Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology has been around now for a long time (1994). It has become a standard for fundamentalist America and, indeed, is probably the standard theology book available in Spanish.
This is problematic for me on two fronts. First, it is problematic for me since I am a Wesleyan-Arminian. When there is a great resource, people will use it. And this is a great resource. That means it will have what you might call "accidental influence." If a person has a firm theology in some area that disagrees with it, a person will simply disagree on that point. But if a person has no opinion on a particular issue or is undecided, they are likely to be influenced when there may actually be another position more consistent with their base theology. In effect, good resources from other traditions create traditional hybrids and mutants often without the user even realizing it.
This is particularly problematic because, on a second front, Grudem is a fundamentalist as I define one. A fundamentalist, as I am defining it, is a person who engages the modern world--history and science in particular--from a posture that seeks to defend and maintain as much as possible a pre-modern view of the world. Evangelical thinking, in this regard, is not always entirely different in kind, more in degree. Evangelical thinkers are less pre-modern, less unreflective, more willing to engage and take seriously the canons of contextual, historical interpretation as well as the canons of modern science.
Fundamentalist thinking is thus heavily "presuppositional" in nature, heavily deductive in orientation. It is generally not willing to modify its starting assumptions in the light of dissonant data. Rather, it applies its intellect to fitting the data into its initial, "fundamental" categories. It is thus inherently less objective, less truly interested in the truth, even while ironically touting quite vociferously that it is all about holding to the truth. But what it means is that it is vigorously interested in maintaining inherited traditions about what is true. In practice, it is interested in finding possible ways to maintain its starting assumptions, not in determining the most probable interpretation of the evidence.
Since presuppositions are often caught rather than taught, this means that a book like Grudem's can unwittingly infect its reader with questionable assumptions. Thus a person in the Wesleyan tradition, which historically has always affirmed women in ministry, can find themselves questioning it after reading Grudem. They may come to Grudem affirming women in ministry as a stand alone issue. But if they inadvertently absorb Grudem's fundamentalist hermeneutic, they may find themselves questioning our historic position without fully realizing why.
It is for these reasons that I have decided to engage his book. My intention is to provide a resource on the web for students forced to read his book that will both summarize his key positions and provide some key questions that can be raised about some of them. This is particularly true for individuals in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition who might find themselves at a non-Wesleyan seminary.
However, I also wish to engage Grudem as a biblical scholar. The fundamentalist biblical paradigm is fundamentally incoherent because it claims to be based on the Bible yet its Bible is largely a construct, a projection of a somewhat traditional theology on the biblical texts. It thus deconstructs from its very foundations.
Showing posts with label systematic theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label systematic theology. Show all posts
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
2 The Word of God (Grudem)
Summary
In chapter 2, Grudem identifies several different ways in which God has spoken, several different paths through which the "word" of God has come. His list includes:
1. Jesus as the Word of God (John 1:1; Rev. 19:13)
You can see hints of him trying to downplay this one without downplaying Jesus. "This usage is not common" (47). It's an implicit put down to theologies that emphasize Jesus as God's Word as central more than the Bible as God's word (e.g., the theology of Karl Barth, the most significant theologian of the twentieth century).
2. The speech of God to the creation in the Bible as the word of God (e.g., 33:6)
Here Grudem is setting up for the Calvinist idea of God's decrees, God's commands that order the creation.
3. Words God says to people in the Bible (e.g., to people)
Here he gets a little into the question of whether human words can be perfect and he predictably believes they can.
4. God's words he speaks orally through humans (e.g., on the lips of a prophet)
5. God's words spoken through humans and written down (i.e., in the Bible)
He speaks of the advantages of getting the words written down: more accurate preservation, opportunity for repeated inspection, accessible to more people.
The focus of his systematic theology is on #5: the Bible. Perhaps someone told him he had missed something, because he has a tiny, tiny footnote (50 n.1) on "general revelation" or what is sometimes called "natural revelation," revelation through the creation.
Evaluation
It is not so much that Grudem's breakdown here is wrong as that it is anemic and implicitly circular. For example, the worlds of the Bible were oral cultures, yet Grudem's thoughts in #5 are typical of someone from a literary culture. Were the words of the Bible really accessible in written form to hardly anyone until after the invention of the printing press in the late 1400's? No, only to the elite in written form, since hardly anyone could read. His analysis thus betrays at more than one point an unreflectivity, an inability to see one's own paradigmatic assumptions.
God had been speaking for a very long time before a word of the Bible was written down and presumably continues to speak in countless contexts today outside the Bible. Here is another point Grudem seems to de-emphasize by only alluding to it. He mentions that God speaks to individuals but his discussion is focused purely on the Bible. Is he afraid to say much about the fact that God can speak to you or me today, a word from the Lord to me or you today?
The underlying goal of his analysis is to set up the written Bible as the focal word of God. Certainly, the Bible is the place we should begin to seek God's voice. Where else would a Christian go to hear God's voice more readily than Scripture? Would we find God's voice so clearly in nature or in prayer? Of course, to turn Grudem's own words in a different direction than he does, if God were to speak to you genuinely in nature or in prayer, that speaking would be just as authoritative to you as any word in the Bible. The problem is more to be able to confirm that it is actually God speaking to you in those venues. God's word is God's word if it is God's word.
However, this is a question of method from where we sit. It is the question of where we should start to hear God's voice. Where can we, where we sit today, most easily access God's will? Where is God's voice most readily available to me today? Surely the Bible is the answer!
But also from the standpoint of God, surely all of his words are equally authoritative. Reflect on any inner struggle you might have at this comment. If God speaks through nature, that speaking is as authoritative as him speaking through Scripture because God is God. There is no way this statement cannot be true if God is the ultimate authority. If this causes any inner conflict, then you are not fully capable of distinguishing God the person from God as you have constructed him in your mind in the Bible. You are in danger of idolatry. You cannot distinguish between God as real and your ability to know God.
Grudem again is not fully able to read the books of the Bible in context, so he tends to see them as a deposit of truth and to miss the thousand year period of their assemblage and the thousands of years of their relative inaccessibility. Taken in their plain sense, they are individual moments in God walking with his people, speaking at specific times and places. Secondarily, since they were written, the Spirit has also used them as a means of grace, a sacrament of transformation. Neither of these natural functions of Scripture exactly constitutes a deposit of revelation. It is no coincidence that the Protestant Reformation came after the invention of the printing press.
To see the books of the Bible as a singular deposit is to read and project a perspective on them that is different from their own intrinsic categories. As an example of listening to what the "word" is on the Bible's own terms, behind some of the New Testament's idea of the word of God is arguably Jewish speculation about the divine logos. God's word in John 1, Hebrews 4:12, arguably Colossians 1, was God's will in action. Hebrews 4:12 is God's judging word that discerns the heart and dispenses judgment appropriately (cf. Wisdom 18:15) and does not refer to Scripture directly. John 1:14 perhaps implies that the image and will of God became present among his people in the person of Jesus like the glory of God in the wilderness sanctuary. It ultimately refers to Christ (as Grudem acknowledges) and not to Scripture.
We seem on an idolatrous trajectory if we do not place the books of the Bible as God's words within the context of an overall story of God speaking. We make the Bible an end-in-itself and the focus rather than the God who spoke, speaks, and will speak, most centrally through Christ. It doesn't matter that the Bible only refers to Christ as the word relatively few times. This is Grudem's implicit circularity. Assuming that the Bible (rather than Christ) is the central revelation, he determines the central revelation through the number of times the Bible uses "word" in this way. This is the circular fallacy, assuming one's conclusion in one's argument.
But how can anything supersede Christ as God's supreme revelation to the universe? The Bible has been a sacrament of God's speaking to those who could read in history or who knew some of its content orally or through stained glass. Methodologically, it is our starting point today, we who are privileged to be literate. But God has spoken far more in history than in the Bible and his central speaking to the universe is surely in Jesus Christ. Any other view of Scripture verges dangerously on idolatry.
God "spoke" the worlds into creation. God spoke and continues to speak to the hearts of all humanity in general through his Spirit. God spoke to Israel through the prophets and through the Law. God spoke on earth through Jesus. God spoke to the early church through the apostles. God spoke and continues to speak to the church through his saints. These speakings are far more oral than literary and far more "soulish" than cognitive.
Grudem's approach to God's speech is thus anemic also because it focuses on knowledge rather than what God's word does. As a true heir of Rene Descartes, Grudem assumes that humans are primarily "thinking things." But this is only the surface of our humanity, and God's words are more to our hearts than our heads. The most important revelations of God are transformations in our attitudes and lives, with our heads singing the descant.
A couple other critiques. One is that, in his unreflectivity, Grudem does not take into account the genres of ancient literature. He has a "what you see is what you get" reading of the Bible that inevitably imports all the assumptions of what he sees rather than the criteria of the audiences for whom the books of the Bible were first written. For him a quote is a quote, when it might have just as well been a paraphrase.
Finally, words don't have to be incorrect because they are human words, but they are subject to certain limitations and finitude. As Joel Green says in Seized by Truth, there is an inevitable limitation that comes from shoving a rich life experience into a string of words. It inevitably limits the perspective. It inevitably makes the presentation partial. It makes it finite in some ways, imprecise even if accurate.
However, human language can compensate by going poetic and figurative. We can point to profundity by metaphor and non-literal language. Against these sorts of considerations, Grudem's outline of words seems like something a high school student might write. There is more to revelation than is dreamt of in his philosophy.
Friday, May 25, 2012
8 The Sufficiency of Scripture
Summary
Grudem defines the sufficiency of Scripture as follows: "The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly" (127).
The sufficiency of Scripture for Grudem means that we focus our search for God's words to us on the Bible alone (128) and have confidence that "we will be able to find what God requires us to think or do" on all our doctrinal or moral questions (129). This sufficiency is now complete, although it unfolded in stages. So at the time of the death of Moses, Grudem believes the first five books of the Bible were sufficient for God's people at that time (130). No further central redemptive acts have occurred since the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ (and the unpacking of these events in the New Testament).
Grudem gives several practical applications that come from the sufficiency of Scripture:
1. We should be encouraged that everything God wants to tell us to think or do about an issue is found in Scripture (131). It may not always speak directly to our questions, of course, but it will at least do so indirectly if it is a matter of concern to God.
2. We are to add nothing to Scripture and to consider no other writings of equal value to Scripture.
3. "God does not require us to believe anything about himself or his redemptive work that is not found in Scripture" (132).
4. "No modern revelations from God are to be placed on a level equal to Scripture in authority" (132).
5. "Nothing is sin that is not forbidden by Scripture either explicitly or by implication."
6. "Nothing is required of us by God that is not commanded in Scripture either explicitly or by implication" (133).
7. "We should emphasize what Scripture emphasizes and be content with what God has told us in Scripture" (134). There are many topics that receive "relatively little direct emphasis in Scripture" (135), and while the Bible may have things to say about many of these things, these are not the areas that Christians should be focusing on.
Evaluation
The idea of the sufficiency of the Scriptures--like the clarity of Scripture--flows directly out of the Reformation and Martin Luther's debates with the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). Luther believed rightly that the Roman Catholic Church had added a number of doctrines and practices that are not clearly taught in the Bible. The Protestant dictum of "sola scriptura," "Scripture only," was thus a battle cry meant to peel back these accretions, things like purgatory and requiring priests to be celibate.
