before he moves to talk about the Trinity from divine revelation. The impression left is that there is validity to speaking about God in any other way than the Triune God of Scripture.

Van Til says this about that idea:

It is accordingly no easier for sinners to accept God’s revelation in nature than to accept God’s revelation in Scripture. They are no more ready of themselves to do the one than to do the other. From the point of view of the sinner, theism is as objectionable as is Christianity. Theism that is worthy of the name is Christian theism. Christ said that no man can come to the Father but by him. No one can become a theist unless he becomes a Christian. Any god that is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not God but an idol. (Christian Apologetics, 79)

For Van Til the God of creation is the Triune God. The God of the Old Testament is also the Triune God. That unbelievers or the saints of the Old Testament do not articulate a Nicean doctrine of the Trinity does not mean that God is anything else or anything other than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the one God who is at the same time three persons. The God who reveals himself in both nature and Scripture is the one Triune God.

Van Til and Barth share a common anti-Scholasticism at this point.

But, unfortunately, here the commonality ends. As we mentioned in an earlier post, Barth’s ontological starting part is actualism. That is, things are understand properly only by way of their acts and relations. So, for instance, there is no eternal Logos (i.e., the Word of John 1:1) who stands behind or apart from Jesus Christ as the Logos come in human flesh. So when he says the only God who is is the Christian God he is not affirming what Van Til is affirming. For Van Til the Triune God has always existed, even quite prior to and independent of the incarnation. What is more, the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – existed eternally and happily even prior to and independent of his decision to create and redeem by becoming the God-man in Jesus Christ. But for Barth the Triune God is who he is precisely because and only insomuch as he is the God who from all eternity has acted by way of a sovereign and free decision to become Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in and by Jesus Christ.

To put it in very simple terms, for Barth God is dependent on creation (even the humanity of the incarnate Logos) to be (more accurately: to eternally become) a Trinity.[1] However, for Van Til the God of the Scriptures is “the self-contained ontological Trinity.” (see, for example, Christian Apologetics, p. 97). In other words, for Barth God’s act of grace toward his creatures in Christ becomes the constituting event which renders God as Trinity. For Van Til God does not need to be constituted as Trinity, for he is always and everywhere Trinity, and as Trinity the sovereign Lord over creation.

Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to Barth’s approach is that creation is sovereign over his god.

And that god is no Christian God. But for Van Til the Triune God is the Christian God—and the only God—precisely because he is not dependent on creation for his being or identity. If there never was a fall, there would be no incarnation. And still God would be Trinity. Perhaps the irony is that, according to Van Til, the Triune God does not need the incarnate Christ in order to be the Christian God. To say otherwise is to make God dependent on the creature. And a dependent God can in no way be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[1] I understand that whether or not, or to what extent, God’s act of electing grace in Christ constitutes his being as Triune is hotly debated among Barth scholars. I do not intend to engage that discussion here. I make this statement without prejudice to the current debate. I am simply speaking from within the context of how Van Til himself reads Barth.

But, while we believe in the centrality and primacy of Christ in all the church’s mission and theology, there is a sense (an all-important sense) in which we do not mean to speak of the centrality of Christ. Van Til points this up in his An Introduction to Systematic Theology:

Again, there is much in the Scriptures about Christ. After the entrance of sin into the world, Christ is the only way through whom God can be known. He is not only the one through whom we can more fully than otherwise know the Father; it is through him alone that we can come to the Father. Furthermore, Christ is God, so that when we know him we know God. In spite of all this it should always be remembered that Christ’s work is a means to an end. Even if we think of the fact that Christ is the second person of the Trinity, we ought still to remember that it is the full Godhead with whom we ultimately have to do and about whom, in the last analysis, we wish to know. Hence, theology is primarily God centered rather than Christ centered. (p. 16)

I think this is absolutely correct, and is a word of exhortation that theologians—especially today—need to heed. Especially in light of some contemporary attempts to find a new prolegomena and new starting point for doing systematic theology. Usually, these theologies purport to begin with the works of God—whether that be election, creation, the incarnation, or the Gospel, or even eschatology. But theology in general, and systematic theology in particular, must not begin with the works of God.

