A Covenantal
Ontology of the Triune God:
An Attempt to Expound the
Relationship between the Covenant and Ontology and
Answer Richard Phillips’ Criticisms of My Views
Ralph
Allan Smith, Missionary service in Japan
Published in www.GlobalMissiology.org
“Trinitarian Study” January 2009
Preface
This essay is an attempt to develop further my
thinking about the Trinitarian covenant while I respond to Richard Phillips’ various criticisms of my books on
the Trinity, especially the criticisms
that the notion of a covenant among the Persons of the Trinity is mere
speculation and that my views of
Trinitarian ontology were unclear and confused. With regard to the first, I have
presented more extensive evidence of
a covenant relationships among the persons of the trinity. Included in that evidence is a suggested revision
of the way we view the ontology of the Triune God. I hope that this essay can make some contribution toward the
development of a distinctly Reformed
view of the Trinity.
What
I believe to be the distinctly Reformed contribution is a covenantal view of
the Trinity. To the best of my
knowledge that view was first explicitly formulated by Abraham Kuyper, but insofar as it is an extension of the
doctrine of the covenant of Redemption, its roots sink deep into Reformed
history. Herman Hoeksema followed Kuyper’s view and translated relevant portions of Kuyper’s work into English.
Read in the light of Kuyper’s view, Van Til’s exposition of the Trinity appears, at least in places, to be following
Kuyper.
James Jordan introduced the
covenantal view of the Trinity to me and discussion on the Biblical
Horizons email list with Jordan, Jeffrey Meyers, Peter Leithart, and Joel
Garver has helped me to think through various aspects of Kuyper’s view of the
Trinity. Joel Garver, in
particular, pointed out what he
believed to be a legitimate complaint among Richard Phillips’ criticisms
of my book The Eternal Covenant. Joel agreed with Phillips that I had not
expounded the relationship between the covenant and
ontology very well. One of the main purposes of this paper
is to attempt to repair that fault. Joel has offered helpful suggestions and
interaction with earlier work on this essay, but
he is not responsible for the form this essay takes and I am not sure
that I have answered his criticisms adequately.
Hopefully, I have made a step in the right direction,
because the issue itself is important. I believe
a covenantal view of the Trinity unites a covenantal systematic theology in the
doctrine of God, unites Biblical and systematic theology in the
doctrine of the covenant, which functions as
the center of each, and unites theology and worship in the vision of a Triune
God of love who renews His covenant with us in
our weekly communion with Him.
Arguing for a
Covenant Among the Three Persons
That there is a covenant among
the Persons of the Trinity has been taken for granted in Reformed
theology for hundreds of years.1 No one doubts or denies this, even
though they call it by different names. But this
traditional doctrine has not developed to a truly Trinitarian insight nor
has it provided the central organizing structure for Reformed theology, in
spite of the fact that Reformed theology is most
distinctively a theocentric theology. I showed in a previous essay
that as a matter of fact, the covenant among the Persons of the Trinity is
often presented as if it were binitarian instead of
Trinitarian, but the real problem is that it is focused entirely on the salvation
of the elect. It is not conceived of as fundamental to the relationships of the
three divine Persons. What I argued in my essay is that the traditional
Reformed doctrine of a covenant among the Persons of
the Trinity must be refined so that the covenant is not seen
merely as a means for an end,
but as describing the fellowship of love shared by Father, Son, and Spirit.2
This essay
argues for an even more fundamental thesis: the comprehensive relevance of the doctrine of the covenant for our understanding of
the doctrine of the Trinity. Before I explain what that means, I must offer two qualifications. First,
the argument made by this essay is tentative. It
may be that there are implications to what I have written that I have not seen
— implications that might undermine part
or all of what I suggest here. If that is so, I will be happy to set aside whatever is in error. My purpose is to
stimulate thought and deepen our understanding of
the doctrine of the Trinity. If this essay fails to shed light on our knowledge
of God, it may at least be useful negatively, pointing out a direction we ought
not travel. Second, nothing suggested here is intended to supplant the
traditional confession of the doctrine of the Trinity. I am suggesting a supplement to the traditional
doctrine, one that expounds further the language of One God in Three Persons.
With these
qualifications in mind, the thesis of this paper is that the notion of covenant
is essential to the Biblical teaching
about the relationships among the Persons of the Trinity. First, the Biblical language that provides the basis for the
traditional Trinitarian doctrine of perichoresis is
covenantal — a point I have already argued in previous essays. Second, the Biblical doctrine of the covenant stands behind the
traditional Trinitarian doctrine of the five notions, four relations, and two processions.3 It is the
second point that represents a significant expansion on my original thesis.
1
The Eternal Covenant (Moscow, ID: Canon Press,
2002), pp. 15-31.
2
Ibid., pp. 61-83.
3
In traditional Trinitarian theology stemming from
Thomas Aquinas, there are five notions: 1)
unoriginatedness, 2) paternity, 3) filiation, 4)
spiration, 5) procession. A notion is a “defining characteristic of a divine person.” Four of these notions are
“relations of opposition”: 1) paternity, 2) filiation, 3) spiration, 4) procession. Three of these relations constitute
divine persons. Paternity constitutes the Father as Father. Filiation constitutes the Son as Son. Procession
constitutes the Spirit as Spirit. In the five notions and four relations, there
are two processions,
the Son’s being begotten of the Father and the Spirit’s being spirated by the
Father and the Son.
See: Karl Rahner, The Trinity
(New York: Crossroad, 1997), p. 3.
To argue for the
comprehensive relevance of the Trinity, I will first review the reasons for believing in such a covenant, since my previous essay has
been challenged.4 Second, I offer for consideration the idea of a thoroughly covenantal
ontology of God. As I said above, I am not defining a finished position, but putting forth an idea
with the hope that it might be read by competent theological students who can offer Biblical
and theological criticism. Whether or not my suggestion makes even a small contribution to the
ongoing discussion of the Trinity depends upon the reviewers. I hope that at least a few good men
will read this essay, give it some
thought, and offer criticism.
The Covenant in God
Demonstrated
Is there a
covenant relationship among the Persons of the Trinity? I believe the Biblical and theological answer must be yes. The most important
reasons are the following.
1.
What God does in time reveals who He is in
eternity and His most characteristic act
in establishing relationships with other persons in time is covenant making.
2.
The relations among the Persons defined in the
names Father, Son, and Spirit are distinctly
covenantal.
3.
The names of God used to describe Trinitarian
relations are also the names used to
describe God’s covenant relationships with creatures.
4.
Representation is a key covenantal idea and it is
found in the relations of the Trinitarian
Persons in the representation of the Father by the Son and of the Father and Son by the Spirit.
5.
Some of God’s attributes are described in language
that is distinctly covenantal.
6.
The Gospel of John speaks of God’s covenantal
relationship with us as parallel to the
relationship between the Father and the Son.
7.
The pre-creation covenant for the salvation of man
would involve a change in the relations
among the Persons of the Trinity to accommodate the creation, if they were not essentially related in covenant.
8.
The dynamic of the Trinitarian ontology is
emphatically covenantal.
1. God’s Acts in Time Reveal His Nature in Eternity
The principle that what God does in time reveals who He
is in eternity is thoroughly Biblical and far more important than some realize.
To get a grasp of the significance of this principle, imagine if it were otherwise. If God’s acts
in history did not reveal who He is in eternity then we would have no basis for knowing who He
really is and what He will do when history is over.
If His works in history were incongruous with His eternal being, or revealed so
little of Him that we could not really
say anything about the eternal relationships of the Three Persons, then we could not say we know God. We would only
know the historical God. He might turn out
to be very different from the God we meet in heaven and live with for eternity.
4
Richard Phillips referred to my
essay as offering “abstract speculation” and “unsound Trinitarian
speculation”
in his profoundly misguided essay, “Covenant Confusion.”For Phillips essay see:
http://www.alliancenet.org/partner/Article_Display_Page/ 0,,PTID307086%7CCHID560462%7CCIID1787572,00.html
.