The place of my own tradition--the Wesleyan tradition--in relation to sola scriptura is a little ambiguous. Perhaps prima scriptura, "Scripture first," would be a little more accurate description of the practice of John Wesley, the father of Methodism. He is often said to have operated more in terms of a "quadrilateral" consisting of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, with Scripture primary. Nevertheless, the sufficiency of Scripture is taught in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican tradition from which Methodist churches like mine emerged, and the sufficiency of Scripture is in the Articles of Religion of my own Wesleyan denomination. (They are also implied by the Westminster Confession of the Reformed and in Cornelius Van Til's four characteristics that Grudem is building on)
Do I believe that the Scriptures are sufficient? Absolutely I do, and especially in two ways. Let me start with the easy one. The Scriptures are entirely sufficient for any matter of ethics because all of God's expectations are summed up in "Love God and love neighbor," where love of God means that one is completely surrendered to his will as you know it, and love of neighbor includes living lovingly toward one's enemies. The rest is working out the specifics.
The specifics are where Grudem and I no doubt will get into some disagreements, because it seems inevitable to me that many of the specific commands of Scripture were contextual and situational. Nor do I think it will be always easy to hone in on specific answers to ethical questions. In a complex world, love of neighbor can be a complex matter to work out and the Bible may or may not give much help. What is that verse about stem cell research again? I strongly suspect that Grudem's idea of finding answers in Scripture will often turn out to be just plain bad interpretation.
Secondly, I believe that Scripture contains "all things necessary to salvation," as the Thirty-Nine articles read. I would distinguish what God requires of us for salvation from the truths about how salvation works, with God judging us according to our (God-empowered) response to the light we have. But the fundamentals of how salvation works are even then quite sufficiently laid out in Scripture: God's loving grace, Christ's death, and my faith, all clearly there in Scripture.
But the Protestant sense of sufficiency goes well beyond what I just said. For example, the sense that the Thirty-Nine articles have is that "whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man or woman that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." So if the Bible doesn't require celibacy--or complete abstinence from alcohol--then no denomination should either. Groups that forbid having organs in worship because the Bible doesn't mention organs are ruled out of bounds.
As common-sensical as this sounds, the matter may be a little more complicated when we get into the details. Where, for example, does the Bible prohibit polygamy? Don't go for "the two shall become one flesh," because Jacob became one flesh with two wives and two concubines. The Old Testament freely allows polygamy (check out the rule in Deuteronomy 21:15-17), and the New Testament never explicitly prohibits it. I think it assumes monogamy in 1 Corinthians 7, but never commands it. No doubt Grudem thinks he can prove it from Scripture but, then again, he practices strange magic.
Similarly, it was about 400 years before most Christians believed in the Trinity in its current form. The main competition, Arianism, believed Jesus was the first of God's creation, the most exalted of all beings, but not "of the same substance" as God the Father. The key is that Arians made their arguments from Scripture just like their (winning) opponents did. Sure, we can read a statement like "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30) and fill it with our Trinitarian assumptions. I think God is fine with us reading it that way now. But it is not at all clear that John was saying anything related to the Trinity originally.
Although I don't want to get into the weeds, I would claim that when the Protestant Reformers (and when Grudem) speaks of the sufficiency of Scripture in matters doctrinal, they really mean the sufficiency of Scriptures as interpreted once the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the first five centuries were over. Basically, the Scriptures are sufficient for Christian doctrine if they are interpreted the way they were once the theology of common Christendom was established. But one at least might argue that the Reformers did not actually peel back doctrine all the way to the New Testament church but back to the interpretations of the Bible that became dominant by around the year 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, when the Nicene Creed was finalized.
Monday, May 21, 2012
11 The Incommunicable Attributes of God
A. Introduction
Summary
The next three chapters of Grudem's Systematic Theology treat the attributes (or characteristics) of God. Chapter 11 deals with God's "incommunicable" attributes, while chapters 12 and 13 deal with God's "communicable" attributes. Incommunicable attributes are aspects of God that he does not share with humanity, like the fact that he is present everywhere (omnipresent). Communicable ones are attributes that he shares with us, like the fact that he is love--we love too. Grudem makes the further claim that "there is no attribute of God that is completely communicable, and there is no attribute of God that is completely incommunicable" (157).
A second section to his introduction talks about the names of God in Scripture. His basic point is that "God made the universe so that it would show forth the excellence of his character" (159). The many images used of God in the Bible are illustrations of God taken from analogies to his character in the creation. "All that Scripture says about God uses anthropomorphic language--that is, language that speaks of God in human terms." These are not wrong or untrue ideas about God, just somewhat figurative or less than fully literal ones. Further, each description of God's attributes in Scripture needs to be understood in the light of the rest of Scripture.
Finally, Grudem clues us into the format by which he will define the incommunicable attributes. He will do so in two parts. The first part of his definition will define the attribute. The second part will balance out what that first part is not meaning to imply. He gives the example of God's unchangeableness. On the one hand, "God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises," but he balances this out with the fact that "God does act, and he acts differently in response to different situations" (160).
Evaluation
Grudem's categorization and descriptions are traditional and are quite acceptable. It is noteworthy, of course, that these categorizations are logical rather than biblical. They are perfectly appropriate attempts to arrange biblical material according to logical groupings that do not derive from anything in the biblical texts themselves. All such categorizations are "extra-biblical," meaning that while they can be built out of biblical content and can fit with biblical material, their organizing principles are not strictly derived from the Bible. Grudem's two part approach to defining God's attributes is also perfectly acceptable.
Grudem is much to be commended for his sense that our talk of God involves a hefty dose of anthropomorphism (or perhaps more accurately, anthropopathism, describing God by way of features of human psyche--anthropomorphism technically has to do with human shape). In theory, Grudem's understanding of God approaches an "incarnational" view, which would see revelation as God largely speaking in the categories of those to whom he reveals himself. Grudem at least accepts a measure of this view when it comes to God's revelation of himself.
B. The Incommunicable Attributes
1. Independence
Summary
Grudem defines God's "independence" as follows: "God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything, yet we and the rest of creation can glorify him and bring him joy" (160-61). This is Grudem's sense of the classic doctrine of God's "aseity" or self-existence. God does not and could not need the creation for anything (162). With regard to us, he is a necessary being (we could not exist without him existing) but with regard to him we are completely unnecessary (he can and does exist whether we exist or not).
On the other hand, it would be wrong to think that our existence is therefore meaningless. On the contrary, "we are in fact very meaningful because God has created us and he has determined that we would be meaningful to him. That is the final definition of genuine significance" (162). God's existence is qualitatively different from ours but our contingent existence is immensely significant because it is significant to God.
Evaluation
Grudem is completely on target with his sense of God's self-existence. God does not need us to exist nor does our existence complete God in any way. This is the classic view. Grudem is also correct in believing that our significance is derivative from God. Humanity is immensely significant because God considers humanity--and the creation as a whole--to be significant.
The main critique again is Grudem's use of Scripture to "proof text" his claims. God's self-existence is more a topic that arose in later Christian theology than within the pages of the Bible itself. On the one hand, Acts 17:25 does point solidly in this direction. God does not need human service. Even though the Bible doesn't say much about God's self-sufficiency, surely the biblical authors would have agreed.
On the other hand, attempts to use Exodus 3:14 to do hard core theological or philosophical service are generally anachronistic. This is the passage where YHWH reveals his name to Moses. To make significant metaphysical claims out of it is almost always to import later philosophical categories, often categories that did not exist until centuries after Christ.
"Couldn't God have been thinking such things when Exodus was written?", one might ask. Certainly! But how would we know what God was thinking at the time of Exodus, if that's not what Exodus itself originally meant? We would implicitly be claiming that God revealed this truth at some later point in church history. I personally am fine with thinking, but we should be clear in such cases that we are claiming God continued to reveal key understandings even after the New Testament was written. By contrast, those who say such things are often trying to use a meaning from outside the Bible to argue for a meaning inside the Bible. You can't have your cake and eat it to.
2. Unchangeableness
Summary
Grudem defines God's unchangeableness, also known as immutability, as follows: "God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations" (163). By unchanging "perfections," Grudem means God's attributes do not change (164). By unchanging "purposes," Grudem means that "once God has determined that he will assuredly bring something about, his purpose is unchanging and will be achieved." By unchanging promises, he means that God will be faithful to his promises once he has promised something.
Grudem addresses the impression we get from various biblical texts that God changes his mind. Moses intervenes and God decides not to destroy Israel. Hezekiah prays and God allows him to live for fifteen more years. Jonah preaches, Nineveh repents, God changes his mind and spares it. Grudem explains that "God responds differently to different situations" (165). Statements about what God plans to do in such cases are statements of his present intention given a present situation. When the situation changes, God's present intention changes. Such statements are thus not part of God's unchanging purposes or promises.
Another topic in this section is the question of God's "impassibility." Does God experience emotions or "passions." Grudem differs from the Westminster Confession and holds that "the idea that God has no passions or emotions at all clearly conflicts with much of the rest of Scripture" (166).
In this section he also dismisses process theology, a form of theology that believes process and change are essential aspects of true existence, and thus that God must change if he exists. The evangelical view in God's unchangeability, Grudem responds, does not imply that God does not act in the world. According to the Bible, Grudem says, God is both infinite and personal, something true only of biblical religion, he says.
Grudem ends his section on God's unchangeability with what is at stake. If God could change, then he could change for the worse--he could become evil. If God could change for the better, that would mean he isn't already the best. If God could change his purposes or promises, then how could we trust him? Some of the things most important to us about God would be in jeopardy. Rather, God is "infinitely worthy of trust" (168).
Evaluation
Grudem's treatment of God's immutability is orthodox and would be agreeable to most Christians. His use of Scripture, as always, is dubious. For example, the verses he quotes in relation to God's unchanging character need to be read in terms of what specific characteristic of God each passage is talking about. When God says in Malachi 3:5 that he does not change, he is talking about changing his opposition to adultery, to those who pay unjust wages, to those who oppress immigrants, and so forth. It is not talking about the theological doctrine of immutability.
When Hebrews 1:12 says that Jesus will not change, it is primarily talking about the fact that he will continue to live forever and probably that he will continue as high priest forever (cf. 7:24). The psalm Hebrews is quoting had a slightly different referent in its context even still. The parallelism of Psalm 102:26-27 indicates that the psalmist was speaking of God (the Father rather than Jesus') continued existence for ever. In short, Grudem doesn't know how to read biblical texts for their intended meanings.
I believe Grudem is also inconsistent in what he is willing to consider metaphorical and what he takes literally. So he insists we must take language of God's emotions literally. Perhaps he would say that he takes language of God changing his mind literally too, but I don't think he does because he is interpreting "change of mind" to mean "respond in a predictable way to a new circumstance." Surely this is not the normal sense of "changing one's mind."
A more consistent view, in my opinion, is to say that language of God changing his mind is anthropopathic language. It is human-speak that helps us understand God but that should not be taken literally. If God knows all things, then he cannot literally change his mind (or in my opinion, literally have emotions). These become less than literal pictures of God that enable us to relate to him. They are true analogies of a reality we could not possibly understand on a literal level.