The intentions of those who want to begin somewhere upon the field of history and the works of God therein are admirable and understandable. Regular listeners of Christ the Center have heard us say time and again how important eschatology is, even invoking Vos’ great maxim: eschatology precedes soteriology. Listeners have heard us harp on the idea that pastoral and preaching imperatives must always be grounded in the indicative of the Gospel. So, why is theology not to be Christ-centered, or Gospel-centered, or grounded in eschatology?

Here Van Til’s answer is as helpful as it is simple: “Christ’s work is a means to an end.” We cannot confuse the absolute, necessary triune being of God with redemptive history. We need to understand both God’s necessary nature AND his works in redemptive history. But the two are not equally primal or important.

That is because God existed—as triune—before he elected, created, or was incarnate. God is necessary, we are not. With all reverence and fear we must even say that not even Jesus Christ—understood as the God-man—is necessary. The God-man is not necessary because creation and sin and redemption were not necessary. The God-man presupposes all those things. Likewise, God did not have to decree to do anything outside of himself (ad extra), he was perfectly content in himself (ad intra). Why was he content? He was content because, without even a thought about us, he is and enjoyed perfect love in the perichoretic relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If he never chose to elect or create or become incarnate he would have been perfectly content in and with himself. Everything he does ad extra is contingent and unnecessary. That means every work of God is always and only to the greater end of his own self-glorification. It is all to serve the triune God.

Therefore, we begin with God himself. He, as triune, is the ground of everything. He is the ground of election, creation, the incarnation, the Gospel, and eschatology. Without the self-contained ontological Trinity there can be no intelligible understanding of anything: not election, not creation, not the Gospel, not eschatology, nothing! So once again from An Introduction to Systematic Theology:

God, as self-sufficient, as the One in whom the One and the Many are equally ultimate, is the One in whom the persons of the Trinity are interchangeably exhaustive, is the presupposition for the intelligent use of words with respect to anything in this universe, whether it be the trees of the garden or the angels in heaven. (p. 180)

Since the triune God is the ground of all things, systematic theology (especially, but not just systematic theology) must begin here, and nowhere else. All true theology, then, has no one and no thing other than God himself at its center.

Finally, why this contemporary desire to begin with God’s acts? It is almost assumed today that to speak about the Trinity is to do speculative theology. It is too often presupposed (and orthodox theologians have allowed the presupposition to go unchallenged!) that talk about the existence, being, and nature of God is philosophical and not properly theological. It is true that in the history of theology the doctrine of God has been treated that way (i.e., as an object of philosophical/speculative study). But that method must be challenged. And Van Til does that for us here. No, beginning with the Trinity is not—and must not be—speculative. Why? Because the triune God of Scripture has directly revealed to us something of his eternal and everlasting nature. While he is eternal and we are not, and therefore we can never comprehend him, we can nevertheless know him truly (albeit in a limited and imperfect way). And we can know him truly, though not comprehensively, as the self-contained ontological Trinity. It is here—and nowhere else—where Van Til will begin his theology and his apologetic approach.

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.

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.

After a hiatus we are back to our reading through and engaging with the text of Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and its Legacy. We come now to the third point of departure that Ayres’ discusses in the opening chapter of the book: theology and the reading of Scripture (31-40). As Reformed Protestants we should be keen to see what the author has to say about the standard Scriptural reading strategies of the early church fathers leading up to the time of the Trinitarian controversy in the fourth century.

Ayres begins the section by noting that the latest scholarship on the early church has cast Adolf von Harnack’s charge of the inappropriate “Hellenization” of the church’s theology in more negative light

Recent scholarship has argued that characterizing the fourth century as the culmination of Christianity’s “Hellenization” is misleading. This is especially so if Hellenization is understood as resulting in a philosophically articulated doctrinal system only distantly related to the words of Scripture. The revisionary scholarship to which this book is indebted has tried to demonstrate the ways in which exegetical concerns shaped the theologies with which we are concerned here (31).

The author goes on to note why early church exegesis is so harshly judged.