This is obviously not a Biblical
notion. Nothing in the Bible suggests to us that God’s self- revelation
in history — both through His works and words — either is or could be
inconsistent with or unrelated to His eternal being. On the
contrary, He could not be other than what He has shown
Himself to be in history unless His self-revelation were intentionally
unintelligible, concealing who He is rather than
revealing. To assume that God’s works do not reveal who He
is in eternity would be to
fundamentally misunderstand and distort the whole Biblical idea of revelation.
Furthermore, He is unchanging.
He reveals Himself to creatures in His words and works5 because
He is the God in whom the Three Persons fully reveal themselves to one another.
The Father fully expresses Himself to the Son so that the Son knows Him fully
and perfectly6. The Holy Spirit searches the deep
things of God, the mind of the Father and the Son, so that He may reveal
God to us (1 Cor. 2:10-12). Though what He reveals transcends our
comprehension, we
still know God truly. Indeed, in
the very context in which Paul emphasizes that the Spirit of God reveals
God to us because He is the One who truly knows the things of God, he even
says, “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16).
The traditional language for
distinguishing God in Himself and God as He works in history is
ontological Trinity and economic Trinity. Obviously these two must be one. Vern
Poythress explains the distinction between the two notions and elaborates on
the relationship between
them.
Before we go on, we should
include one clarification. In the analogical relation
between
God and human language, are we considering God as he is in himself, the ontological Trinity, or God as he reveals himself
to us, the economic Trinity? We should
recognize that much of the Bible focuses on God’s relations to us and the
historical
outworking of redemption. God’s Trinitarian character stands forth most fully and eloquently in the redemptive events
where the Persons of the Trinity have a distinct role (e.g., Matt 3:16–17; Acts 2:33; Rom 8:11; 1:4; John
16:13–15). God reveals himself to us
through the “economy” of redemption. We understand the
Trinity
through the economic relations of the Persons of the Trinity in their functions
in creation, redemption, and
consummation.
In
John 1:1 and elsewhere, the Bible does sometimes focus more directly on aspects
of the ontological Trinity, that is,
on God as he is in his own existence before
creation and independent of creation. But even here we
recognize that the language is crafted for the purposes of
nourishing our faith, enlarging our understanding, and promoting
our redemption. Hence the language as a whole is tied in with “functional”
or “economic” purposes.
5
The
works of Jesus reveal both Jesus and the Father. See: John 5:36; 10:25, 37-38;
14:10-11.
6
“All things have been handed over to Me by My
Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and
anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.” (Mat. 11:27)
“Therefore Jesus
answered and was saying to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do
nothing of Himself, unless it is
something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things
the Son also does in like manner. For
the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing;
and the Father will show Him greater
works than these, so that you will marvel.’” (John 5:19-20)
Since God is our standard and
his word is our standard, there is nothing more
ultimate than this revelation of
himself. We believe that God is true. He truly reveals himself,
not a substitute. We believe it because God says so. Hence we believe that God
is in conformity with what he reveals. The Trinity in economic operations reveals
the ontological Trinity. Hence, I have not tried to separate in any strict or exhaustive
way between functional (economic) and ontological statements. Such
separation on the part of a
creature would itself be a repudiation of creaturehood. The analogies
we explore deal with God in both respects, ontological and economical.7
Thus, not only must we say that
the ontological and economical Trinity are one, we must
confess
that it is beyond us to entirely distinguish between them. God reveals Himself
to us as
the One and Only
Living God, who from eternity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Therefore, the principle that
God reveals Himself in history as He is in eternity is sound.
But how far may it be
applied? Do the facts that God creates the world through a covenantal
process,
always and only relates to man in covenant, and before the creation of the
world plans
the salvation of the
elect through a covenant reveal something about the Trinitarian relations in
eternity?
To even ask the question is to
answer it. If creation itself is a covenantal act, then the only relationship
God sustains to the whole created world is covenantal. How could that not
reveal something about who He is? When we add that His
relationship to His image, man, is always and
only covenantal, and that man’s fundamental relationships with other men are
also covenantal, it is clear that the most basic relationships
for those who image God are covenantal.
If man images God in his most basic
interpersonal relationships, with God or man, and if those relationships are always covenantal, the implication that
interpersonal relationships in the Godhead are also
covenantal seems inescapable. If personal relationships in the Godhead were not covenantal, why would the Triune God create His image
in such a way that man is religiously,
psychologically, and sociologically covenantal?
If this one argument
were all we had to go on, one might well argue that it requires too
bold a step to suggest a covenant
relationship among the Persons of the Trinity. I personally do not think so. It seems to me that this argument alone is
profoundly solid. But the fact is that this argument is not alone. It is only one piece of a larger
puzzle that, when assembled, spells covenant in bold
letters.
2. Father, Son, and Spirit
It is seldom reflected upon that the
names Father, Son, and Spirit define relationships that are primarily covenantal.8 Fatherhood per se, in other
words, is a basically covenantal idea.9
7
Vern Poythress,
“Reforming Ontology and Logic in the Light of the Trinity: An Application of
Van Til’s
Idea of Analogy,”
Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 196-97.
8
After
completing this essay, I learned from Joel Garver about a lecture by Peter
Wallace titled, “Covenant
and Inheritance,” in
which Wallace argues that the Father/Son relationship is an eternal covenant.
His approach is
somewhat different
from mine, but he arrives at the same conclusion, that an intratrinitarian
covenantal relationship
is central to our understanding of the Triune
God. http://www.peterwallace.org/essays/inheritance.htm
9
Poythress explains
that terms and names are analogies. “By calling the Second Person of the
Trinity
‘the
Word,’
God invites us to see a relation between the Second Person of the Trinity and
the speech of God at creation.
The
two are analogous. God alone fully knows the character of the analogy. But we
can understand that he is saying
-5-
Sonship involves covenantal
relations. Even the word “Spirit” exudes covenant. Given that these
names define who God is in Himself for all eternity, nothing could be more
significant for the doctrine of God. When we
realize that in the Bible Father, Son, and Spirit are words describing
covenantal relationships, then the fact that the Persons of the Trinity are
most characteristically called by these names stands out as
perhaps the most direct proof of a covenantal relationship among
the Persons of the Godhead.
The words “father” and “son”
speak to us first of all as words of human relationship. But they
obviously have relevance to our understanding of God as well. We need to
consider how
these things fit together. Man
as God’s image, man as a biological creature, the Biblical idea of sonship,
and the Spirit of God as a distinctly covenantal blessing are fundamental
issues.
Image
and Covenant
Man
as the image of God is a covenantal creature. The covenant law of God is
written in
man’s heart, defining his
psychology as covenantal and orienting man toward God in the center of
his being. Man is thus defined primarily by his relationship to God. But every
other relationship defines him also. To be a person is to be
in relationships and to be defined by those relationships,
at least to some — and I believe a very large — degree.
Thus, as image of God, man was
created to be like God, to love and worship his creator, knowing
himself as God’s covenant son and servant. As image of God, he was created to
love the others who are also God’s image and to bless them. As
image of God, he was created to rule
the rest of
God’s creation so that the world might glorify God through the realization of
its full potential. Each of these relationships
is covenantal and definitive of who and what man is. Image, therefore, is a covenantal notion.10
To say that is not to deny that Adam’s
physique, his intelligence, his artistic ability, and his imagination all uniquely fitted for him as the image of
the one true God and are part of what it means that he is God’s image. There is no reason to
separate the physical characteristics of man from the notion of image, nor are man’s spiritual
qualities irrelevant. But these aspects of man are seen to be part of a covenantal whole. Just as the
physical creation manifests God and is in covenant with God under man, so also man is a covenantal
being in his physicality.11
Biology and Image
To see the Biblical
basis for the assertion that “father,” “son,” and “spirit” are words that
describe a covenantal relationship, we need to
first consider what is to us the most basic aspect of
that the two are analogous. We can even see some
aspects of the analogy. In both cases the word of God has divine
power and divine wisdom. In both cases God
expresses who he is in what he says.” Op. Cit., p. 188. In the same
way,
using the name “Father, Son, and Spirit” to name the One God invites us to see
an analogy between human
fatherhood and divine fatherhood, etc.