So I believe Grudem is mostly right. God walks with us through time in the way he supposes. Yes, God's responses are predictable given God's unchanging character. Unlike Grudem, I would say God's emotions fall into this same category of anthropopathic descriptions of God's predictable responses.
Where Grudem is wrong is to suppose that the biblical texts already have such a philosophically worked out theology. Following Grudem's hermeneutic, he should be an open theist. Open theists are individuals who believe that God has suspended his foreknowledge so that he can truly change his mind, experience emotions, etc. They take the Old Testament text in particular more literally than Grudem does. I believe Grudem rightly appropriates the Old Testament through later Christian theological eyes. I believe he wrongly thinks he is taking the Old Testament literally.
We can raise some questions about Grudem's sense of God's unchanging purposes. Where do we learn these? Grudem would no doubt say that we learn them in the Bible. The problem is of course that he is being selective in what purposes are unchanging and which or not. Reading Leviticus on its own terms, for example, we would conclude that animal sacrifice is part of God's unchanging purpose. It is only when we read Leviticus in the light of Hebrews that we come to a different conclusion. So Grudem is not wrong to say that God's purposes are unchanging. He is only unreflective in how he has come to arrive at a knowledge of which of God's purposes are the unchanging ones.
A final word is in order about process theology, which is different from the open theism mentioned in the previous paragraph. One has to wonder what reason anyone has for continuing to believe in God at all if one becomes a process theologian. It does not seem a position that an atheist or objective seeker would adopt. Rather, process theology seems to be an attempt to hold on to some vestige of a Christian faith one has more or less lost or abandoned.
3. Eternity
Summary
Grudem defines God's eternity as follows: "God has no beginning, end, or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time" (168). The fact that he does not learn new things or forget things (omniscience) follows from this aspect of his being. "To God himself, all of his existence is always somehow 'present'" (169). "All of past history is viewed by God with great clarity and vividness" (170).
God "has a qualitatively different experience of time than we do" (170). In Grudem's diagram, God is above looking down at creation, the life of Christ, 1994, and the final judgment all at the same time (171). Yet, by contrast, God somehow "sees the progress of events over time and acts differently at different points in time" (172). This will be true of us forever, even in eternity (173).
Evaluation
Grudem's analysis of God's eternity is completely orthodox here also. It would be unwise for most of us to speculate about the physics. Grudem's diagrams (and anyone else's) will surely be a source of great embarrassment to him in the kingdom when God gives him a greater glimpse of how it actually works.
Grudem's use of Scripture continues to be out of context. The idea of someone being "outside of time" seems anachronistic for biblical times. It seems doubtful that any biblical author understood God to exist outside of time. Such ideas arguably did not develop until later church history, and those who understand relativity today would no doubt even question the notion of medieval timelessness.
The biblical authors thus seem to picture God going through time as we do, as we would expect. The passages Grudem quotes only suggest that God always has and always will exist. God revealed himself in the ancient frameworks of those to whom he first spoke, so it is no surprise that the Old Testament sometimes pictures God learning new information, just as it sometimes pictures him knowing the distant future. Arguably the more philosophical versions of God's timelessness came in later church history, when philosophy began to influence Christian theology more extensively. The biblical language is more poetic and anthropopathic, even though the biblical authors themselves probably understood it literally.
4. Omnipresence
Summary
Grudem defines God's omnipresence as follows: "God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with his whole being, yet God acts differently in different places" (173). God created space, so he cannot be limited by it. He is present everywhere, although not necessarily present in the same way.
So he can be present to punish in one place, present to sustain in another, present to bless in another. Grudem's sense seems to be that the times we tend to notice God is when he is active in judgment or blessing. But the rest of the time he is still there, sustaining everything. "There is no one place on earth that God has chosen as his particular dwelling place" (176). Even in heaven, God is not more present, only more manifested. When the Bible says God is present, it usually means "present to bless" (177).
Grudem believes that God does not have spatial dimensions. "We should guard against thinking that God extends infinitely far in all directions so that he himself exists in a sort of infinite, unending space" (174). Rather God does not have size or dimensions in space. "God relates to space in a far different way than we do or than any created thing does" (175).
Evaluation
God's omnipresence has to do with the fact that he is aware of and able to act at any point of space. Since we have a limited understanding of space, it is difficult to know exactly what the physics is. Grudem is right that God can act to bless, sustain, or punish at any point in space (just as he can in time). But we are not in a position to know the metaphysical details. Grudem is surely right to say that God relates to space in a far different way than we do.
It is possible that heaven is more profound--and analogical (meaning we can only grasp its nature through analogy)--than Grudem thinks. He seems to think of heaven as a place in this universe. But could heaven in part relate to "where" God was before the creation? If so, then it is not a place such as we can relate to but a reference to "wherever" God's "presence" most literally exists. Where created beings like angels or spirits exist "in heaven" remains a mystery, but it is not clear that it is within created space.
In the end, we are not in a position to say much about such questions. The same issue pertains to hell, which we probably should not think of as located within the spatial creation. Biblical images of hell are thus surely very heavily analogical as well, a suggestion supported by the fact that most of the imagery of hell is drawn from ancient Jewish apocalyptic.
5. Unity
Summary
The final incommunicable attribute Grudem treats is his "unity," sometimes called his simplicity. He defines it in the following way: "God is not divided into parts, yet we see different attributes of God emphasized at different times" (177).
What does this idea mean for Grudem? It means that Scripture "never singles out one attribute of God as more important than the others" (178). These attributes are characteristics of God as a unity, not characteristics of parts of God. God is not a "collection of attributes" and his attributes do not add something to God. Rather, "God's whole being includes all of his attributes: he is entirely loving, entirely merciful, entirely just..." (179).
The implication is that God is not loving at one point in history and then just at another. "He is the same God always, and everything he says or does is fully consistent with all his attributes" (180).
Evaluation
The medieval doctrine that God does not have parts arose largely from the application of philosophy to theology. It is not a clearly biblical teaching, which does not in itself negate it. Divine simplicity means that God does not have attributes but God is love, justice, etc.
Many of us will no doubt find this doctrine obscure. Since it does not particularly come from Scripture, we may feel particularly free to question it. Biblical statements like "God is love" were not saying anything of the sort but are metonymies, poetic sayings that equate God with something that is so closely associated with him that we can practically identify him with it. It would be as if we were to call someone with an incredibly good sense of smell, "the nose." "She's the nose," we might say.
The question of whether some of God's attributes take priority over others is a legitimate question. We cannot wish it away. Can God make an exception to his justice because of his love? This is a legitimate question that cannot be wished away by some supposed doctrine of God's unity.
Summary
The next three chapters of Grudem's Systematic Theology treat the attributes (or characteristics) of God. Chapter 11 deals with God's "incommunicable" attributes, while chapters 12 and 13 deal with God's "communicable" attributes. Incommunicable attributes are aspects of God that he does not share with humanity, like the fact that he is present everywhere (omnipresent). Communicable ones are attributes that he shares with us, like the fact that he is love--we love too. Grudem makes the further claim that "there is no attribute of God that is completely communicable, and there is no attribute of God that is completely incommunicable" (157).
A second section to his introduction talks about the names of God in Scripture. His basic point is that "God made the universe so that it would show forth the excellence of his character" (159). The many images used of God in the Bible are illustrations of God taken from analogies to his character in the creation. "All that Scripture says about God uses anthropomorphic language--that is, language that speaks of God in human terms." These are not wrong or untrue ideas about God, just somewhat figurative or less than fully literal ones. Further, each description of God's attributes in Scripture needs to be understood in the light of the rest of Scripture.
Finally, Grudem clues us into the format by which he will define the incommunicable attributes. He will do so in two parts. The first part of his definition will define the attribute. The second part will balance out what that first part is not meaning to imply. He gives the example of God's unchangeableness. On the one hand, "God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises," but he balances this out with the fact that "God does act, and he acts differently in response to different situations" (160).
Evaluation
Grudem's categorization and descriptions are traditional and are quite acceptable. It is noteworthy, of course, that these categorizations are logical rather than biblical. They are perfectly appropriate attempts to arrange biblical material according to logical groupings that do not derive from anything in the biblical texts themselves. All such categorizations are "extra-biblical," meaning that while they can be built out of biblical content and can fit with biblical material, their organizing principles are not strictly derived from the Bible. Grudem's two part approach to defining God's attributes is also perfectly acceptable.
Grudem is much to be commended for his sense that our talk of God involves a hefty dose of anthropomorphism (or perhaps more accurately, anthropopathism, describing God by way of features of human psyche--anthropomorphism technically has to do with human shape). In theory, Grudem's understanding of God approaches an "incarnational" view, which would see revelation as God largely speaking in the categories of those to whom he reveals himself. Grudem at least accepts a measure of this view when it comes to God's revelation of himself.
B. The Incommunicable Attributes
1. Independence
Summary
Grudem defines God's "independence" as follows: "God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything, yet we and the rest of creation can glorify him and bring him joy" (160-61). This is Grudem's sense of the classic doctrine of God's "aseity" or self-existence. God does not and could not need the creation for anything (162). With regard to us, he is a necessary being (we could not exist without him existing) but with regard to him we are completely unnecessary (he can and does exist whether we exist or not).
On the other hand, it would be wrong to think that our existence is therefore meaningless. On the contrary, "we are in fact very meaningful because God has created us and he has determined that we would be meaningful to him. That is the final definition of genuine significance" (162). God's existence is qualitatively different from ours but our contingent existence is immensely significant because it is significant to God.
Evaluation
Grudem is completely on target with his sense of God's self-existence. God does not need us to exist nor does our existence complete God in any way. This is the classic view. Grudem is also correct in believing that our significance is derivative from God. Humanity is immensely significant because God considers humanity--and the creation as a whole--to be significant.
The main critique again is Grudem's use of Scripture to "proof text" his claims. God's self-existence is more a topic that arose in later Christian theology than within the pages of the Bible itself. On the one hand, Acts 17:25 does point solidly in this direction. God does not need human service. Even though the Bible doesn't say much about God's self-sufficiency, surely the biblical authors would have agreed.
On the other hand, attempts to use Exodus 3:14 to do hard core theological or philosophical service are generally anachronistic. This is the passage where YHWH reveals his name to Moses. To make significant metaphysical claims out of it is almost always to import later philosophical categories, often categories that did not exist until centuries after Christ.
"Couldn't God have been thinking such things when Exodus was written?", one might ask. Certainly! But how would we know what God was thinking at the time of Exodus, if that's not what Exodus itself originally meant? We would implicitly be claiming that God revealed this truth at some later point in church history. I personally am fine with thinking, but we should be clear in such cases that we are claiming God continued to reveal key understandings even after the New Testament was written. By contrast, those who say such things are often trying to use a meaning from outside the Bible to argue for a meaning inside the Bible. You can't have your cake and eat it to.
2. Unchangeableness
Summary
Grudem defines God's unchangeableness, also known as immutability, as follows: "God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes, and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations" (163). By unchanging "perfections," Grudem means God's attributes do not change (164). By unchanging "purposes," Grudem means that "once God has determined that he will assuredly bring something about, his purpose is unchanging and will be achieved." By unchanging promises, he means that God will be faithful to his promises once he has promised something.