These negative judgements have usually resulted from comparisons between early Christian and modern academic exegetical practice, comparisons that assume the former is a deficient form of the latter. An implied comparison between fourth-century exegesis and modern historical-critical modes is also frequently embedded in reference, for instance, to post-Reformation divisions between allegory and typology, or to some ways of distinguishing Alexandrian from Antiochene exegesis (particularly those which assume that Antiochenes were more interested in the historical, that they were somehow more modern).

We need to assess the early church hermeneutical and exegetical practices on their own terms rather than subjecting them to the standards of other eras. I would be in general agreement with the author in terms of getting at just what the practices were. At other times I have noted we need to recognize the distinction between the historical question (what was said and done?) and the normative question (is it right or is it Scriptural?). Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology? Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference? Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches? These are all interesting and important questions.

Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology?

The first question has to do with the use of pagan thought in Christian theology. Is that what the church fathers as a whole thought they were doing or actually did? Is it wise to do that? This is another way of wrestling with the relationship and priority of natural revelation and special revelation. It is also another way of relating philosophy to theology, faith to reason, and the antithesis to common grace. We must note with all seriousness that the antithesis came before common grace in the scheme of things. The fall created the antithesis between belief and unbelief. Yes, it is true that the reality of common grace means that unbelievers do know things after a fashion and that we Christians can learn things from unbelievers. But insofar as they deny the connection of everything in creation to the triune God of Scripture and refuse to accept that God determines the meaning and significance of every last thing in the cosmos, to that extent, their knowledge will be corrupted and truncated and distorted. This is why Augustine in his On Christian Teaching talks about plundering the Egyptians and baptizing the truth that we gain from pagan thought. That is why Cornelius Van Til said that while the king of Lebanon could provide timber for the Jerusalem temple, only God could provide Solomon with the blueprints. The question remains, what did the early church fathers think they were doing? It would be best to treat each father on his own terms as I imagine there were a variety of opinions and practices. Von Harnack shared the anti-metaphysical bias of his age and so created a procrustean bed and whatever was too small he stretched and whatever was too big he hacked off according to his Ritschlian (Kantian) standards. In reality I suspect the best of the fathers thought they were using the terminology of Greek philosophy while cleansing the said terminology of its pagan roots much as the New Testament uses the word theos for God, a word used with regard to Zeus and no doubt other gods in the divine pantheon. We have to look at each instance and each theologian carefully. It can be the case that we fail to untwist the twisted truth found in pagan thought.

Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference?

The second question has to do with the Protestant rejection of the so-called quadriga or fourfold sense of Scripture. While the schematization is of later development, our forebears in the Reformed faith no doubt recognized that it had its seeds in earlier hermeneutical practices. Ayres says that the fathers understood the idea of the plain sense or sensus literalis or literary sense of the text of Scripture or what he describes as knowing the “way the words run” (32) but that they also assumed that the text could “have a variety of functions in the education of the Christian mind” (33). Ayres challenges the distinction made between allegory and typology. In our setting we would say that typology is divinely intended and implanted meaning that resides in the text connecting an earlier OT text involving persons, places, events, and institutions to later OT texts or NT texts, especially culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Typology as properly conceived is grounded in redemptive history as well as the literary sense of the text whereas it seems that allegory cuts itself loose from the historical referential moorings of the text. I concede that in practice it is not always easy to see the difference between allegory and typology. And it is likely that various fathers of the church did both intentionally and unintentionally.

Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches?

On the related question of whether there was a hard and fast distinction between the hermeneutical practices of the schools of Alexandria and Antioch, the current scholarship appears to be calling the clear cut distinction between the two schools overwrought. Alexandria was not committed to unalloyed allegory and Antioch was not tied to only historical concerns. Do we see these tendencies at work in the work of the fathers? Yes. But as Ayres points out, these characteristics were shared by both schools. Sometime back there was a two-part article in the Westminster Theological Journal that argued the same thing. Alexandria and Antioch do not represent two diametrically opposite schools of biblical interpretation. This is where reliance only on secondary literature can be problematic. We can’t be experts in everything so we do rely on the expertise of others to keep us up to date on scholarly developments insofar as they assist us in understanding what were in fact the conditions on the ground in the ancient church.

