The Trinity & the Bible

On Theological Interpretation

Scott R. Swain

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683595366
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Seeing the Trinity in ScriptureOrthodox Christians affirm and worship a triune God. But how should this affect our reading of the Bible? In The Trinity and the Bible, Scott R. Swain asserts that not only does the Bible reveal the Trinity, but the Trinity illuminates our reading of the Bible.Swain reflects on method and applies a Trinitarian framework to three exegetical studies. Explorations of three genres of New Testament literature—Gospel, epistle, and apocalyptic—display the profits of theological interpretation.Through loving attention to the Scriptures, one can understand and marvel at the singular identity and activity of the triune God.

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(RE)TURNING TO THE SUBJECT

THE TRINITY AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

The essays that follow have a common focus: the Triune God who presents himself to us in holy Scripture as the object of our shared knowledge, love, and praise. Though some consideration is given to the manner in which the Trinity reveals himself in the prophetic and apostolic writings and also to the ways in which the church has received that revelation in its confession and theology, the primary focus of these essays is exegesis: the act of loving attention we give to the historical and literary shape of scriptural texts in order to discern the singular identity and activity of the Triune God who presents himself therein (Deut 4:32–40; 6:4; 1 Cor 8:6; Eph 4:4–6).

The arguments made in this volume would be hard to conceive apart from the broader retrieval of Trinitarian biblical exegesis we have witnessed over the past several decades. The recovery of the Trinity as the subject matter of exegetical attention is downstream from an earlier recovery of the Trinity as the subject matter of dogmatic attention. That recovery led to the production of significant theological and historical treatments of the doctrine. Among the latter, studies of various church fathers (set within the context of an emerging pro-Nicene culture), medieval doctors, and Protestant divines have enriched our understanding of the history of biblical interpretation and theology. More recently the flourishing of Trinitarian theology can be traced to studies devoted to what Karl Barth once called the “root” of Trinitarian doctrine—biblical exegesis.

From the standpoint of academic theology, the rise of renewed interest in Trinitarian biblical exegesis is nearly miraculous. Once regarded as the later Hellenistic corruption of primitive evangelical religion, far removed from the minds of Jesus, the apostolic church, and its Scriptures, the Trinity has been restored to its rightful place as an object of interpretive attention through the work of biblical scholars and theologians such as Michael Allen, Matthew Bates, Mark Gignilliat, Wesley Hill, Bobby Jamieson, Robert Jenson, Madison Pierce, Kavin Rowe, Fred Sanders, Andrea Saner, Christopher Seitz, Katherine Sonderegger, Kendall Soulen, Kevin Vanhoozer, Francis Watson, and David Yeago, along with many others.

These scholars have helped facilitate the recovery of Trinitarian biblical exegesis from what, hermeneutically speaking, may be likened to the condition of those who have suffered certain brain injuries. In such conditions, patients retain their ability to recognize features (for example, eyes, noses, mouths) but not faces.1 This hermeneutical condition not only afflicts more atomistic approaches to biblical exegesis. It also afflicts certain heirs of J. P. Gabler’s approach to biblical theology. The latter often enough address questions about the deity of Jesus—a vital topic for Trinitarian theology! However, due to specific habits inherited from historical biblical criticism, they tend to do so without benefit of categories and interpretive practices within which such questions make good historical and theological sense.

Recent approaches to Trinitarian biblical exegesis have facilitated recovery from this lamentable hermeneutical condition by reconnecting the New Testament christological teaching to Old Testament monotheism; through deeper awareness of the historical, religious, and philosophical contexts within which the writings of Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament emerged; through careful reception-historical attention to historical and theological categories and practices of biblical interpretation (for example, relations, prosopological exegesis, partitive exegesis), along with confidence in Scripture’s status as prophetic and apostolic witness to the appearance and action of the Triune God in history. The result, hermeneutically speaking, is a better capacity for perceiving the primary ascriptive subject of holy Scripture, the Triune God.

The studies that follow were produced over the course of the past decade. Some of them began as formal academic lectures; all of them have been published previously in various books and journals. The first and second chapters address the broader hermeneutical framework of Trinitarian biblical exegesis as well as the reception of one particular instance of such exegesis in North American Reformed and evangelical theology. The final three chapters address different aspects of Trinitarian theology by means of exegetical attention to different forms of New Testament literature, including Gospel, Epistle, and apocalyptic.