10
Meredith Kline gives extensive exegetical and
theological argumentation for the basic points above in his
Images of the Spirit and Kingdom Prologue.
11
Kline expresses it this way, “Under the concept
of man as the glory-image of God the Bible includes
archetypal Glory. Functional
glory-likeness is man’s likeness to God in the possession of official authority
and in
the
exercise of dominion. Ethical glory is the reflection of the holiness,
righteousness, and truth of the divine
Judge
(not
just the presence of a moral faculty of any religious orientation whatsoever).
And formal-physical glory-
likeness
is man’s bodily reflection of the theophanic and incarnate Glory.” Images of
the Spirit, p. 31. I would add
that
all three of these dimensions are covenantal.
-6-
the father and son relationship,
the biological. We may think of the biological as strictly physical.
But what I am arguing is that the biological and covenantal relationship
between father and son presuppose and include
one another. They belong together.
This can be seen first in the
fact that the father and son relationship is part of a larger covenantal
whole. That is, since the biological relationship between fathers and sons12 is
an extension of the covenantal relationship between husband
and wife, it should be understood as covenantal in nature. The
biological relationship functions primarily for the continuation of the family
as a covenantal unit, therefore biology and covenant are inseparable. Perhaps
we should say, the biological serves the covenantal.
This
is a “theological” rather than an exegetical argument, but there is Biblical
evidence
for this in the second
commandment. When we read that the sins of fathers may be punished until
the third and fourth generation, while the blessings of God may be inherited
for a thousand generations, it is clear that
the generational relationships are conceived of in covenantal terms. Inheritance
of God’s covenantal blessing or curse by biological children exemplifies the intersection
of biology and covenant.
But we are not left to infer the
covenantal nature of this relationship from the inheritance of covenantal
sanctions or the fact that sons are born from the covenantal relationship of
fathers and mothers. We have quite explicit testimony to the
covenantal nature of the biological relationship between
fathers and sons in the book of Genesis, where the genealogy in Genesis 5 unambiguously
states it in the most profound theological language.
This
is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He
made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and He
blessed them and named them Man in
the day when they were created. When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his
own likeness, according to his
image, and named him Seth. (Gen. 5:1-3)
On these verses and their
relationship to the creation account in Genesis 2, Meredith Kline observes,
Though with a careful
restraint, biblical revelation thus intimates that this creating of man is a kind of divine authoring analogous to
human procreation. What is thus simply
suggested of father-son imagery in the record of creational origins becomes virtually explicit in the record of the birth of
Seth in Genesis 5:1-3. In this passage a statement of Adam’s creation in the likeness of God is directly juxtaposed
to a statement that Adam begat a son
in his own likeness and image. Clearly we are
being
advised that there is a similarity between these two processes, both of which result in products like their authors. Adam’s
fathering of a son provides the proper analogy
to God’s creating of man and the relationship of Seth to Adam is analogous 12
I am not intentionally neglecting
daughters here. The father/son relationship has a special meaning for the
However, the meaning of the
daughter is somewhat different. The city of Jerusalem, which is pictured as God’s
bride, is also His
daughter. The symbolism of daughters is also covenantal, but it points to God’s
relationship to His
covenant
people, who are both His daughter and His bride. (see, for example: 2Kings
19:21; Psa. 9:14; Is. 1:8;
10:32;
16:1; 37:22; 52:2; 62:11; Jer. 4:31; 6:2,23; Lam. 1:6; 2:1,4,8,10,13,18; 4:22;
Mic. 1:13; 4:8,10,13; Zeph.
3:14;
Zech. 2:10; 9:9; Matt. 21:5; John 12:15)
-7-
to man’s relationship to his
Maker. Such is the understanding of the Genesis 5 genealogy reflected in the
Lukan use of it when, tracing the lineage of Jesus, the evangelist
concludes: “Seth, which was (the son) of Adam, which was (the son) of God”
(Luke 3:38). The Lucan birth narrative throws an interesting light on the overarching
creative presence of the Glory-Spirit in Genesis 1. Luke records Gabriel’s
words to Mary in which the origin of the second Adam is attributed to the
overshadowing presence and power of the Glory-Spirit (as was the case with the
first Adam) and the explanation for calling the holy one thus
produced the Son of God is found in this special creative
involvement of the Glory-Spirit (Luke 1:35). Here then is
another indication of the father-like nature of God’s act of creating man in
the beginning. . . .
Since
the Spirit’s act of creating man is thus presented as the fathering of a son
and that man-son is identified as the image-likeness of God,
it is evident that image of God and son of God are mutually explanatory
concepts. Clearly man’s likeness to the Creator-Spirit is to be understood as
the likeness which a son bears to his father.
And that understanding of the
image concept, according to which the fundamental idea
is one of representational similarity, not representative agency, is further unmistakably
corroborated by Genesis 5:1-3 as it brings together God’s creation of Adam
and Adam’s begetting of Seth, expressing the relation of the human father and son
in terms of the image-likeness that defines man’s relation to the Creator. To
be the image of God is to be the son of God.13
No one imagines that the case of
Adam’s relationship with Seth is unique, as if Cain and Able
were not also in the image and likeness of Adam or as if the rest of the father
and son relationships in Genesis 5 were not the same sort of
relationships. The relationship between
Adam and Seth here defined is the
typical father and son relationship, the pattern of father and son
that was established when God made Adam His son (Luke 3:38). Of course, in the
context, the fact that Adam passed on his own sinful nature to
Seth is the focus. But just as we do not imagine
that only Adam and Seth sustained the relationship here specified, so also we
do not imagine that if Adam had not sinned his sons would not be
born after his image and likeness. Thus, the parallel between Adam
being in God’s image and Seth being in Adam’s image means that Adam is a
covenant person who reflects the God who created him, and Seth is a covenant person
who reflects the father who begot him. Sonship means image and likeness which
are covenantal notions involving representation and
covenantal personhood.14
13
Kingdom Prologue, p. 45-46 (cf.
also, pp. 50 ff., 62 ff., etc.). I doubt that the distinction here between
representative
similarity and representative agency can really stand. After all, as image and
son of God, Adam rules
the world as God’s
representative. Sons inherit their father’s worlds and rule in their place,
too. Note also that “the
relation of the human father and
son in terms of the image-likeness that defines man’s relation to the Creator”
necessarily brings in the
covenant, since man’s fundamental relationship to God is covenantal. 14
For
a fuller exposition of the idea of the original creation as covenantal, see
Meredith Kline, Kingdom
Prologue, p. 14-21. Kline
interprets the original covenant as a covenant of works — with which I disagree
— but
his exegetical reasons for
understanding creation as a covenant-making act are solid. He does not specifically
identify
the notion of “image” as a covenantal idea in so many words, but his view of
creation certainly suggests it.
In
his Images of the Spirit, the covenantal nature of man stands out more clearly.
See also, the sections referred to
below
concerning sonship.
-8-
Redemption,
Sonship, and Covenant
The importance of the Genesis
creation narrative for the rest of the Bible cannot be overemphasized
because it is often not adequately appreciated. In part this is because the
Bible typically understates its allusions to larger narrative
frameworks and earlier passages of Scripture, assuming the reader is
aware of the connections. Thus, we need to keep the Genesis story in mind when
we read of Israel’s redemption. In the light of Genesis, there is special significance
in referring to redemption from Egypt or Babylon in language emphasizing that
God will be Israel’s father.
Before
we consider the Genesis connection, however, we need to look first at the
redemptive meaning of fatherhood.
In an excellent article on the subject of baptism and its relationship
to the ideas of servanthood and sonship, Allen Mawhinney wrote the following.