Grudem addresses the impression we get from various biblical texts that God changes his mind. Moses intervenes and God decides not to destroy Israel. Hezekiah prays and God allows him to live for fifteen more years. Jonah preaches, Nineveh repents, God changes his mind and spares it. Grudem explains that "God responds differently to different situations" (165). Statements about what God plans to do in such cases are statements of his present intention given a present situation. When the situation changes, God's present intention changes. Such statements are thus not part of God's unchanging purposes or promises.
Another topic in this section is the question of God's "impassibility." Does God experience emotions or "passions." Grudem differs from the Westminster Confession and holds that "the idea that God has no passions or emotions at all clearly conflicts with much of the rest of Scripture" (166).
In this section he also dismisses process theology, a form of theology that believes process and change are essential aspects of true existence, and thus that God must change if he exists. The evangelical view in God's unchangeability, Grudem responds, does not imply that God does not act in the world. According to the Bible, Grudem says, God is both infinite and personal, something true only of biblical religion, he says.
Grudem ends his section on God's unchangeability with what is at stake. If God could change, then he could change for the worse--he could become evil. If God could change for the better, that would mean he isn't already the best. If God could change his purposes or promises, then how could we trust him? Some of the things most important to us about God would be in jeopardy. Rather, God is "infinitely worthy of trust" (168).
Evaluation
Grudem's treatment of God's immutability is orthodox and would be agreeable to most Christians. His use of Scripture, as always, is dubious. For example, the verses he quotes in relation to God's unchanging character need to be read in terms of what specific characteristic of God each passage is talking about. When God says in Malachi 3:5 that he does not change, he is talking about changing his opposition to adultery, to those who pay unjust wages, to those who oppress immigrants, and so forth. It is not talking about the theological doctrine of immutability.
When Hebrews 1:12 says that Jesus will not change, it is primarily talking about the fact that he will continue to live forever and probably that he will continue as high priest forever (cf. 7:24). The psalm Hebrews is quoting had a slightly different referent in its context even still. The parallelism of Psalm 102:26-27 indicates that the psalmist was speaking of God (the Father rather than Jesus') continued existence for ever. In short, Grudem doesn't know how to read biblical texts for their intended meanings.
I believe Grudem is also inconsistent in what he is willing to consider metaphorical and what he takes literally. So he insists we must take language of God's emotions literally. Perhaps he would say that he takes language of God changing his mind literally too, but I don't think he does because he is interpreting "change of mind" to mean "respond in a predictable way to a new circumstance." Surely this is not the normal sense of "changing one's mind."
A more consistent view, in my opinion, is to say that language of God changing his mind is anthropopathic language. It is human-speak that helps us understand God but that should not be taken literally. If God knows all things, then he cannot literally change his mind (or in my opinion, literally have emotions). These become less than literal pictures of God that enable us to relate to him. They are true analogies of a reality we could not possibly understand on a literal level.
So I believe Grudem is mostly right. God walks with us through time in the way he supposes. Yes, God's responses are predictable given God's unchanging character. Unlike Grudem, I would say God's emotions fall into this same category of anthropopathic descriptions of God's predictable responses.
Where Grudem is wrong is to suppose that the biblical texts already have such a philosophically worked out theology. Following Grudem's hermeneutic, he should be an open theist. Open theists are individuals who believe that God has suspended his foreknowledge so that he can truly change his mind, experience emotions, etc. They take the Old Testament text in particular more literally than Grudem does. I believe Grudem rightly appropriates the Old Testament through later Christian theological eyes. I believe he wrongly thinks he is taking the Old Testament literally.
We can raise some questions about Grudem's sense of God's unchanging purposes. Where do we learn these? Grudem would no doubt say that we learn them in the Bible. The problem is of course that he is being selective in what purposes are unchanging and which or not. Reading Leviticus on its own terms, for example, we would conclude that animal sacrifice is part of God's unchanging purpose. It is only when we read Leviticus in the light of Hebrews that we come to a different conclusion. So Grudem is not wrong to say that God's purposes are unchanging. He is only unreflective in how he has come to arrive at a knowledge of which of God's purposes are the unchanging ones.
A final word is in order about process theology, which is different from the open theism mentioned in the previous paragraph. One has to wonder what reason anyone has for continuing to believe in God at all if one becomes a process theologian. It does not seem a position that an atheist or objective seeker would adopt. Rather, process theology seems to be an attempt to hold on to some vestige of a Christian faith one has more or less lost or abandoned.
3. Eternity
Summary
Grudem defines God's eternity as follows: "God has no beginning, end, or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time" (168). The fact that he does not learn new things or forget things (omniscience) follows from this aspect of his being. "To God himself, all of his existence is always somehow 'present'" (169). "All of past history is viewed by God with great clarity and vividness" (170).
God "has a qualitatively different experience of time than we do" (170). In Grudem's diagram, God is above looking down at creation, the life of Christ, 1994, and the final judgment all at the same time (171). Yet, by contrast, God somehow "sees the progress of events over time and acts differently at different points in time" (172). This will be true of us forever, even in eternity (173).
Evaluation
Grudem's analysis of God's eternity is completely orthodox here also. It would be unwise for most of us to speculate about the physics. Grudem's diagrams (and anyone else's) will surely be a source of great embarrassment to him in the kingdom when God gives him a greater glimpse of how it actually works.
Grudem's use of Scripture continues to be out of context. The idea of someone being "outside of time" seems anachronistic for biblical times. It seems doubtful that any biblical author understood God to exist outside of time. Such ideas arguably did not develop until later church history, and those who understand relativity today would no doubt even question the notion of medieval timelessness.
The biblical authors thus seem to picture God going through time as we do, as we would expect. The passages Grudem quotes only suggest that God always has and always will exist. God revealed himself in the ancient frameworks of those to whom he first spoke, so it is no surprise that the Old Testament sometimes pictures God learning new information, just as it sometimes pictures him knowing the distant future. Arguably the more philosophical versions of God's timelessness came in later church history, when philosophy began to influence Christian theology more extensively. The biblical language is more poetic and anthropopathic, even though the biblical authors themselves probably understood it literally.
4. Omnipresence
Summary
Grudem defines God's omnipresence as follows: "God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with his whole being, yet God acts differently in different places" (173). God created space, so he cannot be limited by it. He is present everywhere, although not necessarily present in the same way.
So he can be present to punish in one place, present to sustain in another, present to bless in another. Grudem's sense seems to be that the times we tend to notice God is when he is active in judgment or blessing. But the rest of the time he is still there, sustaining everything. "There is no one place on earth that God has chosen as his particular dwelling place" (176). Even in heaven, God is not more present, only more manifested. When the Bible says God is present, it usually means "present to bless" (177).
Grudem believes that God does not have spatial dimensions. "We should guard against thinking that God extends infinitely far in all directions so that he himself exists in a sort of infinite, unending space" (174). Rather God does not have size or dimensions in space. "God relates to space in a far different way than we do or than any created thing does" (175).
Evaluation
God's omnipresence has to do with the fact that he is aware of and able to act at any point of space. Since we have a limited understanding of space, it is difficult to know exactly what the physics is. Grudem is right that God can act to bless, sustain, or punish at any point in space (just as he can in time). But we are not in a position to know the metaphysical details. Grudem is surely right to say that God relates to space in a far different way than we do.
It is possible that heaven is more profound--and analogical (meaning we can only grasp its nature through analogy)--than Grudem thinks. He seems to think of heaven as a place in this universe. But could heaven in part relate to "where" God was before the creation? If so, then it is not a place such as we can relate to but a reference to "wherever" God's "presence" most literally exists. Where created beings like angels or spirits exist "in heaven" remains a mystery, but it is not clear that it is within created space.
In the end, we are not in a position to say much about such questions. The same issue pertains to hell, which we probably should not think of as located within the spatial creation. Biblical images of hell are thus surely very heavily analogical as well, a suggestion supported by the fact that most of the imagery of hell is drawn from ancient Jewish apocalyptic.
5. Unity
Summary
The final incommunicable attribute Grudem treats is his "unity," sometimes called his simplicity. He defines it in the following way: "God is not divided into parts, yet we see different attributes of God emphasized at different times" (177).
What does this idea mean for Grudem? It means that Scripture "never singles out one attribute of God as more important than the others" (178). These attributes are characteristics of God as a unity, not characteristics of parts of God. God is not a "collection of attributes" and his attributes do not add something to God. Rather, "God's whole being includes all of his attributes: he is entirely loving, entirely merciful, entirely just..." (179).
The implication is that God is not loving at one point in history and then just at another. "He is the same God always, and everything he says or does is fully consistent with all his attributes" (180).
Evaluation
The medieval doctrine that God does not have parts arose largely from the application of philosophy to theology. It is not a clearly biblical teaching, which does not in itself negate it. Divine simplicity means that God does not have attributes but God is love, justice, etc.
Many of us will no doubt find this doctrine obscure. Since it does not particularly come from Scripture, we may feel particularly free to question it. Biblical statements like "God is love" were not saying anything of the sort but are metonymies, poetic sayings that equate God with something that is so closely associated with him that we can practically identify him with it. It would be as if we were to call someone with an incredibly good sense of smell, "the nose." "She's the nose," we might say.
The question of whether some of God's attributes take priority over others is a legitimate question. We cannot wish it away. Can God make an exception to his justice because of his love? This is a legitimate question that cannot be wished away by some supposed doctrine of God's unity.
Friday, May 18, 2012
14 The Trinity
Chapter 14: The Trinity
A. Progressively Revealed in Scripture
Summary
This part of the chapter has two sections. The first is on the partial revelation of the Trinity in the Old Testament. The second is on the more complete revelation of the Trinity in the New Testament. Grudem acknowledges up front that the word trinity is not found in the Bible. However, he believes the idea represented by the word is found in several places.
As for the Old Testament, he says it would be surprising not to find indications of it if God indeed has existed eternally as three persons. Although it is not explicitly found, he catalogs at least 9 passages that might imply that God exists as more than one person.
Grudem has done a good job of pulling together various texts from the two testaments that have played some role in the question of the Trinity and the Bible. He also demonstrates that he does not simply accept an idea because it fits with his way of thinking. For example, Proverbs 8 is almost certainly a personification of wisdom such as we find in other Jewish literature. It is not in any way thinking of wisdom as an actual being, despite how vividly it portrays her.
Similarly, 1 John 5:7 played no role in the great trinitarian debates of the 300s. This fact alone would indicate it did not exist at the time. After all, it would have been the most explicit trinitarian verse in the entire Bible if it had existed at the time. I affirm Grudem for looking at these passages objectively.
I want to affirm in strong terms his sense that the Trinity is "progressively" understood in Scripture. That is to say, the New Testament has much more to say in relation to the three persons of the Trinity than the Old Testament does. It is perhaps also significant that he says "more complete" revelation about the Trinity in the New Testament. Surely this wording is acknowledging what seems impossible to deny, namely, that the most complete understanding of the Trinity did not come until the 300s and 400s--hundreds of years after the New Testament was written.