The essays were not originally written with a larger work in view. Despite their differences in relative degree of exegetical rigor and intended audience, they nevertheless share a number of common features: interest in ontological (as opposed to merely ethical or soteriological) dimensions of biblical monotheism, the conviction that “relation” provides the most meaningful category for identifying the persons of the Trinity, impatience with the modern divide (sometimes exacerbated by proponents of theological interpretation of Scripture) between historical biblical criticism and the history of biblical interpretation, and dissatisfaction with modern ways of distinguishing immanent and economic Trinity.

I have incurred many debts in the process of producing these essays. I am grateful to Mark Elliott for the opportunity to participate in the Galatians and Christian Theology conference at the University of St. Andrews in 2012. Thanks also are due to Sam Storms for inviting me to deliver a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2016. Christina Mansfield and Tyler Freire assisted me in bringing the present volume to publication.

Over the past twenty-two years my Doktorvater Kevin Vanhoozer has been an academic mentor, a sounding board and an encourager in various facets of my personal and professional life, and a friend. In gratitude for his friendship, and in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday, I dedicate this collection of essays to him.

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THE BIBLE AND THE TRINITY IN RECENT THOUGHT

REVIEW, ANALYSIS, AND CONSTRUCTIVE PROPOSAL

For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

1 Corinthians 8:6

Christians confess the holy Trinity. “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6). Christians confess the holy Trinity on the basis of holy Scripture. The Bible proclaims a Triune Creator (Ps 33:6; John 1:1–3) and a Triune Redeemer (Gal 4:4–6). The Bible, moreover, promises a Triune reward to its faithful readers: “The river of the water of life … flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1) is our promised inheritance (Rev 21:6–7). Holy Scripture mandates baptism in God’s Triune name (Matt 28:19), calls us to bless God’s Triune name (Eph 1:3–14), and blesses us in God’s Triune name: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor 13:14). The Trinity is the foundation of typological reasoning: God’s agency through Christ and the Spirit connects Israel’s exodus and Christian baptism because in both events both parties “drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13; see also 10:1–4). And the Trinity is the foundation of moral reasoning: Paul urges the Ephesians to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3) because “there is one body and one Spirit … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–6). The unified testimony of holy Scripture is that all things are from and through and to the Triune God (1 Cor 8:6). “To him be glory forever” (Rom 11:36).

Christian theology’s interest in the relationship between the Bible and the Trinity follows from their mutual implication within the Christian confession. When Christian theology directs its attention to the relationship between the Bible and the Trinity, it confronts a number of important questions. There is the fundamental question of whether the Trinity is actually in the Bible, a question disputed since the rise of modern biblical criticism that remains with us today. There is also the question of what kind of Trinity is in the Bible. Recent evangelical controversy surrounding the Trinity reveals that agreement on the former question does not guarantee agreement on the latter question.1 There is, finally, the question of how the Trinity is in the Bible. How does the Triune God teach us to confess his holy name in and through the writings of holy Scripture? Addressing the “how” question, I suggest, best prepares us to address the “whether” and the “what” questions. Indeed, the controversy of recent days indicates that missteps regarding the question of what kind of Trinity is in the Bible are intrinsically connected to missteps regarding the question of how the Trinity is in the Bible.

I want to focus on the question of how the Trinity is in the Bible by taking a tour of some of the most significant recent studies on the Bible and the Trinity. Along the way, I will chart a constructive pathway for analyzing the Bible’s Trinitarian discourse. Our tour will proceed in two broad movements. First, I will engage in methodological ground clearing. Second, I will discuss three patterns of divine naming that indicate how the Trinity is in the Bible, each of which is found in 1 Corinthians 8:6, our lodestar for this essay. In 1 Corinthians 8:6, as well as in a host of other biblical texts, we see a monotheistic pattern of divine naming, a relational pattern of divine naming, and a metaphysical pattern of divine naming. Taken together, these patterns reveal how the Trinity is in the Bible. In learning to recognize and read these patterns rightly, Trinitarian theology may better learn to follow the Word as it leads us into the knowledge and love of the Triune God.