In the OT, the Kingship of Yahweh is nowhere more clearly seen than in the
deliverance of Israel from Egypt and
the formation of the covenant people under
Yahweh’s Lordship. Although there are relatively
few explicit references to God as “father”
in the OT, a very high proportion of these are found in the context of references to the Exodus/Sinai events. That is,
kingship and fatherhood are both used to describe God’s redemptive work in the
Exodus.
In this regard, it is
important to note that the connotations of the word “father” are developed in the context of redemptive history and
not that of cosmological discussion.
This is clear from passages such as Ps 89:26. Yahweh affirms of the king of
Israel, “He shall cry to me. ‘Thou art my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation. Similarly the prophetic cry to Judah
was raised, “Thou, O Lord, art our Father,
our redeemer from of old is thy name” (Isa 63:16). The father is the redeemer, the one who formed Israel when he chose
her and delivered her out of Egypt.
This redemptive context gives definition to the expressions used in the next chapter. “O Lord thou art our Father; we are the
clay, and thou art our potter” (Isa 64:8).
It is the formation of the people of God, not the creation of the world or of
all mankind, which is in view. This
soteriological use of the word father (‘ab) is the constant OT usage. The universe as a whole is not
typically regarded as the son of God.
Similarly there is no notion in these texts of Yahweh as the archetypal
ancestor of Israel, the prime
begetter, and biological source of the nation.
Because
the father/son relationship between Yahweh and Israel is firmly rooted in the history of Yahweh’s redemptive acts, those
acts have determined the meaning of the
relationship. Israel is Yahweh’s son because he has chosen these people and redeemed them. This hope is expressed in the
Isaianic oracle cited above, “Thou, O Lord,
art our Father, our redeemer from of old is thy name” (Isa 63:16). The father’s
name was “redeemer” and it had been
“redeemer” for generations. The superlative
OT act of redemption was the
deliverance from Egypt at which time Yahweh had made
known to Israel his name and had constituted Israel as his own covenant people.
. . .
God called his son out of Egypt
and taught him to walk as a father teaches a child (Hos 11:1, 3). When the
people apostasized, they were rebuked. “Do you thus repay -9-
the Lord, O foolish and unwise
people? Is not He your Father who has bought you (qnh)?
He has made you and established you” (Deut 32:6). The parallelism of
buying, making, and establishing
and the “exodus” context of the passage (note the “name
of the Lord” in Deut 32:3 and “rock” in 32:4) indicate that the making refers to
the formation of the covenant people and not to any materialistic conception of
God as literally making his son by procreation. That this
spiritually understood filial relationship to Yahweh was
thought to be based upon the exodus/Sinai complex of redemptive
acts is indicated by the repeated occurrence of these exodus motifs in contexts
which refer to God as Israel’s father. Especially frequent is the reference to the
divine name. Israel’s status as son and relationship to its Father was based on
the redemptive choice of Yahweh. God, the Redeemer, is King
and Father.15
Although Mawhinney attempts to
divorce the notions of fatherhood and sonship from the cosmological sphere, he
makes clear the covenantal and redemptive meaning of the father and son
relationship in the Old Testament. What he misses is the background for the
redemptive language in the creation that Meredith Kline has expounded. God is
first of all “father” to Adam. To Mawhinney’s exposition, we
need to add that redemption means restoration. Since God was a
father to Adam (Luke 3:38), it should be clear that for Israel to be brought
back to God as her Father meant that she was
restored to the kind of relationship that man originally enjoyed with
God. To be redeemed by the grace
of God is, in a manner of speaking, to be brought back into the
Garden of Eden and to be allowed to enjoy the blessings that God intended to
bestow on his beloved children in the beginning.
This aspect of salvation is brought
to even greater clarity and very frequent expression in the
New Testament, where those who are redeemed are typically called the children
of God
(John 1:12; 11:52; Acts 17:29;
Rom. 8:16,21; 9:8; Phil. 2:15; 1John 3:1-2,10; 5:2), sons of God (Matt.
5:9; Luke 20:36; Rom. 8:14,19; Gal. 3:26) and brothers in Christ16. Fatherhood
and sonship are indeed the language of redemption and
salvation, but we need to emphasize here that the
language of Biblical soteriology is emphatically and exclusively covenantal.
Baptism, Sonship, and
Covenant
Apart
from these rather straightforward evidences of the covenantal nature of
fatherhood
and sonship, there is the
evidence provided in the doctrine of baptism. Again I quote from the article
by Mawhinney.
This
conclusion is buttressed by the recognition of the connection between Christ’s Sonship
and his baptism. The divine interpretation of the descent of the Holy Spirit is,
“You are my Son.” The Spirit is the endowment of the Son of God for his
15
Allen
Mawhinney, “Baptism, Servanthood, and Sonship” in The Westminster Theological
Journal, Spring,
1987, vol. 49, no. 1,
pp. 35-64.
16
All of the verses speaking of
Christians as brothers imply the brotherhood in Christ which some specify.
See: Rom. 1:13; 7:1,4; 8:12,29; 10:1;
11:25; 12:1; 15:14-15,30; 16:14,17; 1Cor. 1:10-11,26; 2:1; 3:1; 4:6;
6:5,8;
9:3,5;
11:9,26; 13:11; Gal. 1:2,11;
2:4; 3:15; 4:12,28,31; 5:11,13; 6:1,18; Eph. 6:10,23; Phil. 1:12,14; 3:1,13,17;
4:1,8,21;
Col. 1:2; 4:15; 1Th. 1:4;
2:1,9,14,17; 3:7; 4:1,10,13; 5:1,4,12,14,25-27; 2Th. 1:3; 2:1,13,15; 3:1,6,13; 1Tim.
4:6;
5:1; 6:2; 2Tim. 4:21; Heb.
2:11-12,17; 3:1,12; 7:5; 10:19; 13:22; James 1:2,16,19; 2:1,5,14; 3:1,10,12; 4:11;
5:7,9-
10,12,19; 1Pet. 1:22; 3:8; 5:9;
2Pet. 1:10; 1John 2:7; 3:13-14,16; 3John 1:3,5,10. - 10 -
ministry as the Suffering
Servant, assuring him of the good pleasure of the Father in his
life of obedience and sacrifice.
That a similar relationship
exists between the Christian’s sonship and baptism is confirmed
by three lines of evidence. First, the sonship of the Christian is always regarded
as a derivative sonship. By nature, man is a child of wrath. It is by union with
the Son of God that man becomes a son of God. The Christian’s baptism is the
sign and seal of that union with Christ. That union with Christ of which
baptism is a sign and seal includes (but is not limited to)
the Christian’s sonship.
Second, the baptismal washing is
described as a “washing of regeneration” in Tit 3:5. Baptism
is a sign of entrance into the family of God by being born again.
Third, the NT authors parallel
Christ’s baptism with the Christian’s baptism and sonship.
In Luke/Acts Luke presents Jesus’ endowment with the Spirit for mission and
assurance of sonship as parallel to the Pentecostal endowment of the Church for
the continuation of the Messianic mission. Similarly the
baptism of Christians in Acts is associated with the
coming of the Spirit, the eschatological gift of the Father which
makes men sons of God. Paul, in Ephesians, models his description of the
adoptive sonship of Christians on
the language which was used to describe Christ’s baptism.
Baptism is, in part, a sign and
seal of sonship. This is the teaching of the Reformed confessions.
It is the teaching of the NT.17
The baptism of Jesus is parallel
to the baptism of the Christian in that in both there is the
work of the Spirit and the
Father’s declaration that the one baptized is His covenant son. Jesus’ sonship
is Messianic to be sure, but when He is called Son of God, there is much more
involved than His messianic ministry. He is the eternal Son. His
ministry as the covenantal Messiah stems from that eternal sonship.
Neither the Father nor the Spirit could have become the Messiah
and representative of the people of Israel because Israel is God’s son and only
a Son could represent Israel as Messiah. The parallel between
the Sonship of the second Person and the sonship of those who are
brought into God’s covenant by baptism points to the covenantal nature
of sonship itself and the relationship among the Persons of the Godhead.
