The Triune God by Fred Sanders & Michael Allen & Scott R. Swain

Author:Fred Sanders & Michael Allen & Scott R. Swain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2016-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

ON THE TOP SHELF

Our argument began in chapter 4 with the claim that the canon of Scripture is a unified story centered on the definitive self-disclosure of God as Trinity when the Father sends the Son and the Holy Spirit. We then traced, here in chapter 5, the argument that those missions reveal processions, which are internal actions of God that constitute the divine life in itself, in distinction from God’s free outward actions toward creation. Because this is the actual basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, we must clarify its character as an ultimate claim. It does not constitute merely an angle of approach, perhaps one among others, to a doctrine that can be viewed from many angles. God sends God for our salvation, making known to us that God is the kind of God who can do so. Trinitarian theology has other kinds of arguments and analyses to correlate with this central claim, but unless this central claim is true, there is no good reason for believing that God has revealed himself as he truly is through the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit.

In the historical process of faith seeking understanding, the temptation to treat this Trinitarian revelation as something less than ultimate has been recurring. But the doctrine of the Trinity must be handled as something that belongs on the top shelf of Christian doctrine, so to speak—that is, residing on the highest conceptual level such that the claims we make about it are things that apply to the divine being. Consider why this matters for questions about our comprehension of God. Incomprehensibility is a divine attribute. That God cannot be grasped, defined, and made the object of full understanding is a statement about more than just the temporary limits of our understanding. Incomprehensibility characterizes God’s essence, so anything that belongs in the divine essence shares in the incomprehensibility of God. When we approach the doctrine of the Trinity as a puzzle that ought to be solvable, we are not treating it like a top-shelf doctrine. Just as we should not expect to comprehend any of the divine attributes, we ought not to expect to comprehend the triunity of God. This is not an excuse for making incoherent statements about the Trinity, or indulging in a “theological sleight of hand” that “consists in excusing doctrinal obscurity by appealing to divine mystery.”25 Responsible theology must make clear statements. When talking about things that exceed human understanding, the theological statements about those boundaries must be clear statements. Coinherence is no excuse for incoherence. But if God’s triunity is an ultimate truth about God, then our grasp of it will have the same limitations as our grasp of the divine essence.26 To expect otherwise is to treat triunity as something less than ultimate, as something on a lower shelf of theological discourse than the top shelf.

At one of the crucial turning points in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, Gregory of Nazianzus sharply rejected any attempt

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