Ayres argues for the figural reading of Scripture which at its best is a trained sensitivity to the theological, historical, literary, philosophical, linguistic, and cultural features of the text. Figural readings are dependent on the historical foundation of the biblical text (37). Ayres is correct to point out that the bifurcation between exegesis and theology, which is so common in biblical studies these days, was not a working assumption of the fathers (38). Pre-critical exegesis has much to commend it and I for one am happy to recover as much of the theological mindset of pre-critical exegetical practice as we can. Related to this are the guides that arose in the early church: the analogy of Scripture, the analogy of faith, and the scope of Scripture. The analogy of Scripture has to do with comparing Scripture with Scripture and allowing clearer passages to shed light on less clear passages. The analogy of faith was a more synthetic idea where one gains a sense of the whole so that we never fall into the trap of not allowing one part of Scripture to enlighten another. And the scope of Scripture has to do with the telos or goal of the Bible, which is Jesus Christ himself (see Ayres’s discussion on 39-40).

We have now come to the end of the author’s bird’s eye summary of the book and with the next segment we will delve into the deep structure of the book and the history and theology of the fourth century Trinitarian controversy.

Lewis Ayres begins his consideration of the four points of departure in his Nicaea and Its Legacy by looking at the circumstances which obtained in the church from the time of Arius until the Council of Nicaea in 325 (15-20). To recap, Ayres will proceed through a consideration of the standard treatment of the fourth century Trinitarian controversy (repeat after me, “conTROversy” not “controVERsy”) which ties the whole brouhaha to the fully-formed theology of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius and his followers. This will be followed by a look at the theology of the church father Origen, an examination of the exegesis developing between the time of Origen and late fourth century, and finally Ayres will develop themes from the first three points of departure demonstrating the “variety of theological trajectories existing in tension at the beginning of the fourth century” (15).

Traditionally, it has been understood that Arius took umbrage with the teaching of his bishop, Alexander. Alexander taught that the Father and the Son always existed from eternity, suggesting the eternal generation of the Son. Arius is said to have objected to this teaching since it implied two foundational principles of the universe rather than one. Arius is said to hold that the Son was inferior to the Father, being as Ayres notes, a created “derivative copy of some of the Father’s attributes” (16). Whatever we ultimately make of the historical accuracy of this all-too-brief description, it remains true that as explicated here, Alexander is sound and Arius is defective. Whether this summary is adequate will become clear as we move along. Typically, in summaries of church history this is the picture we get. Ayres is trying to overturn this facile reading with a thicker contextually sensitive, historically accurate, and theologically nuanced consideration of matters.

This begs the question of how much distortion occurs when we seek to simplify inherently complex matters? Is it possible to bring clarity without distortion? All thinking involves a certain level of selectivity and abstraction. If it didn’t we would be faced with a blooming, buzzing chaos or with bare chronologies which are about as exciting as reams and reams of statistics (with all due respect to all you statisticians out there). In philosophical terms I am talking about the one and many problem. We work hard to wrestle the facts of history into a coherent plan. The voluminous events, persons, and circumstances are the many and our attempted explanation is the one. This is not in itself problematic as this is how God has made us to think. There is a unified plan according to God and his Word. The question is whether we treat the facts of history as bits of silly putty malleable to our template (read procrustean bed) or, to use another metaphor, do we try to shoehorn historical data? Our explanation should arise from the facts of history. Of course this is talking in general terms and I have not considered the sovereignty of God over the whole process and his speaking into our world and into our historiographical method. Huh? God who created the world in which we live and who has created us in his image and who has sent his Son into the world to save us and sent his Spirit to apply the Son’s redemption to us and spoken into this world has something to say about history and truth-telling, etc. Christian historiography at the very least ought to be concerned to uphold the ninth commandment. It is possible to break the ninth commandment with how we do history. We ought to aim for truth.