In addition to the doctrine of
baptism, there are other passages in the New Testament
which
draw parallels between our relationship with God the Father and the
relationship between Jesus and the Father (John
15:8-10; 2020:17, 21; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6; Heb. 2:10-11; 1 John 3:1; Rev.
3:21). We are children of God and sons of God after the same pattern and
likeness of Jesus as the eternal Son of God. That
is, we are the created and re-created analogy that reflects the
eternal relationship between
Father and Son. Thus we have the right to call upon God as our Father,
using the very language that Jesus used in the Garden, “Abba, Father” (Gal.
4:6). More could be said about fatherhood and sonship, but it
should already be clear that not only is the human relationship
of fathers and sons patterned on the divine Father and Son
relationship, but also the
Fatherhood of God for man is a covenantal fatherhood, the fatherhood 17
Mawhinney, Op cit.
- 11 -
of a human father is a covenantal
fatherhood, and the redemptive fatherhood of God is a covenantal
fatherhood. To be a son, therefore, is to be in a covenant relationship with a
father. For the Bible to speak of the eternal relationships
between the Persons of the Trinity as a Father and
Son relationship is already to say that the Persons of the Trinity relate to
one another in a family covenant of love.
Spirit and Covenant
How
does the Holy Spirit fit into this covenantal picture? It may seem that
“Spirit” is only vaguely covenantal.
In fact, however, in the Bible, the Holy Spirit is emphatically covenantal. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the covenant. He
is associated with covenantal creation in the very beginning and covenant making throughout the Scriptures.
The
work of the Holy Spirit in the original creation is explicit from the second
verse of Scripture: “and the Spirit
of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” The fact that the creation of the world was a covenantal act and
that the Spirit’s moving is central to that act, especially the creation of man, is the thesis of Meredith Kline’s Images
of the Spirit. Kline wrote in his
preface,
Overlooked though it has been,
the idea of creation in the image of the Glory-Spirit is,
in fact, a foundational and pervasive theme in the Scriptures. We come upon it
in historical narration, symbolic representation in the
cultus, didactic exposition, and eschatological expectation. The
present work merely suggests selectively something of
these biblical riches. Waiting to be pursued further also is the relationship
of the imago Dei to certain other major biblical concepts. Once
it is seen that God the Spirit in his theophanic
Presence is the divine paradigm in the creation of the image
of God, a conceptual overlap, if
not synonymity, will be recognized between the imago
Dei and concepts like messiahship and the Spirit’s filling or baptism of God’s people.
And to perceive that it is the same Spirit by whose charismatic enduing the church
is qualified to fulfill the great commission who also as Paradigm Creator of
man in the image of God, endowed him to execute the cultural commission, is to possess
a vital coherence factor for working out a unified world and life field theory,
inclusive of creation and redemption and, within the
area of the redemptive
accomplishment of God’s creation
designs, comprehensive of both holy and common vocations.18
The work of the Holy Spirit in
the Old Testament is often neglected, in spite of the fact that there
are well over 100 clear references to the Spirit and his work. The Spirit is
associated with the gift of life, prophecy, and
other gifts that require special abilities and wisdom. On the whole, these are
the same basic themes that we find in the New Testament. Explicit associations
of the Holy Spirit with the covenant are rare in both
testaments (Is. 59:21; 2Cor. 3:6; Heb. 10:29), but the underlying theme, as
Kline points out, is pervasive.
In Genesis, when God creates the
world the work of the Holy Spirit in the covenant act of creation
is central (Gen. 1:2). The Spirit’s hovering over the world should be
understood to be the way that God brings the word to bear on the creation. The
Father breathes the Word by the 18
Images
of the Spirit, p. 11
- 12 -
Spirit/Breath and the Spirit
applies the Word to the creation. The whole process is covenantal: God
commands, the world obeys, God blesses the obedient creation.
It should be noted that this scenario,
suggested by Meredith Kline’s work on the Spirit in
creation, supposes both that the
Son proceeds from the Spirit and that the Spirit proceeds from the Son.
In creating all things, the Word
of God who was in the beginning thus proceeded forth
from the Spirit of God — as did also the incarnate word and the inscripturated
Word. We are confronted again with this mystery of the Son’s identity with the
Spirit and his personal distinctiveness and his procession from
the Spirit in the figure of that Angel associated with the
Glory-cloud and called “the Angel of the Presence” (Isa.
63:9ff.; Exod. 32:34; 33:2, 12–15).19
Kline
offers a revision to traditional Trinitarian doctrine in which the Son proceeds
from
the
Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – in the West – or
from the Father — in the East. In
Kline’s perspective, the Son proceeds from the Spirit and then the Spirit proceeds from the Son. That this is a Biblical
reconstruction seems clear from the Gospels.
Jesus is born through
the power of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary (Mat. 1:20; Luke 1:35), according to Kline an allusion to the original
creation of man.20 Jesus is also filled with the Spirit and led by the Spirit. Indeed, we even read that the Spirit
“drove him [Jesus] into the wilderness”
(Mar. 1:12). In His death, also, He offered Himself up to God through the
Spirit (Heb. 9:14). Thus, the Word
proceeds from the Spirit, even as the Spirit proceeds from the Word. The Spirit does not exactly send the Son by
commandment, as the Son sends the Spirit, but He does lead the Son into the world, and while the Son is in the
world, all that He does is done in
the Spirit.
The
gift of the Messiah as the New Adam and as the leader of a New Covenant,
therefore,
is distinctly the work of the
Spirit, just as the creation of the old Adam in the old covenant was distinctly
the work of the Spirit. But we must also say that the Holy Spirit Himself is
the promised gift of the New Covenant (Acts 1:4-5; 2:38-39).
His indwelling the Church as the new
temple of God
corresponds to His covenantal indwelling of the tabernacle and temple in the
old
covenant era. In the gift of the tabernacle, the temple, and the restored
temple of Ezra’s day, the
work of the Holy
Spirit is prominent and His presence is what makes the temple God’s
covenantal throne and dwelling place.
19
“Creation in the Image of the Glory Spirit,”
Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 39, no. 2, p. 254.
20
On this Kline writes, “As that is portrayed in
Genesis 2:7, man was made a living soul by a divine
inbreathing. That this is to be understood in
terms of the vitalizing breath of the Spirit is evident from the quickening
function
attributed to the Spirit in Scripture, sometimes in passages reflective of
Genesis 2:7. According to Psalm
104:29–31, when God sends forth his
Spirit-Glory-Face, the face of the earth is renewed and living creatures are
created. In Lamentations 4:20, “the breath (ruah)
of our nostrils” stands in appositional parallelism to “the (Spirit-)
anointed of the Lord.” In the vision of Ezekiel
37, when God summons his Spirit-wind to breathe upon the lifeless in
the valley, the valley comes to life with a host
of living men (vss. 1–10, 14). At the coming into the world of the
second Adam, it was revealed to his mother: “The
Holy Spirit will come upon you and the Power of the Highest will
overshadow you; therefore also that holy thing
which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God” (Lk.
1:35). And when our
Lord prophetically portrayed his creation of the new man(kind), he breathed on the disciples
and
said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn. 20:22). Clearly then we are to understand
that it was the Spirit-Glory of
world into life, who was the
divine breath that fathered the living man-son in Genesis 2:7.” - 13 -
Whenever
therefore we think of the Holy Spirit, we should think of God’s covenant
presence
and blessing. It was so in the original covenant when God created the world, especially
when He breathed life into man (Gen.
1:2; 2:7). It was so in the days of Moses and David (Ex. 14:19 ff.; Num. 11:17; Isa. 63:7-14; 2 Sam.
23:1-7; 1 Kings 8:10-11). It was so when God sent the Messiah to bring in a New Covenant (Isa.