Grudem's basic expectation of the Old Testament seems, at first glance, to be reasonable. We should expect to find hints of the different persons of the Trinity in the Old Testament. The question is whether Grudem is looking in the right way in the right places.
Here we face a fundamental issue of hermeneutics. Do we read biblical texts for what they were likely to mean to those to whom they were first written or do we read them in terms of the full blown Christian faith that was not in place until the 400s after Jesus? For Grudem, these two ways of reading will tend to be the same because he does not really know how to read biblical texts in context.
I personally believe that both are valid ways of reading the text, although the second way is more Christian. It just isn't always what the text meant originally.
For example, Psalm 45 seems to have been a wedding psalm for a king originally. The princess is ready in her chamber, dressed in gold (45:13). She is led to the king with many virgin maidens accompanying her (45:14). They enter the palace and the promise of sons and princes is mentioned (45:16).
This confirms that the psalm originally referred to a human king when it spoke of riding out in military triumph (45:4-5) and that it was indeed a theme in relation to a human king (45:1). The entire literary context thus pushes us to see the words, "your throne, O god" addressed to a human king (45:6), and the historical context tells us that earthly kings were often addressed as gods at that point in history. After all, the king is the embodiment of God on earth, God's focal representative at that time. We are not surprised, then, to find the next verse distinguish the king as god from Yahweh as God (45:7). Hebrews then takes these verses in a "fuller sense," a spiritual sense, when it reads them in relation to Christ (Heb. 1:8-9).
Suffice it to say, ancient Israel probably did not take any of these verses in the Old Testament in the way Grudem and other Christians have in the past. That does not mean that God did not intentionally plant clues for later Christians to find. It only means that all these verses probably were read differently originally, since the Trinity was not a way of reading the Old Testament until after the New Testament. Even New Testament passages like Hebrews 1:8-9 may have been more nuanced originally than Christians came to take them.
So no Israelite would have taken Genesis 1:26 in relation to a triunity within God. They would have taken the "us" in one of the other ways Grudem mentions--either a kind of plural of majesty or, perhaps more likely, as an address to other heavenly beings. There is clear evidence from the rest of the Old Testament that Yahweh could be visioned in the presence of other gods (e.g., Psalm 82; Deuteronomy 32:8 in its more likely original wording).
Psalm 110 is an uncomfortable passage in this discussion. On the one hand, like Psalm 45, it reads quite easily in relation to a human king. Since the headings of psalms and other biblical books were added to them later, they are usually not considered part of the inspired text. In that case, the LORD (Yahweh) is addressing the Lord (king) of the psalmist. It thus becomes a psalm in honor of a human king of Israel.
God promises to put the enemies of the king under his feet (110:1). God will bring triumph over enemies as the king rides out with his troops on the day of battle (110:2-3). He will be a king-priest like Melchizedek in Genesis 22, a king who also represented God spiritually (110:4). The king Lord fights at God's right hand, crushing other kings and judging nations (110:5-7).
Surely this is how those who first heard this psalm would have taken it. After the heading was added, the Israelites probably took it as David speaking of himself. This interpretation is not problematic so far.
What creates difficulty is the fact that Jesus uses this psalm in his sparring with his debaters and the early church followed suit. As part of his argument--and that of the early church--Davidic authorship is assumed. For the early Christians, including the gospel writers, we can suggest something that we often find, namely, that God inspired the biblical authors in the categories of the day, including the structure of the universe and human personality. It does not seem problematic to say that authorship was never the inspired point but rather the clothing in which the inspired point was presented, just as we do not think of there being three heavens above us to get to God (2 Cor. 12:2).
But what about Jesus (Mark 12:35-37)? Did not Jesus know who the author of Psalm 110 was, since he is God himself? We could suggest that Jesus was "gaming" them, playing on their own assumptions rather than his own. On the other hand, Jesus himself tells us he did not access his omniscience while on earth (Mark 13:32). But most would be more comfortable thinking that this only means his knowledge was partial rather than inaccurate at some point.
Grudem, in fact, would probably consider it an unintentional sin to assert the wrong authorship of a book. As a Wesleyan-Arminian, I do not. The intention to lie would not be present, and no one would be wronged inadvertently since the overall point being made was true either way. It is a sensitive enough issue that I will not take a position on it, only to say that Psalm 110:1 was not likely read to indicate more than one divine being until the time of Christ.
Yet surely Grudem is right to think we should find traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament. And we do find the Spirit of God in numerous places in the Old Testament. Even in Genesis 1:2 we find the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters. The Spirit of God comes on various people in the history of Israel--David, for example (1 Sam. 16:3).
And perhaps Grudem is right that the angel of the LORD reflects one of the persons of the Trinity, such as the pre-incarnated Christ. This is a difficult concept, since it is hard to imagine what the person of the Son was before he took on human personhood. But these are questions beyond the scope of individual speculation.
The New Testament does not specify the exact nature of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Grudem is quite right that all three are said to be divine. All three are distinct persons. Yet God is one. God would work out the rest of the details in the church.
B. Three Statements in Summary
Summary
Grudem captures the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (he calls it the biblical teaching on it) in three statements:
1. God is three persons.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.
1. God is three persons.
Scripture speaks of Jesus as a distinct person from God the Father. It speaks of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person from Jesus. It uses a masculine pronoun of the Holy Spirit in John, treating him as a person. Since the Spirit intercedes to God the Father, he must be distinct from him as well. The three persons of the Trinity are thus distinct persons from each other.
2. Each is fully God.
God the Father is clearly God. Grudem draws on John 1:1-4 to show that Jesus was fully God. He argues against the Jehovah's Witness' sense that John 1:1 should be translated that the word was a god on the basis of Greek grammar. Colwell's rule states that when a predicate nominative precedes the verb in Greek and the subject follows, the predicate nominative will lack the article (234, n. 12).
Other verses are adduced to support Jesus' full divinity. Thomas calls Jesus God in John 20:28. Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ is the "exact representation" of God's being. Hebrews 1:10, Titus 2:13, 1 Peter 1:1, Romans 9:5, Isaiah 9:6, Colossians 2:9 are all mentioned.
If God the Father and God the Son are God, then surely the Spirit is in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19. Lying to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5:3-4 is lying to God. Fleeing the Spirit in Psalm 139:7-8 is fleeing the presence of God. So each distinct person is God.
3. There is one God.
Despite there being three distinct persons, each of which is fully God, the Bible seems to require that there only be one God. This faith is the centerpiece of the Shema of Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4 and it is also key to Isaiah 45:5-6, 21-22.
Grudem's next two points in this section are that 4) simplistic solutions all run aground on one of the previous three points and that 5) all analogies have shortcomings. In the next section, he will treat the various errors of those who have tried to oversimplify the Trinity, including those who have erred on the "one God" side and those who have erred on the "all three are fully God" side.
Meanwhile, all analogies fail on one or another of the three basic points: analogies of a three-leafed clover or a tree with three parts or a person who is a farmer, a mayor, and an elder in his church or one person who has intellect, emotions, and will.
Finally, 6) Grudem makes it clear that all three persons have eternally existed as the Trinity.
Evaluation
Grudem's treatment in this section is entirely orthodox. These are the historically shared beliefs of the vast majority of Christendom. He treats in his footnotes a couple outliers--Jehovah's Witnesses and oneness Pentecostals. The former deny that Jesus was God in the same way as God the Father and the latter are "modalists" who believe the three persons were really only manifestations of the same person.
If there were to be a critique, it would be in the interpretations of the proof texts, although there is nothing idiosyncratic about the way Grudem uses them. It is at least possible that many of the passages that have been classically adduced were far more nuanced originally. That is to say, the classic statements of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) on the Trinity and dual nature of Christ probably reflect more developed understandings of these passages than their original meanings.
For example, it seems more likely that Old Testament passages like Isaiah 9:6 took their original meaning from the fact that kings of the Ancient Near East (ANE) could be conceptualized as God's divine representatives on earth. Such language seems fantastic to us used of a human being but, then again, we have not grown up in the ANE. The New Testament interestingly never uses this passage in relation to Jesus, but it is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament for later Christians to see the divinity of Christ in it.
Some of the New Testament passages may find their original background in various Jewish traditions that used divine language of the logos (word) or of kings. The Jewish thinker Philo spoke of the logos, the divine word, as the one through whom God made the world (cf. Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:3). We also have evidence of divine language/imagery used of exalted figures like the Son of Man in 1 Enoch, Adam in The Life of Adam and Eve, or even Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian.
The point is that the original meanings of these verses may have been more nuanced at first than they seem to us today. This explains why there was such long debate over the Trinity and how such differing positions could be taken. The point is not to deny the Trinity in any way but simply to say that God used the flexibility of language to bring Christian thinking on this subject to maturity, just as he did with the New Testament in its understanding of the Old Testament.
So the position that Grudem takes in this section is completely and historically orthodox. This position, however, may require us to put more faith in God's working in the early church than would make Grudem himself comfortable.
C. Errors on the Trinity
Summary
In the previous section, Grudem has conceptualized the Trinity in terms of three statements he believes capture biblical teaching: 1) God is three persons, 2) Each person is fully God, and 3) There is one God. In this section, he discusses various historical perspectives on God that fail in regard to one of these three.
1. Modalism
Also called Sabellianism after the early third century teacher Sabellius, modalism understands the three "persons" of the Trinity simply to be three different forms or modes in which the one God manifests himself. In other words, modalism fails to see God as three distinct persons. The United Pentecostal Church affirms modalism as one of its core beliefs.
Modalism is obviously strong in its affirmation of there being only one God and that he is supreme ruler (it is sometimes called "modalistic monarchianism") but it fails to capture relationships between the persons of the Trinity, such as we find at Jesus' baptism or in the intercession of Jesus and the Spirit to the Father on behalf of us.
2. Arianism, etc.
Grudem puts denials of the full deity of the Son and Holy Spirit under the heading of Arianism, although it is only the best known representative of this category.
a. The Arian Controversy
Arius taught that although Jesus was the greatest of all creation, he was created by God before God made everything else (cf. Col. 1:15). The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that his views were false. The Creed of Nicaea said that Jesus was "begotten, not made." The Nicene Creed, which issued out of the next Council of Constantinople in 381, clarified that this begetting took place "before all ages."
Nicaea also debated whether Jesus was "of one substance" (homoousios) with the Father or only of similar substance (homoiousios). It concluded that Jesus was "of one substance" with the Father, which Grudem believes is true to biblical Christianity.
b. Subordinationism
As Grudem defines the heresy of subordinationism, it is to hold that the Son is inferior in being or attributes to God the Father. Grudem does not believe it is subordinationism to believe that the Son is subordinate to the Father in role or function (244 n.27). He will return to this issue later in the chapter.
In this section he also praises Athanasius for his role in defeating Arianism. The Athanasian Creed probably does not come from Athanasius but is a clear affirmation of trinitarian doctrine used in some Protestant and Catholic churches today.
c. Adoptionism
Grudem mentions one form of adoptionism that existed in the early church, namely, the view that Jesus lived as an ordinary man until God "adopted" him as son at his baptism. Like Arianism, it did not affirm the eternal, full deity of Jesus. He also mentions in this section that the Nicene Creed of 381 added a statement on the deity of the Holy Spirit.
d. Filioque
In AD589 at a regional council in what is now Spain, the Western church added to the Nicene Creed a sense that the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father but "from the Father and the Son." Grudem does not believe that Scripture has an explicit statement on this issue because John 15:26 and 16:7 are about Jesus sending the Spirit after his resurrection, not from eternity past. He considers it unfortunate that the Eastern church split from the Western church over this doctrine, although the underlying issue had more to do with the authority of the Pope and the Western church.