All of this is to remind us that we should allow the evidence left from the past to speak on its own terms within the context of a biblical and Reformed world and life view (ooh, did I use that nasty Kantian word “worldview”?). Our commitment to orthodoxy does not per se determine what in fact various historical individuals said or did. That is a matter of historical investigation and making sense of what is left to us to conclude from the evidence. Our Reformed Christian theological commitment (er, …worldview) provides biblical parameters (for instance, there is such a thing as the supernatural) but it is possible that things get mixed up or misunderstood or simplified or distorted over time.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Ayres points out that there were other issues that may have been at play beyond the purely Trinitarian. Among these was the rise of monarchical episcopacy. That is, the church in Alexandria was moving from the bishop as primus inter pares among a college of presbyters to being sole absolute authority within a diocese (15). The conflict between Arius and Alexander may betray elements of this movement. We need not fear the reality of politics within the church as if this is something new. Politics played its role in the OT church as well and this fact does not undermine the sovereignty of God, nor does it necessarily sully theological formulations. It can, but does not necessarily do so. Politics has been defined as the organization of our common life. That is, any group of people will have to organize themselves around certain agreed-upon principles. So all groups involve politics in this general sense. The question is, is the politics seen in the history of the church godly or corrupt?

Ayres highlights the complexity of the situation in the early church.

Alexander and the Alexandrian clergy condemned Arius after he refused to sign a confession of faith presented by Alexander. Over the next few years Arius gained support from some bishops in Palestine, Syria, and North Africa, especially Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine and Eusebius of Nicomedia, near Constantinople. Many of his supporters appear to have greatly valued the teaching of Lucian of Antioch, a priest and teacher in Antioch martyred in 312 and some were Lucian’s students. Although these supporters may have been wary of some aspects of Arius’ theology—especially his insistence on the unknowability of the Father—they joined in opposition to Alexander. For all of them Alexander’s theology seemed to compromise the unity of God and the unique status of the Father. Two small councils, one in Bithynia, the other in Palestine, vindicated Arius, and Alexander may have refused a conciliatory approach from Arius as involving insufficient concession. For some of this period Arius seems to have left (or been expelled from) Alexandria and travelled to seek support; eventually he returned and openly opposed Alexander (17).

There is such a thing as oversimplification and over-complication. These are two extremes to avoid. As we work through theological controversies we need to learn to live with complexity whether we personally like it or not. We might like things to be neat and tidy and wrapped with pretty paper and tied up with a nice bow. But that is rarely how God works. Maturity involves learning to live with our heroes, warts and all, as the Bible does. The Bible presents the saints in all their colorful glory. Only Jesus was sinless.

Emperor Constantine even got in on the action, writing to Alexander and Arius, telling them to cease and desist doctrinal bickering (18). After a series of meetings and communications, a council met at Nicaea in 325 which produced a statement

asserting that the Son is generated from the Father himself in an ineffable manner and that the transcendence and ineffability of this generation forbid us from speaking of the Son as in any way like the creation. The text distinguishes the language of the Son’s ‘generation’ from language used about the ‘creation’ of the cosmos (18).

The so-called Nicene Creed that was produced stated the following

We believe in one God, Father Almighty Maker of all things, seen and unseen; and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only begotten of the Father, that is of the being of the Father (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός), God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (ὁμοούσιον) with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, and is coming to judge the living and the dead…But those who say ‘there was a time when he did not exist’, and ‘before being begotten he did not exist’, and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or ousia (ἐξ ἑτέρας ὑποστάσεως ἢ οὐσίας), or is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns (19).

As Ayres points out, this formulation, later modified at Constantinople, did not end the theological controversy swirling around Arius. Arius was a problem, but his teaching did not arise de novo. Arius claimed that Alexander had distorted the theology taught in the catechesis of the Alexandrian church (20). There may be more than a scintilla of truth about this.

Those who assume that this narrative of Arius and his conflict with Alexander is the most important point of departure for the fourth-century controversies interpret the events after Nicaea by narrating the emergence of an Arian conspiracy to keep alive his theology, to oppose Athanasius, and to contend against Nicaea and its theology. In fact, little evidence for any Arian conspiracy can be found. In these confusing events around and after Nicaea, we see the need to consider not simply Arius and his fortunes but the wider context within which that particular controversy occurred. If we are to make useful judgements about Nicaea’s creed and about how the Christian community viewed the conflict over Arius, we need to understand the theological options available in the 300–25 period. For example, the initial opponents of Arius present him as distorting the Church’s traditional faith; Arius argues, however, that Alexander’s theology changes and distorts the traditional catechetical teaching in Alexandria. We can only assess these claims by understanding the wider context within which those claims were made. Indeed, through exploring this context we will find pre-existing deep theological tensions at the beginning of the fourth century. Controversy over Arius was the spark that ignited a fire waiting to happen, and the origins of the dispute do not lie simply in the beliefs of one thinker, but in existing tensions that formed his background (20, emphasis mine).

