The Trinitarian Story in 100 Words or Less

From the Triune God comes a narrative centering on Christ, God’s incarnate Son, and supernaturally recorded in Scripture. This story begins with creation, reports humanity’s fall, Israel’s history, and God’s redemption in Jesus, the Messiah. People, who by the Spirit’s power repent and believe this good news, experience salvation: deliverance from sin, Satan, and death. United with the crucified and resurrected Lord, believers participate in Christ’s Body, the eschatological community that worships God, serves a needy world, and provisionally embodies God’s coming Kingdom. This blessing is for the whole creation, which will soon be judged and renewed for God’s glory.

Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective

This introduction to Christology is an excellent model of careful, creative, and yet confessing theology. The intentional integration of Christology with a rich Trinitarian theology is refreshing. Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective is edited by Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler.

Here is a sample (following a wonderfully concise and helpful summary of the early church councils on Christology):

“At the center of the open space marked out by the boundaries of Chalcedon are two things: the apostolic narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and the confession that this person in the gospel narrative is an eternal person distinct from the Father, yet fully divine. What stands in the middle of the Chalcedonian categories is the biblical story of Jesus, interpreted in light of the Trinity” (p. 25).

The following also resonates with me:  “To think rightly about the Trinity, the incarnation, or the atonement, the theologian must think about all of them at once, in relation to each other.” (p. 226).

The Mission of God

Chris Wright has written a magisterial work on biblical theology – and from a missional perspective.  His full title is:  The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Any danger that a Christ Centered Trinitarian theology might fade into a reductionistic christomonism is warded off by a faithfully Trinitarian focus, and the organic way in which God’s mission in Christ becomes the focus of YHWH’s redemptive self-revelation.  Such a balance is enriched by this thoroughly canonical and missional treatment of biblical theology. 

Christian theology is at its core both mission and ethics.  Along the way Wright wisely treats the ethical nature of God’s mission (see his earlier work on OT ethics).  Surely this book will become a mainstay in missional theology. 

Missio Dei

The value of consciously functioning within a Christ centered trinitarian matrix is, in part, its utility for disrupting fossilized theological systems.  It stimulates a kind of healthy "strategic chaos,"  which encourages lateral thinking about what really matters in the Christian confession.  At the same time it can be fruitfully (and faithfully) creative within concrete historical and social contexts.  Exploring the features of this matrix is the task before us.

We have been saying much about the Trinity.  But it must be emphasized that we are advocating a Christ-centered trinitarian model.  This is critical.  A theology whose christology cuts loose from its trinitarian moorings quickly sails away from Orthodoxy.   But a trinitarian approach that is not sensitive to the primary historical, redemptive and revelatory function of the Son,  runs the risk of being an abstraction.  The faithful Christian confession must be both christocentric AND trinitarian. 

The christological focus keeps us close to the missio Dei, and thus to the heart of things.  Those theologians who are moving towards a "missional" theology, and the churchmen [/women] who follow in their trail, are to be celebrated.  Perhaps it is time to critically and prayerfully reread David J. Bosch's monumental work, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission.

In his closing section ("Whither Mission?"), Bosch writes, "The missio Dei purifies the church.  It sets it under the cross — the only place where it is ever safe.  The cross is the place of humiliation and judgment, but it is also the place of refreshment and new birth" (p. 519).  May the Lord purify the church today!

“First Theology”

Anyone working on the boundary between a postconservative evangelical theology and the best of the more traditional theologians, needs the wise counsel of Kevin Vanhoozer.  A good place to start in his 2002 work, First Theology: God, Scripture, & Hermeneutics.  Vanhoozer's concern is for fidelity to the "sensus scripturalis."  He writes, "I am…advocating a distinctly Christian and theological, which is to say trinitarian approach to biblical interpretation that begins by recognizing God as a triune communicative agent and Scripture as the written locus of God's communicative action" (p. 38).  In a footnote, he instinctively adds, "Jesus Christ is, of course, the Word of God made flesh.  The life of the incarnate Jesus therefore is God's communicative act as well.  The point is, however, that one can begin with Christ only by attending to the apostolic (divinely authorized) testimony about him." 

Whether or not one agrees completely with Vanhoozer's use of speech-act theory [and I understand he may have some qualifying thoughts himself], his work is always astute, careful, and a joy to read.

The Subject of Theology

Whether one agrees with it in toto or not, one of the few serious and constructive works on evangelical  prolegomena, is John R. Franke's The Character of Theology: A Postconservative Evangelical Approach. 

John's theological journey and contribution is to be watched carefully.  One might find weaknesses here or there [John would probably be the first to admit it], but one cannot seriously engage contemporary evangelical theology and ignore his work. 

Chapter two is entitled, "The Subject of Theology."  John writes, "For Christians, the subject of theology is the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  Accordingly, the Christian answer to the question of God's identity ultimately leads to the doctrine of the Trinity…the confession of the Triune God has been the sin qua non of the Christian faith" (p. 45).  He continues, "the trinitarian conception of God is so closely tied to the biblical narrative that it serves as a shorthand way of speaking not only about the God of the narrative but also about the narrative itself as the act of the God of the Bible" (p. 46). 

