Thread by @FredFredSanders

I recently gave some brief answers to a few questions from a seminary student who was assigned to teach on the Trinity based on the essay printed as chapter 2 in Fountain of Salvation. Here's a threadthreadthread .com of some of the answers. eerdmans.com/Products/7810/…

The doctrine of the Trinity is a vast & comprehensive doctrine, so it makes sense to place it very early in any course of Christian instruction. Things like Christology & pneumatology can then drop into their proper places. In education jargon, Trinity is an advance organizer.

Teaching on the Trinity should begin with the two visible missions of the Son & the Holy Spirit, which are historical events to which the Old Testament looks forward prophetically, and to which the New Testament looks back interpretively. Start w/this clarity & move outward.

But the OT still has much to say about the Trinity; it just says it by way of adumbration (shadowing-forth) & anticipation. As Warfield says, in this regard the OT is "a chamber richly furnished but dimly lit."

There is value in most of the standard appeals to OT glimmers of God's triunity (Angel of the Lord, divine plurals, tendency to hypostatize divine powers like word & wisdom, repetitions of the divine name, etc.) as long as they aren't treated as conclusive in their own right.

I describe my approach to the Trinity as "evangelical" (FoS p. 33) in the sense of being centered on the gospel, that is, the work of God in the economy of salvation. Gospel trinitarianism is at home in the economy, recognizing how the economy is grounded in God's transcendence.

In my own case, my theology is evangelical in lots of other senses, including the identifying sense that I write as a conservative evangelical Protestant theologian. But Roman Catholic theologian Anne Hunt is a good example of this same approach under the heading "paschal."

Here's a good question: What are the alternatives to this evangelical/gospel trinitarianism? To help locate it by reference to other projects, I can think of two other serious approaches:

(1) A more verbal-propositional approach which simply presupposes that salvation history happened, but that the theological task involves locating & assembling statements from Scripture that combine to form the doctrine of the Trinity. Assemblage of truth claims = doctrine.

This approach is fairly widespread for teaching the Trinity. I think of it as not false, but rather sharply limited so that it needs to be supplemented by attention to the economy itself, which is after all what the words of Scripture are arising from, and pointing back to.

My warning about this fundamentally verbal-propositional mode of instruction is that it tends to drive even very attentive students to the urgent questions: Why does it matter? How does it connect? What is the relevance? It can seem like true-but-inert facts about God.

(2) The major systematic objection raised to this evangelical-economic method is in the ST of Katherine Sonderegger, who argues that such approaches are too at home in salvation-historical occurrence, to the detriment of the sheer transcendence of God in his absolute aseity.

Sonderegger wants trinitarianism to approach the epiphany of God's self-manifestation in the altar sacrifice of biblical Israel & see, in that living fire, a vision of God's own processional life w/out direct reference to God's missions into salvation history.

(Wow, v. hard to tweet-summarize. Here's a nice online conversation on the subject, which includes my take on Sonderegger's trintiarianism in ST vol. 2) henrycenter.tiu.edu/2021/01/the-in…

Sonderegger's recommended alternative is not a path I can follow, but it's a blessed corrective that will never not be in my peripheral vision as I follow my path. And of course Kate is still generating her ambitious theological project, w/more Trinity & soteriology to come.

The questions were for a course in Contemporary Theology, so I went into a little more detail in describing a couple of the alternatives.
Atropos (ender of the thread)