As far as I can tell, the orthodoxy of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is not being called into question. It just turns out that the path to its formulation was more convoluted than we have traditionally thought. That’s OK. God is sovereign over the meandering historical process. One does not have to choose between a cardboard version of events on the one hand and the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code-like conniving on the other. What Ayres is attempting to get at is a more adequate and hopefully more accurate description of the path the church took to get at the truth of orthodox Trinitarian theology. I am not saying that Ayres would agree with my assessment here. He is a Roman Catholic lay theologian and church historian and has to come to grips with how this topsy-turvy pathway squares with his church’s view of the relationship of Scripture and tradition and how tradition unfolds in history (we touched on this in an earlier post and will come back to this later on).

God does not need us sprucing up the messiness of church history. If church history is convoluted and complex, so be it. Redemptive history as revealed in Scripture was not exactly a straight-line development from Genesis to Revelation. If biblical history was filled with twists and turns and our heroes were not typically flawless, why do we think our heroes of church history would be? Does not that expectation fail to square with the grace of the gospel and our own experience of the faith? Another way of putting this is to say that the church is being sanctified in the process of theological development as are the individual heroes of the faith. Richard Muller has argued (in his co-authored book with James Bradley on church history methodology) that our theology does not determine whether someone somewhere at some time in the past said such and such. Our theology can provide, as I have already intimated in this post, parameters or guiderails for historical research, but it cannot determine in advance or a priori the historical particulars as such. That requires historical investigation.

History is in God’s hands and we can be sure he is guiding his church through the travails of wrestling with Scripture and the ups and downs of theological development. Scripture is infallible and inerrant. Theological development is not necessarily either. To use the language of the Reformed Scholastics, our theology is ectypal, not archetypal. Our theology is also in via. We are pilgrims on the way to the eternal city. By God’s grace we will arrive at the new heavens and new earth to dwell eternally with the Triune God and the saints and angels. Between our Lord’s ascension and our eternal felicity there have been and will no doubt continue to be a few bumps in the theological road.

A New but Classic Text

We are reading through Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and its Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004). Our goal is to read this relatively new but still classic text on the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy with intelligence and understanding. The impetus for our pilgrimage is the recent broadly Reformed internecine conflict on the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father in the Trinity (in se or ad intra). While this is the occasion for choosing this text as our first book it will not inordinantly control our reading. We will sometimes move through the book at a snail’s pace and sometimes at breakneck speed (well, maybe).

In the last post we had a brief overview of the book so that we can now delve into the text with abandon. There is no better place than to begin at the beginning. That is, there is no better place once we have read the back of the book cover and the inside flaps, have perused the contents pages, looked at the bibliography and indices (ok, indexes too!). Once we have fanned the pages to get a sense of the whole we can begin.

Point of Departure

The first chapter is titled “points of departure” (11-40) and we will be covering the first five pages (Lane Tipton is my hero!). In this section Ayres wants to line out what he is doing and how he is doing it differently than others who have gone before. This is such an important concern that Ayres devotes the first ten chapters of the book to getting the historical and theological context right. It is not simply that the controversy was a matter of Arius being bad and Nicaea setting the record straight for all time. That is simplistic and not at all helpful. Real history is more complex or complicated than that. This is not to suggest, as far as I can tell, that Arius was somehow a good guy. But the author wants us to get to know all the textures and strands that go into the fabric of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy. This matters to us because we Reformed folk are catholic in the best sense of that lower-case word.