THE BIBLE IN THE TRINITY

We cannot fully appreciate how “the Trinity is in the Bible” without observing how “the Bible is in the Trinity.”2 While the Bible is the cognitive principle of the Trinity, the supreme source from which our knowledge of the Trinity is drawn, the Trinity is the ontological principle of the Bible. The Trinity is not simply one of the things about which the Bible speaks. The Trinity is the speaker from whom the Bible and all things proceed: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things … and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Cor 8:6). All things in heaven and on earth, including holy Scripture, are “produced by the creative breath of the Almighty”3 (See Ps 33:6; 2 Tim 3:16).

Recent work on Scripture and hermeneutics rightly locates the Bible and its interpretation within a Trinitarian economy of revelation.4 According to the late John Webster, “a prudent theology will treat questions concerning the nature and interpretation of Scripture … as corollaries of more primary theological teaching about the relation of God and creatures.”5 Adopting this approach leads us to see “Holy Scripture and its interpretation” as “elements in the domain of the Word of God,” a domain whose source and scope are Trinitarian in nature. “In fulfilment of the eternal purpose of God the Father (Eph. 1:9, 11), and by sending the Spirit of wisdom and revelation (Eph. 1:17), the Son sheds abroad the knowledge of himself and of all things in himself.”6 Kevin Vanhoozer and Dan Treier agree. Viewing the Bible within the domain of the Word enables us to perceive its nature as “a text that is authored (ultimately) by God, with God (Jesus Christ) as its ultimate content, and with God (Holy Spirit) as its ultimate interpreter.”7 Viewing the Bible within the domain of the Word also enables us to perceive its purpose as “part of a divinely administered economy of light by which the triune God establishes and administers covenantal relations with its readers.”8 “Scripture is a means of God’s self-presentation.”9

Fred Sanders’s book The Triune God demonstrates the hermeneutical payoff of adopting this standpoint. Sanders draws on G. K. Beale and Benjamin Gladd’s work on the biblical theology of “mystery” to anchor his understanding of the Trinitarian economy of revelation.10 Attending to the mysterious shape of biblical revelation, he argues that “the Trinity is … a mystery in the New Testament sense of the term: something always true, long concealed, and now revealed.”11 More specifically, the full revelation of the Triune God comes by means of the personal presence of the Son and the Spirit in their respective missions: “In order to inform us that the Father has a Son and a Holy Spirit, the Father sent the Son and the Holy Spirit in person.”12 The Old Testament adumbrates this revelation of the Trinity, “shadowing forth” the revelation of the Trinity before the Son and the Spirit appeared in person to save and to sanctify us, while the New Testament attests it, bearing witness to the revelation of the Trinity after those saving and sanctifying appearances.13 Sanders’s work not only opens up promising possibilities for responsible Trinitarian exegesis of the Old and New Testaments but also offers an intriguing account of the unity of the Old and New Testaments. For Sanders, the Trinitarian economy of salvation “binds the two testaments together as one canon … whose center of attention is the oikonomia (Eph 1:10) but whose horizon includes the eternal being of God above history.”14

THE MODE OF THE TRINITY’S PRESENCE IN THE BIBLE

The Bible is the product of the Triune God through which he (mysteriously) adumbrates and attests his self-presentation to his people. This, in part, is what it means to affirm that the Bible is in the Trinity. Turning toward our focal question about how the Trinity is in the Bible requires that we attend more closely to the mode of God’s self-presentation in holy Scripture.

The Trinity does not present himself to us in holy Scripture in the specific words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Some, of course, claim this as evidence that the Trinity does not present himself to us i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Prayer to the Holy Trinity
• Chapter 1: (Re)Turning to the Subject: The Trinity and Biblical Interpretation
• Chapter 2: The Bible and the Trinity in Recent Thought: Review, Analysis, and Constructive Proposal
• Chapter 3: B. B. Warfield and the Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity: A Historical Experiment
• Chapter 4: God’s Lordly Son: Mark 12:35–37 and Trinitarian Christology
• Chapter 5: Heirs through God: Galatians 4:4–7 and the Doctrine of the Trinity
• Chapter 6: To Him Who Sits on the Throne and to the Lamb: Hymning God’s Triune Name in Revelation 4–5
• Chapter 7: Seven Axioms: On the Trinity, the Bible, and Theological Interpretation
• Explaining the Axioms