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The Quest for the Trinity – Interview with Stephen R. Holmes

In his new book, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity, Stephen R. Holmes explains the complex and controversial history of this crucial doctrine of the Christian faith. Holmes, Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at University of St. Andrews, was interviewed by Matthew Claridge, Credo Magazine editor and Senior Pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist Church in Grangeville, ID. Claridge and Holmes get to the meat of Trinitarian theology and explore some of the mysteries this doctrines presents. This interview comes out of the recent issue of Credo Magazine, “The Trinity and the Christian Life: Why a Triune God Makes All the Difference.”

To view the Magazine as a PDF {Click Here}

Your book sets out to make a historical observation, rather than a theological assessment, of the “advances” made by the 20th century Trinitarian Renaissance. What is the historical point you are burdened to make in The Quest for the Trinity?

In the later years of the twentieth century, many theologians became convinced that the true doctrine of the Trinity had been lost, and needed recovery. I argue that the doctrine recovered was very different from the traditional doctrine.

What is the difference between the “received” Trinitarian theology and the common features of the purported Trinitarian recovery of the twentieth century?

The twentieth-century story argued that in the fifth century Augustine misunderstood the profound advances made by Greek theologians the previous century, and lost sight of a deeply relational vision of a tripersonal God—a true community of love. Instead, for Augustine, the Trinity was just a metaphysical mystery. I argue that Augustine was a faithful interpreter of the Greek tradition, and indeed that the church held on to the doctrine developed in the fourth century with almost no innovation right through to the birth of liberal theology. There was always a profound sense that in speaking of the Trinity we are speaking of a mystery beyond our comprehension, and so there was a great reticence to try to say too much or to over-define. Instead, the task of Trinitarian theology was to say what needed to be said for the Biblical texts to be true, and then to stop in reverent awe.

One major reason why it is believed the Trinity must be recovered in our day is because of a radical parting of ways that occurred between the West and the East on the nature of the Trinity in fifth century onward. What’s the force of this historical construction and what do you believe is problematic about it?

The idea was proposed by a French Catholic writer called Theodore de Régnon in the nineteenth century. I am not sure why he thought it was plausible, but it just isn’t. Theologians, East and West, are cheerfully swapping texts and ideas throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, and it never occurs to any of them that there are two different doctrines at play.

There are two later divisions over the doctrine of God between the (Catholic) West and the (Orthodox) East: in the eleventh century the “filioque,” the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, rather than just from the Father, becomes a part of Western confession. I do not think this was too significant in doctrinal terms but it was a bit of a disaster politically. The other occurs with the Greek Orthodox theologian Greogry Palamas, who taught a difficult distinction between ‘divine essence’ and divine “energies.” The West—rightly in my view—resisted this, far more significant innovation.

Clearly, how we define a “person” is something that throws off many a student of Trinitarian theology in our Modern context. On your telling, the definition of “person” within the received tradition never meant a “separate I-centre with a separate consciousness and will” but was used merely as a placeholder for the “eternal relations of origin” meaning nothing more. As such there are not three centers of divine consciousness, only one. Would you elaborate on this point, especially in reference to what Jesus experienced on the cross?

I think it is clear that the early doctrine of the Trinity never thought that “person” implied “separated centre of consciousness and will”: the unity of the divine will, in particular, becomes very important in a sixth century Christological controversy that convulsed the whole church, but no one ever thought to suggest that we should not believe in one will which the Father, Son and Spirit all share (even though thinking this would have solved the entire problem they were facing!).

Again, we need to look to Christology: is the Son really forsaken by the Father at the moment of crucifixion? Is the eternal life of God broken and ruptured by an event in time? Or do we here have the authentically human cry of Jesus of Nazareth, who was fully human, and so possessed of a truly human consciousness, as well as being truly divine. Humanly, he faced up to all the powers of sin and death and hell, he bore the full wrath of God on the cross, and felt forsaken. As the divine Son, his eternal unity with the Father and the Spirit of course remained unbroken.

I confess I often have difficulty distinguishing the orthodoxy of Augustine’s psychological analogy or Thomas’s discussion of procession (or Jonathan Edwards’ Trinitarian theology) from the straight-up Platonism of someone like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or “Radical Orthodoxy” proponents today. How does Christian orthodoxy and (neo-)Platonism avoid collapsing into each other?

Someone like Coleridge represents an authentically Christian tradition of Platonism, and I think we can be fairly relaxed about that. For me, the doctrine of the Trinity is a series of claims about what we must believe about God—claims I derived from Scripture. Coleridge would not disagree, but wants to argue that there is a philosophical derivation there also, that if we think hard about who God must be, we will see that it is logically necessary that he is triune. I don’t think that sort of argument works, but I’m not really very opposed to people making it—until they start to bend the biblical doctrine to make it fit better with their logic, which is always the danger.

You make the argument that the great pro-Nicean defenders of the Trinity, Basil of Casarea and Gregory of Nyssa, were more concerned about finding a “grammar” rather than a “logic” for the Trinity. Could you explain the difference and the difference it makes?

Sure. By “grammar” I mean a set of rules about how to speak properly—in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity, how to speak truthfully about God. By “logic” I mean a coherent argument that demonstrates that things must be so. What goes on in Basil, Gregory, and the rest, it seems to me, is an enormous, and astonishingly impressive, attempt to work out what things we must say about God so that everything affirmed in Scripture can be true. How can we say “I and the Father are one” and “the Father is greater than I”—not choosing between them, but taking both claims with full seriousness as biblical revelation? At its root, the doctrine of the Trinity is an answer to that question.

This means it is, in a way, something quite modest. There is much that we do not know about God’s life – that’s hardly a surprise, but it is something we need to remember. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a full account of who God is that enables us to build grand philosophical edifices; it is a limited set of rules about the sort of ways we must speak if our speech about God is to be faithful to the biblical revelation, and so true.

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