The context I was speaking of is what Ayres calls a “theological culture” (12). He tells us that this theological culture was a combination of doctrinal propositions and strategies for using the doctrines. We could say that the controversy drove the church to develop a theological grammar. That is, the church developed a way of talking about the Triune God through the rough and tumble of theological debate. Ayres puts it this way:

It is now a commonplace that these disputes cannot simply be understood as the product of the Church’s struggle against a heretic and his followers grounded in a clear Nicene doctrine established in the controversy’s earliest stages. Rather, this controversy is a complex affair in which tensions between pre-existing theological traditions intensified as a result of dispute over Arius, and over events following the Council of Nicaea. The conflict that resulted eventually led to the emergence of a series of what I will term pro-Nicene theologies interpreting the Council of Nicaea in ways that provided a persuasive solution to the conflicts of the century (11-12).

Real History is Complex

By stressing the complexity of the era Ayres seeks to consider not only the myriad differences between various theologians and theological parties, but also what ways of thinking and what propositions they may share in common (13). This seems to me to be a basic historiographic necessity. In order to properly interpret and understand a document from another era we must seek to understand as best we can both the uses of language (especially if we detect technical terms) and the historical setting. Expressions can become settled at a later time that are more fluid at an earlier time and we err when we read the later more settled meaning back into the more fluid usage if that is the case. A more recent example would be the use of the words regeneration and sanctification in the Reformers and post-Reformation eras. As best as I can tell from my own reading of John Calvin and some of the scholastics, these words overlap considerably and do not have the later settled significances we are accustomed to. Calvin can speak of sanctification occurring before justification. That may be the result of his twofold blessing understanding of the benefits of redemption and it can be the result of sanctification being used here in a sense that covers what we now refer to as regeneration. This sense is sometimes conveyed in the expression “sanctification begun.” And regeneration can be thought of in terms of an ongoing lifelong work of the Holy Spirit. So you see a fluidity in technical terms that are more settled in our time. Sensitivity to this difference and development is a must when reading older texts.

Here is Ayres’s summary of the traditional understanding of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy:

Many summary accounts present the Arian controversy as a dispute over whether or not Christ was divine, initially provoked by a priest called Arius whose teaching angered his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Eventually, this traditional account tells us, the controversy extended throughout the century—even after the decisive statements of the Council of Nicaea—because a conspiracy of Arians against the Nicene tradition represented particularly by Athanasius perpetuated Arius’ views. Even when the century is understood as one of evolution in doctrine, scholars continue to talk as if there were a clear continuity among non-Nicene theologians by deploying such labels as Arians, semi-Arians, and neo-Arians. Such presentations are misleading in two very important ways (13).

Organicism

Before we look at Ayres’s reasons for suggesting the traditional account is misleading, I want to note what he is getting at. Ayres is saying that this controversy was not about settled theological parties simply warring with one another. There was movement, misunderstanding, and conventional ways of thinking and formulating doctrine that fluctuated. It was not a matter of development as neat straight-lined progress. Is Ayres dissenting from the view advocated by John Henry Cardinal Newman in his essay on the development of doctrine and elsewhere? These comments toward the end of the book suggest this may be partially so:

Over the last two hundred years these questions have been faced through a variety of theories of doctrinal development. The emergence of these theories is in many ways another part of the story of modern theology’s appropriation of Hegelianism and Romanticism. This can be seen most clearly in the ways that such theories have tended to use ‘vitalist’ metaphors likening the development of doctrine to the growth of an organism. It is frequently noticed, of course, that the theories of development seen in the nineteenth-century Tübingen school and in such figures as John Henry Newman are attempts to hold together the reality of growing attention to historical development with the need to show the continuity of Christian teaching in a Catholic context. Those theories that were not broadly vitalist in this way (especially Thomist models from the first half of the twentieth century) have tended to work on a rationalist model in which the earliest deposit of Christian faith was seen as the foundation for the developed faith of later centuries, broader propositional content being slowly deduced from logical principles. In liberal Protestant contexts development could of course much more easily be seen as a basic story of departure from an original kernel or the carrying of that kernel through history with various accretions (426).

