Starting points for seeing the Trinity in the Bible

Robert Jenson points out the need to read the Bible as narrative to see the persons of the Trinity as dramatis personae in the Old Testament:

The church has its own way of reading Scripture. There are others. By way of putting the contrast let me say a word or two about the other most important way - Rabbinic Judaism...

Rabbinic Judaism reads the Old Testament fundamentally as Torah - guidance for life. The narrative simply provides the context. Now, this is obviously a perfectly possible way of reading the Old Testament, but it is not the Church's.... The Church's second volume, the New Testament, is fundamentally narrative, with comment on the narrative. The Church then reads the Old Testament from this viewpoint. From the viewpoint of this new volume and accordingly reads the Old Testament basically as narrative, with Torah and Wisdom and Prophecy providing the moral and spiritual context...

The narrative is of God's history with his people from creation to fulfilment...it is an obvious question, but one too often not asked, 'how would a narrative display the reality of God?'

How for example would a narrative show that God is merciful? Not primarily by pronouncing the proposition 'God is merciful', though it can do that too. Rather, by telling and pondering his merciful behaviour. Or by recording prayers uttered by his people on the way, prayers for mercy that are answered. Or by telling stories of heroes of Israel who found mercy with God...

So how would a narrative tell us that God is one God and three persons? It would not do it primarily, or perhaps even at all, by saying 'God is three persons' a proposition that indeed never appears in Scripture, but rather by telling a history of God with us which displays three actors, or as David Scaer put it 'three performers', of that history. Each of which is indeed other than the other two, and yet is at the same time the same God as the other two.

(10:00-14:50, MP3 lecture, Confessions - The Bible and the Trinity)

Richard Bauckham stresses that we should consider the concept of "divine identity" when reading the New Testament to find out the true identity, and not the nature, of Jesus Christ:

The God of Israel had a unique identity...the biblical God has a name and a character, since this God acts, speaks, relates, can be addressed and, in some sense, known...

personal identity [is] a concern with who God is. The value of the concept of divine identity appears partly if we contrast it with a concept of divine essence or nature. Identity concerns who God is; nature concerns what God is or what divinity is...That God is eternal, for example - a claim essential to all Jewish thinking about God - is not so much a statement about what divine nature is, more an element in the unique divine identity, along with claims that God alone created all things and rules all things, that God is gracious and merciful and just, that God brought Israel out of Egypt and made Israel his own people and gave Israel his law at Sinai and so on. If we wish to know in what Second Temple Judaism considered the uniqueness of the one God to consist, what distinguished God as unique from all other reality, including beings worshipped as gods by Gentiles, we must not look for a definition of divine nature but for ways of characterizing the unique divine identity...

Once the category of divine identity replaces those of function and nature as the primary and comprehensive category for understanding both Jewish monotheism and early Christology, we can see that the New Testament's lack of concern with the divine nature of Christ is by no means an indication of a merely functional Christology. We can see that, throughout the New Testament texts, there is a clear and deliberate use of the characteristics of the unique divine identity to include Jesus in that identity. Once we have rid ourselves of the prejudice that high Christology must speak of Christ's divine nature, we can see the obvious fact that the Christology of divine identity common to the whole New Testament is the highest Christology of all. It identifies Jesus as intrinsic to who God is.

(pp.6-31, Richard Bauckham, "God Crucified" in Jesus and the God of Israel)

Marching some of the way in the protest of Protest Atheism

I'm not sure I would be a big fan of Moltmann, although I haven't read him. But in a spare moment today I enjoyed reading Richard Bauckham's preface to The Crucified God.

The God who, omnipotent and unaffected, remains simply sovereign over the horrors of twentieth-century western cultural history is the God against whom what Moltmann calls 'protest atheism', represented by Albert Camus, finds it morally necessary to rebel. But is this God truly the Christian God? For Moltmann and others, the crisis of credibility of classical theism provides Christian theology with the opportunity to return to the biblical story of God, with its centre in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, in which, Christian theology has always believed, God defines for us who he truly is. Here God is not only the authority responsible for the world, to whom protest against meaningless suffering can be directed, but also the fellow-sufferer, who enters into the hell of abandonment and suffers it in love for the godless and godforsaken [...] In Jesus' cry of godforsakeness, God the divine Son not only shares the godforsakeness which is at the heart of suffering, but also takes up the cry of protest against it.

(p.xii, The Crucified God)

With this kind of theology I'd always want to keep the balance that God is both the forsaken and the one who forsakes. But nevertheless I think that is a helpful quote as far as it goes.

The right question to ask about Jesus

The right question is not:

• What is Jesus; man or god?

But:

• Who is Jesus; the God of Israel, or someone else?