11:1-5; 42:1-4; 48:16; 61:1-9; Mat. 3:16-17; John 1:32-34). It is so in the Church now and forever
(Acts 1:5-8; 1 Cor. 3:16; Eph. 2:19-22). The Spirit is the Spirit of the
Covenant because He is the Spirit of life.
Conclusion
What
we have seen, then, is that the three special and distinct names for the
Persons of the Trinity are all names
that express covenantal relationships. Fathers and sons are inevitably in covenant with one another — whether they think in
these terms or not. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit who creates and re-creates in covenant. Since the words “father,”
“son,” and “Holy Spirit” all define
covenantal relationships in the created world, we must see the Father, Son and
Spirit as Persons who relate to one
another in an eternal covenant of love.
We
must add to the discussion above the fact that the names of the Persons of the
Trinity
we have discussed are also the
name of the Triune God — “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Mat.
28:19b). There is one name for the Three Persons and that special Trinitarian
name is covenant name “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Add also that this
definitive Triune name of God is used in the covenant
ceremony of baptism (Mat. 28:19). Here, then, in one of the most important
passages in the New Testament on the doctrine of the Trinity, Jesus speaks of
the name of God in a manner that is distinctly covenantal
and instructs us to use that name for the ceremony
that initiates us into covenant with God. In the light of the covenantal
meaning of the
individual
words “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit,” Jesus’ instruction brings to even greater
clarity the reality of the eternal covenant of love within the Persons of the Godhead.
To be baptized is to be introduced into that covenantal fellowship of love.
3. Names of the Covenant God
This point overlaps quite a bit with the previous
point, but I think it is distinct enough to be treated separately. In the previous section, I have shown that Father,
Son and Spirit are words that first
of all define a covenantal relationship. As we saw, human fathers and sons are
in a covenantal relationship related
to their biological relationship. In what follows, I will show that there are at least three divine names that
describe relationships both among the three Persons of the Trinity and between God and His redeemed
people. Since the relationship between God and His people being defined by these names is a covenantal relationship, we
must infer that these names designate
a covenantal relationship when used of the Persons of the Trinity also. Why? Because the relationship between God and His
people is modeled after the relationship among the Persons of the Trinity. My previous point was that the names used
for the Three Persons — Father, Son,
and Spirit — have inescapably covenantal resonance. Now I wish to emphasize
that certain names of the Persons of
the Trinity are grounded in the analogy between the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity and God’s
relationship with us. If the one is covenantal, then by analogy, the other must be also.
We have already seen that the name “Father” is
especially associated with the covenant.
But God the Father is called Father both with
reference to His relationship to Jesus the Son and in His relationship to us.
Christ Himself suggested the parallel between the two relationships
- 14 -
20:17b).
The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is our Father (Rom. 15:6; 2Cor. 1:3; Eph.
1:3; Col. 1:3; 1Pet. 1:3). Our Lord
prayed “Abba, Father” in the Garden of Gethsemane and so can we (Mark 14:36; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). The same name
is used to refer to our covenant relationship to God and to Jesus relationship to the Father. If our relationship is
covenantal, then by analogy Jesus’
relationship to the Father is also.
The second name of God that is
covenantally significant both in reference to
intratrinitarian
relationships and in our covenantal relationship with God is the name “Son of God” or “the Son.” We have already seen that
Fatherhood and Sonship are covenantal notions. What is important to note here is that this covenantal name is used
both of Jesus relationship to the
Father and His relationship to us, suggesting the covenantal parallel.
It hardly needs to be
demonstrated that the name Son or Son of God designates Jesus relationship
to God the Father. But the name “Son of God” also signifies a relationship with
us as a messianic title. The angel promised Marry that the
Holy child to be born from her would be called
“Son of God,” referring to Jesus as the coming Savior (Luke 1:35). When the
demons meet Jesus and cry out “You are the Son of God” Jesus
prevents them “because they knew Him to be the Christ” (Luke 4:41).
John the Baptist associates Jesus name “Son of God” with the fact that
He is the one who baptizes with the Spirit (John 1:33-34), a Messianic
identification that Nathaniel imitates when he says, “Rabbi, You are the Son of
God; You are the King of Israel” (John 1:49). This is the same
Messianic faith that Martha confessed, “I have believed that You are
the Christ, the Son of God, even He who comes into the world” (John 11:27).
John himself
tells us that he wrote his
Gospel so that we may “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John
20:31). In each of these examples, the title “Son of God” is a Messianic title,
often in apposition to “Christ,” “Messiah.”. For John, the title
“Son of God” is both a title that shows Jesus
relationship to the Father as the eternal Son and also His relationship to us
as Messiah and Savior (John 1:33-34, 49;
3:17-18, 35; 5:19-23, 25-27; 6:40; 10:36; 11:27; 20:31; 1 John 3:8;
4:14-15;
5:10, 20).
Thus,
if the name “Son of God” means the one who is our covenantal Messiah and
Savior,
and suggests the covenant given
to us in Christ, then by analogy the name “Son of God” implies covenantal
relationship when used of the Son’s relationship to the Father. Much more can
be said about the meaning of the name “Son of God” and why
it is used in this analogous manner. But that is not my point here. I am simply
pointing to the analogy and to the fact that when used of
Jesus and His people, the name “Son of God” as a Messianic name defines a
covenantal relationship. Exploring the fuller implications
of this analogy requires another essay, but the key to
the analogy seems to be representation, again a distinctly covenantal idea.
The
third name that refers both to the intratrinitarian relationships and to God’s
relationship to man is the name
for Christ, “Word.” John tells us that “in the beginning was the Word and the
Word was with God and the Word was God. This one was in the beginning with God”
(John 1:1-2). Jesus eternal relationship to the Father is portrayed here by the
name “Word.” The Word was in the beginning with God. In other
words, the Word already existed before the beginning. Thus, the
name “Word” is not merely a name of relation to the created world.
It defines the intratrinitarian relationship. God is Three Persons who reveal
themselves to one another fully. The Word speaks for all
eternity by the Spirit, as Father, Son, and Spirit
- 15 -
share a full fellowship of love,
which is what John implies when he says the Word is “face to face”
with the Father.21
When John speaks of the Word being “with” God, he
is not only using the language of
intimate fellowship, he is using
the language of covenant. The most basic covenantal formula in the
Old Testament is the promise of God to be with His people (Gen. 24:40;
26:24,28; 28:20;
Deut. 2:7; 31:6, 8; etc. almost
100 times in the O.T.). For the Son to be “with God” suggests mutual
covenantal blessing. The Father blesses the Son and He the Father.
At the same time, the name “Word” defines who and
what Jesus is to us: “That which was from
the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we
have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, concerning the Word of life — the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness,
and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was
manifested to us — that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us;
and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ” (1
John 1:1-3). The Word is the Person of the Godhead who reveals God to us, whose words and life show the Father
like no one else has or could (John 1:18), for He alone is the True Light (John 1:9), the Word who became flesh and
thereby manifested the glory of the
Father (John 1:14).
The covenantal significance of
the name “Word” is clear. Jesus is the covenant Word from God.
Some ambiguity about the referent of “word” in certain passages adds special
emphasis to
this
point.22 Is the Word of God in Hebrews 4:12 Christ or is it the Bible? What
about the “word of God” by which the worlds were framed (Heb. 11:3)? 1 John 1:1
obviously refers to Jesus, but in language that intentionally
also points to the covenant Word of Holy Scripture. 1 John 2:14 is ambiguous.
Is the Word which abides in us our Lord, or the Word of Scripture. Revelation
1:2
and
1:9 both speak of “the word of God” and “the testimony of Jesus Christ” and
both could be translated “the Word of
God, even the testimony of Jesus Christ.” The traditional translation here is probably better, but in the writings of
John, the expression “Word of God” even when clearly referring to Scripture may
also allude to the person of Christ. The personal Word and covenantal word of Scripture could not be more
closely associated.
21
follows:
“Though existing
eternally with God the Logos was in perfect fellowship with God. Pros with the accusative
presents a plane of
equality and intimacy, face to face with each other.” Word Pictures in the New Testament, vol.