Ayres is not dealing merely with the nature of developmentalism (organicism in 19^th century terminology) in that it was often viewed as the movement from the acorn to the oak tree. Ayres, as a Roman Catholic, desires to hold together a historical sensibility and a trust in sacred texts and their interpretation by revered theologians and biblical scholars. These are not questions limited to Roman Catholics with their views of the relation of Scripture to tradition which we as Protestant Reformed folk would dissent from. The question of the nature of doctrinal development and the relationship of Scripture to tradition is a live issue for us as well. I am not sure we need to set the logical deduction of doctrine by good and necessary consequence from Scripture against a robust recognition of the complex nature of the historical development of doctrine. How else would one be able to assess whether historical changes in doctrine are in fact advances and not backtracks or other kinds of errors? I doubt Ayres would advocate the pitting of reason against historical understanding unless he assumes rationalism and/or historicism. That is, rationalism is the idea that the human mind can determine all reality without divine revelation. Sir Arthur Eddington once said “what my net can’t catch ain’t fish.” That is unvarnished rationalism. Historicism is the view that all of reality can be reduced to the historical setting in which some text was written. It tends to be anti-supernatural and there is no room for divine activity. History is the record of human activity only. Ayres is clearly critical of the influence of Hegel on historiography. That is certainly salient. Hegel (and Romanticism more generally) viewed everything (so it seems) through the lens of gradualism/developmentalism/evolutionism. We will return to this when we come to the end of the book. Just remember that this is one of Ayres’s concerns throughout the book. Historical development is often a two steps forward, one step back kind of experience (or more realistically, a one step forward and two steps back reality).

Back to the two reasons why the neat and clean view of doctrinal development as applied to the fourth-century Trinitarian conflict is misleading. The first reason this approach is misleading is that it treats the Arians as a cohesive party (13). As Ayres points out, many painted with the label Arian protested their ignorance of his writings. These theologians may have shared common characteristics unrelated to any connection with Arius. We shall see. The second reason why the organicist reading of doctrinal development errs with regard to this controversy is that it was not a simple dispute over whether Christ was divine (14). There were different ways of understanding this question and it is arguable whether this was even a major question in the overall controversy. So says Ayres.

Theological Grammar

Ayres offers a helpful definition of grammar: “a set of rules or principles intrinsic to theological discourse, whether or not they are formally articulated” (14). This is a key to properly assessing the meaning and significance of a historical text or artifact. One example of this is that there was the possibility of understanding degrees of deity. A theologian might argue for the Son as God but not as “true God” (14). Sensitivity to these realities makes our investigation more realistic and accurate. We ought to aim for accuracy in understanding texts. I do not buy into the postmodern reader response theory approach to handling texts. Texts have authors and authors intend to communicate something. This is not to ignore the fact that sometimes human authors fail to adequately convey their meaning. Sometimes traditions of misunderstanding arise and gain hegemony. Scripture is free of the failure to communicate because of divine inspiration (this says nothing about adequate spiritual receptivity as that is a different matter).

Going Forward

Ayres sets out to discuss the origins of the Trinitarian dispute along the following lines which will be unpacked over the next several posts: (1) Ayres will consider events involving Arius up to the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325. (2) Ayres will then consider the theological legacy of the church father Origen. (3) Then Ayres will examine the exegesis between the time of Origen and the late fourth century. Finally, (4) Ayres will look at the varieties of theological trajectories existing in “tension” when the fourth century commenced (15). Ayres wants to relativize the importance of the first point (the traditional interpretation) along the following lines:

One of my goals in offering this fourth point of departure is to relativize the first: the controversy surrounding Arius was an epiphenomenon of widespread existing tensions and understanding those tensions is essential to understanding how the controversy developed in the decades that followed (15).

Perhaps another way to say this is to say Arius has become a convenient catch-all symbol of the tensions that existed in the church of the fourth century. The tensions were apparently there whether Arius had happened upon the stage of history. Or we might say that Arius reflected theological sensibilities already in place or in development before his time.

This will be a very interesting study. I hope you all are able to follow along. As I said on another occasion, this is a dense book. We are dealing with texts written in an age other than our own (yes, Charlie Dennison, I know we live in the same redemptive historical age as the fourth-century church fathers!) and it is easy to gloss (and here I have absorbed the special meaning of the word “gloss” held by one of my august seminary professors who shall remain nameless-to gloss a text is to read it in a facile manner) texts from another culture and language and historical context.

In my next post I will begin to look at the four points outlined above.

I dedicate this post to my most favorite Christian blogger of all time—Lane G. Tipton.