On the whole, Grudem thinks the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son makes sense. Might not the relation in time in John 15:26 match the eternal relationship of the Trinity? In any case, he does not believe that it warranted such a division in the church.
e. The Importance of the Trinity Doctrine
Grudem believes that the Trinity is crucial for six reasons. First, he believes Jesus could not have born the full wrath of God if he had not been fully God. Second, he believes that justification by faith alone would be in peril. Could we depend on him for salvation if he were not fully God? Third, if he is not infinite God, should we pray to him or worship him? Wouldn't it be idolatry to worship him then?
Fourth, we then begin to give credit for salvation to a creature rather than to God himself. Fifth, the personal nature of God comes to be at stake, because there are then no personal relationships within the Trinity. Sixth, Grudem sees the unity of the universe at stake--how can the diverse elements of the universe have any unity if in God there is no plurality in unity?
3. Tritheism
Few persons in the history of the church have actually held that the three persons of the Trinity are three separate Gods, although Grudem suggests many evangelicals may unintentionally fall into this category by recognizing the distinct persons but not the real "unity of God as one undivided being" (248).
Evaluation
Grudem's account is overwhelmingly orthodox, for the most part. The one area where there is significant debate is whether he has accurately caught the sense of subordinationism. Grudem does not believe that subordination of role or function counts as a heresy, only inferiority in being or attribute. As we will see later in the chapter, serious questions can and have been raised about this interpretation of subordinationism.
Grudem's six points on the importance of the Trinity are perhaps more open to discussion. It is true that Gregory of Nazianzus in the late 300s said that, "What has not been assumed cannot be healed." He was arguing that Jesus must have become fully human for atonement to work. Grudem's argument is somewhat of the flip side--Jesus needed to be fully divine for atonement to work.
This is a fully orthodox perspective, although Grudem predictably focuses more on God's wrath than early Christian tradition did. And while it is orthodox to believe that Jesus needed to become human to heal humanity of its sin, it is highly debatable whether God, in his sovereignty, couldn't have justified us, pronounced us "not guilty," by divine fiat and command. This is arguably an ironic defect in Grudem's sense of God's sovereignty.
Grudem's arguments about the importance of relationship in God or the importance of plurality seem obscure and highly debatable. Again, it is ironic that Grudem seems to be using the creation in order to argue for a certain understanding of God, as if God needs to have certain items on his pre-creation resume in order to relate to us.
Surely God, as God, may have his own well of creativity. The Trinity may make sense of a God who creates a world with relationships and unity in plurality, but surely Grudem does not want to suggest that God could not have created such things without the Trinity. Grudem seems to be creating God in the image of the creation.
It might be worth adding that it was not at all clear in the 300s who would emerge the winner and what would end up being considered Christian orthodoxy. It is easy for us to look back and condemn people like Arius, but it was not at all clear at the time who was correct. There was a time in the 300s when more Christians were Arian than Athanasian.
Finally, it is probably significant to point out that it was more theology and philosophy in the early church that solidified this orthodox understanding rather than biblical teaching itself. For example, neither Athanasius nor Grudem for that matter would not have written Colossians 1:15 the way it is, that Jesus is "firstborn of all creation." The emphasis is indeed probably on Jesus' pre-eminence, but might not some in the audience of Colossians have easily assumed that Jesus was something like the logos--not created like the rest of creation, but not uncreated like God either?
What Grudem calls "biblical Christianity" is arguably more than just biblical.
D. Distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Summary
1. Different primary functions in world
The ways in which the different persons of the Trinity relate to the world is called the "economy" of the Trinity. For example, in relation to the Trinity, God the Father spoke the words of creation. The Son carried out these "creative decrees." The Spirit sustained and showed God's immediate presence in the creation. In redemption, God planned it. Jesus accomplished it. The Spirit implemented it, brought it to completion. Grudem sees Son and Spirit as equal in deity, but subordinate in their roles.
2. Eternally existed distinct
Grudem does not believe that the roles of the members of the Trinity are interchangeable. For him, the Father could not have come to die on the cross. They each have fixed "positions" (249). Second, these positions for Grudem are eternal. They have always had them from before the creation.
Finally, these are not distinctions in attribute, deity, or God's essential nature. They hold these things as part of God's one substance. The distinctions are in how they relate to each other, something Grudem calls "ontological equality but economic subordination" (251). He will of course use this understanding to argue for subordination in the family.
3. Relationships between persons and being
How does the being of God relate to the three persons of God? The persons are not each a third of God. Each of the persons is fully God. Yet the persons of God are not something added on to God, extra parts that the persons have that the others do not. The persons are not just different ways of looking at God (modalism), like looking at the same man as father, son, and husband.
Perhaps the analogy Grudem likes the most, but certainly considers imperfect, is a man thinking as subject, thinking about himself as object, and thinking about his ideas about himself--himself as subject, object, and thoughts about himself. He fully admits this doesn't get at it perfectly. God's existence is just a kind of existence far different than anything in our experience.
4. Can we understand it?
We simply cannot remove the mystery from the Trinity. He has already said that all analogies ultimately break down at some point. We simply will never be able to understand it fully. At the same time, he says, Scripture does not ask us to believe in a contradiction.
Evaluation
It is best to begin where Grudem ends. We believe in the Trinity because it is a doctrine of faith, because we believe that the Holy Spirit worked in the church universal to establish it as common doctrine. If we were truly limited to the Bible alone, other configurations would be possible. In fact, most scholars of the history of theology would argue that Grudem's version of subordinationism has historically been considered mildly heretical. It is possible to argue for it from the biblical texts, as Grudem does, but it is probably not the common consensus of Christians throughout the ages.
The historical understanding is not that the roles of the persons of the Trinity are subordinate but that the humanity of Jesus was subordinate to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). The incarnation--the pre-existent Son of God taking on flesh--is a matter for later in the book, but historically Christians have believed that the Son was not human before he came to earth. In that sense, the historical Christian belief is that only the human nature of Christ is subordinate to God the Father and that the Son did not have this dimension until the incarnation.
But as Grudem says, no analogy is adequate to explain or describe the Trinity and we must ultimately consign its full understanding to mystery. Grudem seems right to say that the different persons of the Trinity tend to do different things. He also seems on to something when he recognizes a connection between the creation and the various roles they play.
God the Father seems to relate more to God's transcendence. God the Spirit seems to relate more to God's immanence. And God the Son seems to relate especially to bridging the gap between God's transcendence and his immanence.
An individual can speculate about such things, but refinement of doctrine is ultimately a matter for the universal church. But we can ask whether a more developed understanding of creation out of nothing would affect the way the church understands the Trinity.
For example, the Christians of the councils presumably had no thought for space itself being part of the creation. Creation, for them, was arguably the Trinity (in the emptiness) putting stuff into the emptiness that wasn't there before (creating it out of nothing). However, with the advent of relativity, we now must think of God creating the emptiness itself. We must now think of the very laws of nature being part of the creation.
The very idea of scientific law as part of nature belongs to the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. The assumption of the formative church would have been to see the operations of reason and experience as part of the givenness of the cosmos and they would have connected it to the nature of God.
Arguably, theologians like Grudem continue to blur the creation with the Creator. They have a three or at most four-dimensional understanding of God that ultimately sees him within the same space (and time) as the creation. In their theology, he is not truly outside space and, although they might say he is timeless, their solution to the question of God's foreknowledge of the future betrays that they do not truly see him as outside time.
So when so many theologians talk of the relationships within the Trinity, we have to wonder if they are still mistaking the analogy for the literal. That is to say, even "Father" and "Son" are analogies from our world to help us understand a mystery that ultimately reaches beyond our universe and frame of reference. We believe by faith in some eternal distinction in the pre-universe "nature" of God that corresponds to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But arguably even these distinctions are this-universe analogies.
E. Application
Summary
Grudem's primary application is of course to marriage. The husband's role is parallel to that of the Father, whom he believe God intends to have authority over the wife in marriage. The relationship of parents to children is thus analogous for him to the relationship between parents and children. All are equal in humanity, importance, and personhood, but have different fixed roles and levels of authority.
Evaluation
Scholars of the history of theology largely disagree with Grudem (and thus Hodge) on subordination within the Trinity. Historically, it is the humanity of Jesus that is understood to be subordinate to God the Father. If Grudem wants to pull the cork on this issue by trumping the church fathers with Scripture, then he also opens the door to the question of whether Jesus is of "one substance" with the Father in the New Testament. It is no coincidence that, in the Protestant Reformation's turn back to the Bible, we not only saw the rise of Lutherans, but Socinianism as well, which denied the Trinity.
However, in the end, it is not clear that the Trinity is an appropriate model for the family at all. Jesus is not the bride of God the Father. He is the Son. The Holy Spirit is not the child of the Father and Son (a non-traditional family indeed and certain to be incarcerated). Given the mystery of the Trinity and our sense that even the orthodox statements of church history had an underdeveloped sense of ex nihilo, we must consider even the titles of "Father" and "Son" as analogies. They are metaphors drawn from human life to help us catch a glimpse of God. They are images we must not mistake for the fully literal.
God has no genitals. He is not literally male or literally a father. God uses feminine images of himself as well (e.g., Isaiah 42:14). We must never mistake the pictures of God for God himself. God uses pictures in revelation to meet us in language we can understand. But no human words or thought can fully--or perhaps even literally--capture God in our understanding.
A. Progressively Revealed in Scripture
Summary
This part of the chapter has two sections. The first is on the partial revelation of the Trinity in the Old Testament. The second is on the more complete revelation of the Trinity in the New Testament. Grudem acknowledges up front that the word trinity is not found in the Bible. However, he believes the idea represented by the word is found in several places.
As for the Old Testament, he says it would be surprising not to find indications of it if God indeed has existed eternally as three persons. Although it is not explicitly found, he catalogs at least 9 passages that might imply that God exists as more than one person.
- Let us make humanity in Genesis 1:26
- God distinguished from his God in Psalm 45:6-7
- The LORD said to my Lord in Psalm 110:1
- God speaking of Israel grieving his Holy Spirit in Isaiah 63:10
- The LORD speaking of the Lord coming to his temple in Malachi 3:12
- The LORD saying he will save them by the LORD in Hosea 1:7
- The servant of the LORD in Isaiah 48:16 distinguishing between the LORD and his Spirit
- Passages having to do with the angel of the LORD that glide between them being messengers and God speaking in the first person
- Possibly wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-31 who stands at God's side in creation--Grudem does not actually think this one is likely (229 n.7).
- Father, Son, and Spirit present at Jesus' baptism (e.g., Matt. 3:16-17).
- The three invoked in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19
- The mention of all three in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6
- The final blessing of 1 Corinthians 13:13 mentions all three.