4.
22
Luther, in particular,
emphasized the relationship between the written Word and the Incarnate Word.
“Skevington Wood, on the other hand, opts for a
more conservative position, stating that when Luther promoted
Scripture’s authority against that of the Church,
He ‘was not just ventilating a theory (but) trying to reflect the
pattern of Scripture itself.’ Luther realized
‘the significance of the minutiae in Scripture,’ but this did not deter him,
‘since he believed each single word to be
inspired.’ It was that Word that gave birth to the church, not vice versa; it
was the Word which was
parent and the church its offspring, for the Scripture bore its own ‘self-authenticating
character of the inspired writers.’ Of course, a
reading of Luther will show that ‘by the Word, he did not invariably
mean Holy Writ,’ for besides referring to the text
of Scripture, he sometimes used Word ‘with reference to Christ
Himself, and sometimes with references to the
content, or act of preaching.’ This view of Luther Wood sums up by
stating that ‘all that Luther taught about the
authority of the Bible and the nature of revelation found its climax and
corollary in his doctrine of inspiration,’ for
which ‘a miracle of the Spirit was required, (a miracle) parallel between
the written Word and the incarnate Word.’” Eugene
F. Klug, “Word And Scripture In Luther Studies Since World
War II,” Trinity
Theological Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1984, p. 22.
- 16 -
In this case, both the use of
the name “Word” with reference to intratrinitarian
relationships and with reference
to Christ’s relationship with His people occur in contexts that are
explicitly covenantal. We are not merely arguing by analogy here.
I have limited my argument to these three names
because they seemed most clear. I think other examples could be added, but they would only further illustrate
the point that there are some names used both of the intratrinitarian
relationships and of God’s covenant relationship with His people. The use of the same designations of God for the two
different relationships
obviously
presupposes an analogy between those relationships. If God is both Father to
the Son and to us, there is some
analogy here. If “Son of God” is a messianic title as well as the designation of the Second Person of the Trinity,
there must be an analogy between Jesus’ relationship to His people and His relationship to the Father. If the
Second Person can be designated
“Word of God” with reference to the Father and also with reference to us, the
two relationships defined by that
phrase are analogous.
In the light of the previous point about the
covenantal meaning of the words “father” and “son” it seems that in each of the names above, at least one aspect of
the analogy between the intratrinitarian relationships and God’s relationship
to us must be the covenantal nature of the relationships.
4. Representation in God
Representation is one of the
fundamental ideas of the covenant, as is clear from Paul’s exposition
of Adam and Christ in Romans 5. Adam represented all men in the Garden of Eden and
brought sin and destruction to his race. Jesus represented a new race of men in
His incarnation and brought righteous and life to them.
Though the word “covenant” is not used in this
context, the representational relationship outlined belongs to the covenantal
sphere. Like the
relationship between Adam and his
posterity, all Biblical covenants are built upon the representative principle.
In the Biblical context, we may say that all covenants include representation
and representation always implies some sort of a covenant. When the Bible speaks
of the relationship of Father and Son in terms of representation, therefore, we
must understand the relationship as a covenant.
The most important single verse
of Scripture speaking explicitly of representation within
the Trinity is Hebrews 1:3. Here
the Son is said to be “o§13 w·n aÓpau/gasma thv13 do/xh13 kai« carakth\r
thv13 uJposta¿sew13 aujtouv”. The latter phrase is especially relevant for the
purpose of this paper. The noun carakth\r comes from the verb
cara¿ssw, meaning to engrave. The noun may mean “a mark or an
impression placed on an object” such as a coin. In this case, the lexicon
suggests “something produced as a representation” and for Hebrews 1:3, “an
exact representation of (God’s) real being.”23 It has been
translated variously.
the brightness of his glory, and
the express image of his person (KJV)
the brightnes of the glory, and
the ingraued forme of his person (archaic spelling; Geneva
Bible)
23
A Greek-English Lexicon Of The
New Testament And Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), ed. by Fredrick
William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), pp. 1077-78.
- 17 -
the effulgence of his glory, and
the very image of his substance (ASV)
the radiance of His glory and
the exact representation of His nature (NASV) the
brightness of the glory, and the impress of His subsistence (Young’s Literal Translation)
the reflection of God’s glory
and the exact imprint of God’s very being (NRSV) the
brightness of his glory and the figure of his substance (Douay)
Whether we speak of “ingrained
form,” “express image,” “very image,” or “exact imprint,” the
meaning is plain. The Son is the representative replica of the Father. He shows
the Father exactly and perfectly. The Father’s very nature
and substance is exactly imaged in Him. However we translate the phrase, it
speaks both of the Son’s utter equality with the Father as
well
as the personal distinction between Son and Father. The Son is distinct as the
representative and is equal because He
perfectly and precisely images the Father in all His greatness and glory. Therefore,
He is the only one who can truly “exegete” Him (John 1:18).
This is the reason that the Son
— and He alone — is the Person of the Trinity who could become
incarnate. The incarnate God would be the representative of God on earth. He
would manifest God to man and mediate between God and man.
Since it is the nature of the Second Person as Son to be the
representative image of the Father, the exact replica of His hypostasis, it could
only be the Son who could become the incarnate God. That the Son became the
covenant representative in history is grounded in His relationship
with the Father in eternity. The character and nature of the Son
is defined by His relationship to the Father, a relationship analogous
to that He sustains to us. He is the eternal symbol and manifestation of God
the Father because He is the Son.
In
other words, the Son is able to become the covenant representative of the
people of God in history because of who He is in eternity. He reflected the
Father’s glory not only in the
creation, but from before the
foundation of the world, when, as the exact imprint of the Father’s nature,
He radiated the exquisite beauty of His being.
Cornelius
Van Til’s emphasis on the importance of representation for covenant brings this
into perspective.
It may even be said that Calvin’s
covenantal idea is Theism come to its own. The
covenant
idea is nothing but the representational principle consistently applied to all reality. The foundation of the representational
principle among men is the fact that the
Trinity exists in the form of a mutually exhaustive representation of the three
Persons that constitute it. The
emphasis should be placed upon the idea of exhaustion. This is important because it brings out the point of the
complete equality as far as ultimacy
is concerned of the principle of unity and of diversity. This mutual exhaustion of the persons of the Trinity places
one before the choice of interpreting reality
in exclusively temporal categories or in eternal categories. The demand of the doctrine of the Trinity, when thus conceived is
that reality be interpreted in exclusively
eternal categories inasmuch as the source of diversity lies in the Trinity itself and could never be found in a sense world
beyond God. Hence the problem of - 18 -
the one and the many,
of the universal and the particular, of being and becoming, of analytical and synthetic reasoning, of the a
priori and the a posteriori must be solved by an exclusive reference to the
Trinity.24
We
might add that the problem of the nature of the covenant also must be solved by
exclusive reference to the Trinity
and be interpreted in eternal rather than temporal categories.
The
representative nature of the Triune Persons and the fact that the Son is the
express image of the Father reveals
the covenantal relationship among the Persons of the Trinity. As Van Til points out, it is because representation is
fundamental to the relationship among the Persons of the Trinity that it is fundamental to the
creation. Because God’s very being is covenantal and representative, the Triune God creates the world
in covenant with Himself and works all things in creation and redemption
according to the representative principle.
5. Covenantal Attributes
Francis
Turretin noted that “goodness and the qualities contained under it (viz., love,
grace
and
mercy) are occupied with the communication of good . . .”25 In other words, he
recognized that attributes like
goodness necessarily involve interpersonal expression. To say that unless there is “communication of good” there can be no
goodness is to say that unless the Persons of the Trinity communicate good to each other from eternity, goodness
could not be an attribute of God. In
the same way, love requires a beloved. Faithfulness is always faithfulness to
another person. So far as I can
tell, all of the attributes that describe God’s moral character, even attributes like righteousness and truth, make
sense only in the context of interpersonal relations. Though Turretin’s point seems obvious, the odd
truth is that this feature of the attributes of God has been largely ignored.