On this the church must speak with one voice.    

Nexus Mysteriorum

The observation that there has been a lack of trinitarian imagination in Western theology, a kind of trinitarian forgetfulness, is painfully close to the mark.  Many, while confessing the Trinity at the formal level, live their everyday lives as though God were a bare monad.  How do we faithfully bare witness to the gospel, if our speech and thoughts are nearly Unitarian?  How, at this critical hour, does the church  give a certain sound before Dar Al Islam, if the Christian community is confused and forgetful about it's own confession?  Therefore we ought to listen to those who help us remember, and who stimulate us to biblically faithful trinitarian imaginations. 

Such voices are coming from many directions.  Anne Hunt, an Austrailian Roman Catholic writer, recently published a book simply entitled The Trinity. While the careful non-Catholic reader will filter her labor through his or her own tradition, Anne has much to offer. 

The full title of this useful volume is Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of the Christian Faith.  The thesis is that the Trinity is the nexus mysteriorum, i.e., that which provides the interconnection of all the doctrines.  [The Catholic use of the term "mystery" here is not to be confused with the NT usage of "mysterion," which has a special redemptive historical sense.]  

Anne's aim in her own words is "to awaken the trinitarian intuition and to foster an explicitly trinitarian imagination that extends and enriches the entire theological enterprise" (p. 4). 

This is a worthy goal. 

“Theology” in Cultural Perspective

Today many careful scholars are contributing toward a theology that flows in a healthy direction.  A stimulating work is Colin Greene’s Christology in Cultural Perspective.  The opening statement is rich: “At the centre of Christianity stands not a timeless truth, nor a principle, not even a cause, but an event and a person - Jesus of Nazareth experienced and confessed as the Christ.”

This volume is a helpful model for serious theological work.  Is Green an advocate for a Christ centered Trinitarian theology?  Note the following:

“Hitherto, postmodernity has been almost entirely an exercise in radical deconstruction, decentring and wholesale dethroning of usurpers and pretenders to the throne of absolute power and truth.  The resulting epistemological blitzkieg has devasted the intellectual landscape of modernity beyond repair including the ideological interment camp to which religion has been banished.  If this analysis is correct, then the opportunity is there to try to construct again a sustainable, credible and intellectually convincing christological vision of reality…

[After summarizing some helpful recommendations on Christology, he then concludes]

We have arrived at a point where Christology dares to go no further, except, as we have indicated, when it is subsumed within a Trinitarian expostion of the doctrine of God and that is not our particular task” (pp. 351, 368).

Ah, but at the end of the day [and at the beginning] for the believer, this MUST be the task. 

“What is man?”

Theology begins with anthropology, for this is where the gospel begins, with the man Jesus.  This may sound counter intuitive, but how else does even a secular person begin to think, except with the Psalmist's question, "What is man…?"  And does not the believer begin to do theology when he or she meets Jesus, the living Christ?  We then ask anew, "Who am I?" At the end of the day the Divine answer for both the believer and the beloved other is the same:  it is not, "You are Adam," but rather, "Behold, my Son!"  

"Let us make man in our image" is the sacred narrative's beginning [when the Word was with God and when the Word was God, and when the Spirit had moved across the face of the waters].  But the end of the story [the "telos"] is found in Jesus.  In Christ the human image is perfected [and the Word was made flesh]. 

So in this sense to do anthropology is to do Christology.  Here heaven and earth kiss; the question of transcendence and immanence is answered. Such reflections on the person of Christ, within the context of the Trinity, hold answers which we need for the postmodern turn and beyond. 

Postmodernism, Hermeneutics, and the Future of Theology

The current interest in postmodernism, the emerging church, and the question of truth [as important as these issues are] should not distract the church from the larger task of actually doing and living theology.  We must be about the constructive task of reading and living the gospel for our own moment. 

A work that I have found helpful toward this end, but which seems to have been largely neglected, is Jens Zimmermann's  Recovering Theological Hermeneutics.  The subtitle is An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation.  Given my interest in a Christ centered Trinitarian theology, the title alone had my undivided attention.  The book was not disappointing. 

He concludes, "Complemented by the doctrine of the Trinity, incarnational theology offers an ontology that places being-in-community at the heart of reality and gives ethical transcendence definite contours in the divine kenotic and redemptive events of cross and resurrection" (p. 318).   Here is meat to chew on.

The community and ethical focus resonates with me:  "Selfhood is understood as person in relation, a subjectivity that neither begins with, nor is defined as, solitary, independent consciousness but is brought to life by the call of the other….I have argued that this call is possible only as the electing call of God in Christ, by which we gain an identity that is sustained not by us but by concrete hermeneutical appropriation in community through word and sacrament" (319).  This naturally needs careful unpacking and that is what the book is all about.  I trust this wets the appetite.