- The mention of all three in Ephesians 4:4-6
- All three mentioned in 1 Peter 1:2
- All three mentioned in Jude 20-21
- Grudem mentions 1 John 5:7 in the King James Version, but makes it clear that it is not at all likely that this verse was in the original text of 1 John.
Grudem has done a good job of pulling together various texts from the two testaments that have played some role in the question of the Trinity and the Bible. He also demonstrates that he does not simply accept an idea because it fits with his way of thinking. For example, Proverbs 8 is almost certainly a personification of wisdom such as we find in other Jewish literature. It is not in any way thinking of wisdom as an actual being, despite how vividly it portrays her.
Similarly, 1 John 5:7 played no role in the great trinitarian debates of the 300s. This fact alone would indicate it did not exist at the time. After all, it would have been the most explicit trinitarian verse in the entire Bible if it had existed at the time. I affirm Grudem for looking at these passages objectively.
I want to affirm in strong terms his sense that the Trinity is "progressively" understood in Scripture. That is to say, the New Testament has much more to say in relation to the three persons of the Trinity than the Old Testament does. It is perhaps also significant that he says "more complete" revelation about the Trinity in the New Testament. Surely this wording is acknowledging what seems impossible to deny, namely, that the most complete understanding of the Trinity did not come until the 300s and 400s--hundreds of years after the New Testament was written.
Grudem's basic expectation of the Old Testament seems, at first glance, to be reasonable. We should expect to find hints of the different persons of the Trinity in the Old Testament. The question is whether Grudem is looking in the right way in the right places.
Here we face a fundamental issue of hermeneutics. Do we read biblical texts for what they were likely to mean to those to whom they were first written or do we read them in terms of the full blown Christian faith that was not in place until the 400s after Jesus? For Grudem, these two ways of reading will tend to be the same because he does not really know how to read biblical texts in context.
I personally believe that both are valid ways of reading the text, although the second way is more Christian. It just isn't always what the text meant originally.
For example, Psalm 45 seems to have been a wedding psalm for a king originally. The princess is ready in her chamber, dressed in gold (45:13). She is led to the king with many virgin maidens accompanying her (45:14). They enter the palace and the promise of sons and princes is mentioned (45:16).
This confirms that the psalm originally referred to a human king when it spoke of riding out in military triumph (45:4-5) and that it was indeed a theme in relation to a human king (45:1). The entire literary context thus pushes us to see the words, "your throne, O god" addressed to a human king (45:6), and the historical context tells us that earthly kings were often addressed as gods at that point in history. After all, the king is the embodiment of God on earth, God's focal representative at that time. We are not surprised, then, to find the next verse distinguish the king as god from Yahweh as God (45:7). Hebrews then takes these verses in a "fuller sense," a spiritual sense, when it reads them in relation to Christ (Heb. 1:8-9).
Suffice it to say, ancient Israel probably did not take any of these verses in the Old Testament in the way Grudem and other Christians have in the past. That does not mean that God did not intentionally plant clues for later Christians to find. It only means that all these verses probably were read differently originally, since the Trinity was not a way of reading the Old Testament until after the New Testament. Even New Testament passages like Hebrews 1:8-9 may have been more nuanced originally than Christians came to take them.
So no Israelite would have taken Genesis 1:26 in relation to a triunity within God. They would have taken the "us" in one of the other ways Grudem mentions--either a kind of plural of majesty or, perhaps more likely, as an address to other heavenly beings. There is clear evidence from the rest of the Old Testament that Yahweh could be visioned in the presence of other gods (e.g., Psalm 82; Deuteronomy 32:8 in its more likely original wording).
Psalm 110 is an uncomfortable passage in this discussion. On the one hand, like Psalm 45, it reads quite easily in relation to a human king. Since the headings of psalms and other biblical books were added to them later, they are usually not considered part of the inspired text. In that case, the LORD (Yahweh) is addressing the Lord (king) of the psalmist. It thus becomes a psalm in honor of a human king of Israel.
God promises to put the enemies of the king under his feet (110:1). God will bring triumph over enemies as the king rides out with his troops on the day of battle (110:2-3). He will be a king-priest like Melchizedek in Genesis 22, a king who also represented God spiritually (110:4). The king Lord fights at God's right hand, crushing other kings and judging nations (110:5-7).
Surely this is how those who first heard this psalm would have taken it. After the heading was added, the Israelites probably took it as David speaking of himself. This interpretation is not problematic so far.
What creates difficulty is the fact that Jesus uses this psalm in his sparring with his debaters and the early church followed suit. As part of his argument--and that of the early church--Davidic authorship is assumed. For the early Christians, including the gospel writers, we can suggest something that we often find, namely, that God inspired the biblical authors in the categories of the day, including the structure of the universe and human personality. It does not seem problematic to say that authorship was never the inspired point but rather the clothing in which the inspired point was presented, just as we do not think of there being three heavens above us to get to God (2 Cor. 12:2).
But what about Jesus (Mark 12:35-37)? Did not Jesus know who the author of Psalm 110 was, since he is God himself? We could suggest that Jesus was "gaming" them, playing on their own assumptions rather than his own. On the other hand, Jesus himself tells us he did not access his omniscience while on earth (Mark 13:32). But most would be more comfortable thinking that this only means his knowledge was partial rather than inaccurate at some point.
Grudem, in fact, would probably consider it an unintentional sin to assert the wrong authorship of a book. As a Wesleyan-Arminian, I do not. The intention to lie would not be present, and no one would be wronged inadvertently since the overall point being made was true either way. It is a sensitive enough issue that I will not take a position on it, only to say that Psalm 110:1 was not likely read to indicate more than one divine being until the time of Christ.
Yet surely Grudem is right to think we should find traces of the Trinity in the Old Testament. And we do find the Spirit of God in numerous places in the Old Testament. Even in Genesis 1:2 we find the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters. The Spirit of God comes on various people in the history of Israel--David, for example (1 Sam. 16:3).
And perhaps Grudem is right that the angel of the LORD reflects one of the persons of the Trinity, such as the pre-incarnated Christ. This is a difficult concept, since it is hard to imagine what the person of the Son was before he took on human personhood. But these are questions beyond the scope of individual speculation.
The New Testament does not specify the exact nature of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Grudem is quite right that all three are said to be divine. All three are distinct persons. Yet God is one. God would work out the rest of the details in the church.
B. Three Statements in Summary
Summary
Grudem captures the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (he calls it the biblical teaching on it) in three statements:
1. God is three persons.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.
1. God is three persons.
Scripture speaks of Jesus as a distinct person from God the Father. It speaks of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person from Jesus. It uses a masculine pronoun of the Holy Spirit in John, treating him as a person. Since the Spirit intercedes to God the Father, he must be distinct from him as well. The three persons of the Trinity are thus distinct persons from each other.
2. Each is fully God.
God the Father is clearly God. Grudem draws on John 1:1-4 to show that Jesus was fully God. He argues against the Jehovah's Witness' sense that John 1:1 should be translated that the word was a god on the basis of Greek grammar. Colwell's rule states that when a predicate nominative precedes the verb in Greek and the subject follows, the predicate nominative will lack the article (234, n. 12).
Other verses are adduced to support Jesus' full divinity. Thomas calls Jesus God in John 20:28. Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ is the "exact representation" of God's being. Hebrews 1:10, Titus 2:13, 1 Peter 1:1, Romans 9:5, Isaiah 9:6, Colossians 2:9 are all mentioned.
If God the Father and God the Son are God, then surely the Spirit is in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19. Lying to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5:3-4 is lying to God. Fleeing the Spirit in Psalm 139:7-8 is fleeing the presence of God. So each distinct person is God.
3. There is one God.
Despite there being three distinct persons, each of which is fully God, the Bible seems to require that there only be one God. This faith is the centerpiece of the Shema of Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4 and it is also key to Isaiah 45:5-6, 21-22.
Grudem's next two points in this section are that 4) simplistic solutions all run aground on one of the previous three points and that 5) all analogies have shortcomings. In the next section, he will treat the various errors of those who have tried to oversimplify the Trinity, including those who have erred on the "one God" side and those who have erred on the "all three are fully God" side.
Meanwhile, all analogies fail on one or another of the three basic points: analogies of a three-leafed clover or a tree with three parts or a person who is a farmer, a mayor, and an elder in his church or one person who has intellect, emotions, and will.
Finally, 6) Grudem makes it clear that all three persons have eternally existed as the Trinity.
Evaluation
Grudem's treatment in this section is entirely orthodox. These are the historically shared beliefs of the vast majority of Christendom. He treats in his footnotes a couple outliers--Jehovah's Witnesses and oneness Pentecostals. The former deny that Jesus was God in the same way as God the Father and the latter are "modalists" who believe the three persons were really only manifestations of the same person.
If there were to be a critique, it would be in the interpretations of the proof texts, although there is nothing idiosyncratic about the way Grudem uses them. It is at least possible that many of the passages that have been classically adduced were far more nuanced originally. That is to say, the classic statements of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) on the Trinity and dual nature of Christ probably reflect more developed understandings of these passages than their original meanings.
For example, it seems more likely that Old Testament passages like Isaiah 9:6 took their original meaning from the fact that kings of the Ancient Near East (ANE) could be conceptualized as God's divine representatives on earth. Such language seems fantastic to us used of a human being but, then again, we have not grown up in the ANE. The New Testament interestingly never uses this passage in relation to Jesus, but it is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament for later Christians to see the divinity of Christ in it.
Some of the New Testament passages may find their original background in various Jewish traditions that used divine language of the logos (word) or of kings. The Jewish thinker Philo spoke of the logos, the divine word, as the one through whom God made the world (cf. Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:3). We also have evidence of divine language/imagery used of exalted figures like the Son of Man in 1 Enoch, Adam in The Life of Adam and Eve, or even Moses in Ezekiel the Tragedian.
The point is that the original meanings of these verses may have been more nuanced at first than they seem to us today. This explains why there was such long debate over the Trinity and how such differing positions could be taken. The point is not to deny the Trinity in any way but simply to say that God used the flexibility of language to bring Christian thinking on this subject to maturity, just as he did with the New Testament in its understanding of the Old Testament.
So the position that Grudem takes in this section is completely and historically orthodox. This position, however, may require us to put more faith in God's working in the early church than would make Grudem himself comfortable.
C. Errors on the Trinity
Summary
In the previous section, Grudem has conceptualized the Trinity in terms of three statements he believes capture biblical teaching: 1) God is three persons, 2) Each person is fully God, and 3) There is one God. In this section, he discusses various historical perspectives on God that fail in regard to one of these three.
1. Modalism
Also called Sabellianism after the early third century teacher Sabellius, modalism understands the three "persons" of the Trinity simply to be three different forms or modes in which the one God manifests himself. In other words, modalism fails to see God as three distinct persons. The United Pentecostal Church affirms modalism as one of its core beliefs.
Modalism is obviously strong in its affirmation of there being only one God and that he is supreme ruler (it is sometimes called "modalistic monarchianism") but it fails to capture relationships between the persons of the Trinity, such as we find at Jesus' baptism or in the intercession of Jesus and the Spirit to the Father on behalf of us.