That is what Richard Bauckham argues in his awesome book God Crucified, which is now part of Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity. No apologies for typing out a big passage of the book:

This [Jewish] kind of practical monotheism, requiring a whole pattern of daily life and cultic worship formed by exclusive allegiance to the one God, presupposes a god who is in some way significantly identifiable. the God who requires what the God of Israel requires cannot be merely the philosophical abstraction to which the intellectual currents of contemporary Greek thought aspired. Jews, in some sense, knew who their God was. The God of Israel had a unique identity. The concept which will be the central focus of the whole argument of this chapter is that of the identity of God.

[...]

The term identity is mine, not that of the ancient literature, but I use it as a label for what I do find in the literature, which is not, of course, necessarily a notion precisely the same as modern ideas of personal identity, but is nevertheless clearly a concern with who God is. The value of the concept of divine identity appears partly if we contrast it with a concept of divine essence or nature. Identity concerns who God is; nature concerns what God is or what divinity is. Greek philosophy, already in the period we are discussing and in a way that was to influence the Christian theological tradition significantly in the period after the New Testament, typically defined divine nature by means of a series of metaphysical attributes: ingenerateness, incorruptibility, immutability and so on. My point is not that the biblical and Jewish tradition had no use at all for statements about the divine nature. Some Jewish writers in the later Second Temple period consciously adopted some of the Greek metaphysical language. But in these writers the dominant conceptual framework of their understanding of God is not a definition of divine nature - what divinity is - but a notion of divine identity, characterized primarily in ways other than metaphysical attributes. That God is eternal, for example - a claim essential to all Jewish thinking about God - is not so much a statement about what divine nature is, more an element in the unique divine identity, along with claims that God alone created all things and rules all things, that God is gracious and merciful and just, that God brought Israel out of Egypt and made Israel his own people and gave Israel his law at Sinai and so on.

(pp. 6-7, "God Crucified" in Jesus and the God of Israel)

But because Christianity is missionary, and because Jesus Christ makes the claim to be Lord of all the world, we do need to answer the first question, even if it is the wrong question. However, because it is the wrong question we will find ourselves in dangerous territory before we even get going in answering the question. In answering the first question we are going to have to talk about metaphysical attributes whether we like them or not. What we then have to do is gradually lead the questioner down the road to the safer ground where the second question can be asked and answered.

This is risky. It would be safer to stay in our ghettos. In fact wouldn't it be safer if we didn't use English at all to describe God? Or even better, lets stop talking about God at all! But then again, perhaps if God is bold enough to speak to us, and incarnate himself with us, perhaps we should be bold and follow his lead.

As an interesting example of this, I often think of how bold it was of bold it was of the Israelites to say that Yahweh is El. I can't imagine being bold enough to do that. I would want to totally avoid using the language of El in the ANE context.

What makes a good theologian?

Richard Bauckham recently won the 2009 Michael Ramsey prize for his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

It is hard to deny that Richard Bauckham is a remarkable scholar who has genuinely redefined the debate in a whole number of areas (eyewitnesses in the gospels, Christology in the early church and Gospel audiences). But what has made him such a good theologian? Our attitude towards God is of course what really defines whether we are 'good' theologians or not. But the question is wider, if not deeper than that observation.

Kim Fabricius thinks he knows what makes Bauckham a good theologian. He has noticed that Bauckham seems to read a lot of novels. He argues that: 'Fiction is as intrinsic to continuing ministerial education as theology. And that's because there is no greater theological resource for moral and spiritual formation than a great novel'.

Martin Luther apperently agreed because he desired 'that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily' (HT JT). Perhaps an enjoyment of 'culture' is essential to being a good theologian when theology is as much art as science (Theodore Gill in an editorial of Theology Today in 1986 certainly thought so).

However another possible cause of what makes Richard Bauckham a good theologian is that he is wide-ranging in his studies and writings. Michael Bird and Craig Keener have both recently written in encouragement of generalists in Biblical Studies, and Richard Bauckham has certainly written on a wide variety of areas in NT studies. He has written books on Revelation, Peter, Jude, James, the Gospels and the Early Church. But he has even gone beyond that and has written a monograph on the theology of Jurgen Moltmann!

No doubt a theologian could benefit from a whole range of different things. But what do you think are the most important, or neglected, practices for theologians?

I still like Luther's three rules of prayer, meditation and Experience (or Anfechtung), and would probably also add pastoral work. I have commented in that past that it is pastor-theologians who have influenced me most of all.

God Crucified

Richard Bauckham's God Crucified lived up to all the hype. Very highly recommended... but I can't be bothered to explain why because it will take me ages.