2. Arianism, etc.
Grudem puts denials of the full deity of the Son and Holy Spirit under the heading of Arianism, although it is only the best known representative of this category.
a. The Arian Controversy
Arius taught that although Jesus was the greatest of all creation, he was created by God before God made everything else (cf. Col. 1:15). The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that his views were false. The Creed of Nicaea said that Jesus was "begotten, not made." The Nicene Creed, which issued out of the next Council of Constantinople in 381, clarified that this begetting took place "before all ages."
Nicaea also debated whether Jesus was "of one substance" (homoousios) with the Father or only of similar substance (homoiousios). It concluded that Jesus was "of one substance" with the Father, which Grudem believes is true to biblical Christianity.
b. Subordinationism
As Grudem defines the heresy of subordinationism, it is to hold that the Son is inferior in being or attributes to God the Father. Grudem does not believe it is subordinationism to believe that the Son is subordinate to the Father in role or function (244 n.27). He will return to this issue later in the chapter.
In this section he also praises Athanasius for his role in defeating Arianism. The Athanasian Creed probably does not come from Athanasius but is a clear affirmation of trinitarian doctrine used in some Protestant and Catholic churches today.
c. Adoptionism
Grudem mentions one form of adoptionism that existed in the early church, namely, the view that Jesus lived as an ordinary man until God "adopted" him as son at his baptism. Like Arianism, it did not affirm the eternal, full deity of Jesus. He also mentions in this section that the Nicene Creed of 381 added a statement on the deity of the Holy Spirit.
d. Filioque
In AD589 at a regional council in what is now Spain, the Western church added to the Nicene Creed a sense that the Holy Spirit proceeds not just from the Father but "from the Father and the Son." Grudem does not believe that Scripture has an explicit statement on this issue because John 15:26 and 16:7 are about Jesus sending the Spirit after his resurrection, not from eternity past. He considers it unfortunate that the Eastern church split from the Western church over this doctrine, although the underlying issue had more to do with the authority of the Pope and the Western church.
On the whole, Grudem thinks the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son makes sense. Might not the relation in time in John 15:26 match the eternal relationship of the Trinity? In any case, he does not believe that it warranted such a division in the church.
e. The Importance of the Trinity Doctrine
Grudem believes that the Trinity is crucial for six reasons. First, he believes Jesus could not have born the full wrath of God if he had not been fully God. Second, he believes that justification by faith alone would be in peril. Could we depend on him for salvation if he were not fully God? Third, if he is not infinite God, should we pray to him or worship him? Wouldn't it be idolatry to worship him then?
Fourth, we then begin to give credit for salvation to a creature rather than to God himself. Fifth, the personal nature of God comes to be at stake, because there are then no personal relationships within the Trinity. Sixth, Grudem sees the unity of the universe at stake--how can the diverse elements of the universe have any unity if in God there is no plurality in unity?
3. Tritheism
Few persons in the history of the church have actually held that the three persons of the Trinity are three separate Gods, although Grudem suggests many evangelicals may unintentionally fall into this category by recognizing the distinct persons but not the real "unity of God as one undivided being" (248).
Evaluation
Grudem's account is overwhelmingly orthodox, for the most part. The one area where there is significant debate is whether he has accurately caught the sense of subordinationism. Grudem does not believe that subordination of role or function counts as a heresy, only inferiority in being or attribute. As we will see later in the chapter, serious questions can and have been raised about this interpretation of subordinationism.
Grudem's six points on the importance of the Trinity are perhaps more open to discussion. It is true that Gregory of Nazianzus in the late 300s said that, "What has not been assumed cannot be healed." He was arguing that Jesus must have become fully human for atonement to work. Grudem's argument is somewhat of the flip side--Jesus needed to be fully divine for atonement to work.
This is a fully orthodox perspective, although Grudem predictably focuses more on God's wrath than early Christian tradition did. And while it is orthodox to believe that Jesus needed to become human to heal humanity of its sin, it is highly debatable whether God, in his sovereignty, couldn't have justified us, pronounced us "not guilty," by divine fiat and command. This is arguably an ironic defect in Grudem's sense of God's sovereignty.
Grudem's arguments about the importance of relationship in God or the importance of plurality seem obscure and highly debatable. Again, it is ironic that Grudem seems to be using the creation in order to argue for a certain understanding of God, as if God needs to have certain items on his pre-creation resume in order to relate to us.
Surely God, as God, may have his own well of creativity. The Trinity may make sense of a God who creates a world with relationships and unity in plurality, but surely Grudem does not want to suggest that God could not have created such things without the Trinity. Grudem seems to be creating God in the image of the creation.
It might be worth adding that it was not at all clear in the 300s who would emerge the winner and what would end up being considered Christian orthodoxy. It is easy for us to look back and condemn people like Arius, but it was not at all clear at the time who was correct. There was a time in the 300s when more Christians were Arian than Athanasian.
Finally, it is probably significant to point out that it was more theology and philosophy in the early church that solidified this orthodox understanding rather than biblical teaching itself. For example, neither Athanasius nor Grudem for that matter would not have written Colossians 1:15 the way it is, that Jesus is "firstborn of all creation." The emphasis is indeed probably on Jesus' pre-eminence, but might not some in the audience of Colossians have easily assumed that Jesus was something like the logos--not created like the rest of creation, but not uncreated like God either?
What Grudem calls "biblical Christianity" is arguably more than just biblical.
D. Distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Summary
1. Different primary functions in world
The ways in which the different persons of the Trinity relate to the world is called the "economy" of the Trinity. For example, in relation to the Trinity, God the Father spoke the words of creation. The Son carried out these "creative decrees." The Spirit sustained and showed God's immediate presence in the creation. In redemption, God planned it. Jesus accomplished it. The Spirit implemented it, brought it to completion. Grudem sees Son and Spirit as equal in deity, but subordinate in their roles.
2. Eternally existed distinct
Grudem does not believe that the roles of the members of the Trinity are interchangeable. For him, the Father could not have come to die on the cross. They each have fixed "positions" (249). Second, these positions for Grudem are eternal. They have always had them from before the creation.
Finally, these are not distinctions in attribute, deity, or God's essential nature. They hold these things as part of God's one substance. The distinctions are in how they relate to each other, something Grudem calls "ontological equality but economic subordination" (251). He will of course use this understanding to argue for subordination in the family.
3. Relationships between persons and being
How does the being of God relate to the three persons of God? The persons are not each a third of God. Each of the persons is fully God. Yet the persons of God are not something added on to God, extra parts that the persons have that the others do not. The persons are not just different ways of looking at God (modalism), like looking at the same man as father, son, and husband.
Perhaps the analogy Grudem likes the most, but certainly considers imperfect, is a man thinking as subject, thinking about himself as object, and thinking about his ideas about himself--himself as subject, object, and thoughts about himself. He fully admits this doesn't get at it perfectly. God's existence is just a kind of existence far different than anything in our experience.
4. Can we understand it?
We simply cannot remove the mystery from the Trinity. He has already said that all analogies ultimately break down at some point. We simply will never be able to understand it fully. At the same time, he says, Scripture does not ask us to believe in a contradiction.
Evaluation
It is best to begin where Grudem ends. We believe in the Trinity because it is a doctrine of faith, because we believe that the Holy Spirit worked in the church universal to establish it as common doctrine. If we were truly limited to the Bible alone, other configurations would be possible. In fact, most scholars of the history of theology would argue that Grudem's version of subordinationism has historically been considered mildly heretical. It is possible to argue for it from the biblical texts, as Grudem does, but it is probably not the common consensus of Christians throughout the ages.
The historical understanding is not that the roles of the persons of the Trinity are subordinate but that the humanity of Jesus was subordinate to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). The incarnation--the pre-existent Son of God taking on flesh--is a matter for later in the book, but historically Christians have believed that the Son was not human before he came to earth. In that sense, the historical Christian belief is that only the human nature of Christ is subordinate to God the Father and that the Son did not have this dimension until the incarnation.
But as Grudem says, no analogy is adequate to explain or describe the Trinity and we must ultimately consign its full understanding to mystery. Grudem seems right to say that the different persons of the Trinity tend to do different things. He also seems on to something when he recognizes a connection between the creation and the various roles they play.
God the Father seems to relate more to God's transcendence. God the Spirit seems to relate more to God's immanence. And God the Son seems to relate especially to bridging the gap between God's transcendence and his immanence.
An individual can speculate about such things, but refinement of doctrine is ultimately a matter for the universal church. But we can ask whether a more developed understanding of creation out of nothing would affect the way the church understands the Trinity.
For example, the Christians of the councils presumably had no thought for space itself being part of the creation. Creation, for them, was arguably the Trinity (in the emptiness) putting stuff into the emptiness that wasn't there before (creating it out of nothing). However, with the advent of relativity, we now must think of God creating the emptiness itself. We must now think of the very laws of nature being part of the creation.
The very idea of scientific law as part of nature belongs to the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. The assumption of the formative church would have been to see the operations of reason and experience as part of the givenness of the cosmos and they would have connected it to the nature of God.
Arguably, theologians like Grudem continue to blur the creation with the Creator. They have a three or at most four-dimensional understanding of God that ultimately sees him within the same space (and time) as the creation. In their theology, he is not truly outside space and, although they might say he is timeless, their solution to the question of God's foreknowledge of the future betrays that they do not truly see him as outside time.
So when so many theologians talk of the relationships within the Trinity, we have to wonder if they are still mistaking the analogy for the literal. That is to say, even "Father" and "Son" are analogies from our world to help us understand a mystery that ultimately reaches beyond our universe and frame of reference. We believe by faith in some eternal distinction in the pre-universe "nature" of God that corresponds to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But arguably even these distinctions are this-universe analogies.
E. Application
Summary
Grudem's primary application is of course to marriage. The husband's role is parallel to that of the Father, whom he believe God intends to have authority over the wife in marriage. The relationship of parents to children is thus analogous for him to the relationship between parents and children. All are equal in humanity, importance, and personhood, but have different fixed roles and levels of authority.
Evaluation
Scholars of the history of theology largely disagree with Grudem (and thus Hodge) on subordination within the Trinity. Historically, it is the humanity of Jesus that is understood to be subordinate to God the Father. If Grudem wants to pull the cork on this issue by trumping the church fathers with Scripture, then he also opens the door to the question of whether Jesus is of "one substance" with the Father in the New Testament. It is no coincidence that, in the Protestant Reformation's turn back to the Bible, we not only saw the rise of Lutherans, but Socinianism as well, which denied the Trinity.
However, in the end, it is not clear that the Trinity is an appropriate model for the family at all. Jesus is not the bride of God the Father. He is the Son. The Holy Spirit is not the child of the Father and Son (a non-traditional family indeed and certain to be incarcerated). Given the mystery of the Trinity and our sense that even the orthodox statements of church history had an underdeveloped sense of ex nihilo, we must consider even the titles of "Father" and "Son" as analogies. They are metaphors drawn from human life to help us catch a glimpse of God. They are images we must not mistake for the fully literal.
God has no genitals. He is not literally male or literally a father. God uses feminine images of himself as well (e.g., Isaiah 42:14). We must never mistake the pictures of God for God himself. God uses pictures in revelation to meet us in language we can understand. But no human words or thought can fully--or perhaps even literally--capture God in our understanding.
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