It
is commonly known that among the Hebrew and Greek words for God’s attributes
are
some
that assume a covenantal relationship. Perhaps the clearest word is dsj, widely
regarded as a technical covenantal term that always implies or presuppose a
covenant relationship. Many other words that are used for God’s “ethical” or
“communicable” attributes also imply or presuppose a covenant relationship, too.
In
fact, any attempt to define the attributes of God apart from the covenantal
relationship of the three Persons
invites an ancient critique known as Euthyphro’s dilemma. The critique was originally formulated in a polytheistic context
and is especially powerful there. But it has its modern form and it is often used to attack the God of the Bible. The
question is asked: Is God’s ethical
goodness the result of God conforming to a standard of goodness? If so, we do
not need
to
know God to know ethical goodness. The abstract standard exists by itself,
apart from God. It also means that we can judge
God, for He is required to conform to the ethical standard no less than
we. If the ethical goodness that God demands is the expression of His own
nature, then it is said to be arbitrary. If God
were different, He might command murder rather than forbid it.
What
He commands and forbids is just the arbitrary imposition of His absolute will.
In either
case,
we have a view that is unworthy of God. The God of the Bible cannot be thought
of either
24
A Survey of Christian Epistemology,
p. 96. He goes on to say, “It was upon this foundation of a truly Trinitarian
concept that Calvin built his conception of covenant theology.” P. 97.
25
Institutes of
Elenctic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), vol. 1,
p. 241.
- 19 -
as god that is subject to our
judgment according to a standard outside of himself, nor as a god that
is pure arbitrary will.
The Christian answer is that God
is Himself the standard for ethical goodness and righteousness. His own Holy
character is the ethical standard. But this does not erase the problem
entirely, for most, if not all, of the terms defining ethical uprightness are
social. What would it mean for God’s own character to be the
standard for ethics, if we conceived of God as a monad?
A single lonely God, without relationship to any other cannot be good, for
example, because, as Turretin pointed out, goodness is a word that
describes how one relates to others. He obviously
cannot be love, for the same reason. Some might think such a god could be
righteous, but in fact, he could only be righteous in
reference to a standard outside of himself or with reference
to the arbitrary whim of his will. Allah, in other words, falls prey to the
Enlightenment critique of God; he cannot answer Euthyphro.
But a Trinitarian view of God’s
attributes sets us free from this dilemma. The Triune God is a
society in which each denies Himself to seek the good and blessing of the
other.
Righteousness, goodness, love,
faithfulness, and truth all are defined in terms of the concrete
interpersonal
relationships of the Three. Righteousness, for example, is not an abstract idea
or a mere principle. It is the way
the Three Persons treat one another. Or, rather, it is one perspective on the way the Three relate to one another. It
might be stated this way, righteousness means that each of the persons of the Trinity recognizes and
protects the distinct properties of the other
persons.
Other ethical terms emphasize various aspects of the self-sacrificial,
self-giving dedication of the Three for one another. Love, righteousness,
faithfulness, and truth are indeed an
expression of God’s character, but arbitrariness is not possible because the
One true God is a covenantal society
of love. For Him to be anything other than what He is would undermine His very being.
In the Bible, each of these basic ethical terms is
a covenantal term.26 They define relationships
between God and man as well as between man and man whether, as often, in the context of a specific covenant or, as in many
other cases, in a generally covenantal context. Jews, for example are very conscious of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants
as defining their relationship with
God and though they are not self-conscious of their rejection of these covenants, they will be judged in terms of them.
Gentile pagans are in covenant in Adam, but
they
are not conscious of it and the details of what it means for a Gentile to be in
the Adamic and Noahic covenants are
harder to specify. It remains clear, however, that non-Christian men who reject the God of the Bible are still judged in
terms of His revelation because it is a covenantal revelation which speaks authoritatively to men.
It therefore brings men into judgment. They
will
be blessed or cursed in terms of their response, even though they may not have
consciously “entered” into a
covenant with God. They are in covenant with God in Adam and the revelation
that God has given of Himself in history is authoritative for them. In that
sense, then, all ethical terms and
standards have a covenantal foundation in God Himself and in His covenantal
relationship with mankind.
6. Father and Son in John’s Gospel
John’s Gospel supplies a
relatively tight knit exegetical argument for the idea of a covenant among
the Persons of the Trinity. Our Lord’s famous prayer in John 17 uses language
that 26
I
offer more exegetical argumentation for this point in Paradox and Truth.
- 20 -
seems clearly to presuppose a
covenantal relationship between the Father and the Son when it speaks
of the parallel to the covenantal relationship between the Persons of the Trinity
and God’s elect. However, expositions of John’s Gospel
frequently miss the covenantal language in chapter 17
and the covenantal focus of the whole Gospel because John does not use the word
“covenant” even a single time. Yet, for those well acquainted
with the book of Deuteronomy, John’s covenantal language is clear. It
pervades his Gospel, as John Pryor points out.27
It is
especially noteworthy that on many occasions the injunctions to love God and to
obey/keep his commands are brought together, so that we
can see that love for God is always demonstrated by
covenant obedience (Deut 6:5-6; 7:9; 10:12-13; 11:1, 13, 22;
19:9; 30:6-8; Josh 22:5). This Deuteronomic pattern (and note in 30:6-8 the
promise of a renewed people, the
foundation of the new covenant hopes) has been taken
up by Jesus in John. Not only does the Johannine corpus use ‘commandment’ and
‘to command’ with greater frequency than the rest of the New Testament, but love
for Christ and obedience to his commands are brought together in a way which reminds
us of the Deuteronomic covenant obligations.28
The Deuternomic themes of John’s Gospel are especially
prominent in chapters 13 to 17, the immediate context for the
expressions that are especially under consideration. But the Gospel
as a whole depicts the relationship between Jesus and the Father as covenantal,
as the
following illustrates.
The Father
1) sends the Son as His
representative;
2) gives the Son a
mission to accomplish;
3) gives the Son
commandments.
The Son
1) rejoices to do the
Father’s will;
2) accomplishes the
mission for which He was sent;
3) obeys the Father’s
commandments out of love.
This is the classic covenantal structure of God’s
relationship with Israel. 1) She was
chosen from the nations to be His representative
nation, a priestly nation to minister to all the other nations of the world. 2) She was given a mission
to create a kingdom in the promised land that would glorify God and win the
rest of the world. 3) She was given commandments by God that would enable her
to fulfill her mission. Jesus is the true Israel, the true Vine (John 15). He fulfilled the mission that Israel failed to fulfill.
But there is also a sense in which He did not
complete the work. Or rather, a sense in
which He is
still completing the work now. He is working through the Church, His body, to accomplish the full project that the Father gave Him.
That is the reason that He says to His disciples, “As the Father sent me, so send I you” (John
20:21). Jesus’ relationship with the
27
John W. Pryor, John the Evangelist of the Covenant
People, pp. 161-63.
28
Ibid., p. 162.
- 21 -
Church parallels the Father’s
relationship with Him. They have the same covenantal structure, as can
be seen from the words of Jesus in John 15.
Just
as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you
keep My commandments, you will
abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments
and abide in His love. (John 15:9-10)
So, the Church is 1) sent into
the world as Jesus’ body and representative (she prays and works
in His name) 2) with a mission (to disciple the nations of the world) and 3)
commandments to enable her to
fulfill that mission. This unmistakable covenantal parallel is the background
for our understanding certain expressions in Jesus’ prayer in John’s Gospel.
In John 17 Jesus prays that the
disciples may be one as He and the Father are one.29 This oneness
is based in the mutual indwelling of the Persons.30 It is a unity of love at
the same time that it is a unity of mutual indwelling.31 John
17 describes the same relationship of representation,
love, commandments, and glory that we find in John 15, the most emphatically covenantal
chapter in the entire Gospel. Thus, in John 17 when Jesus speaks of the
disciples being “in” Him, He is referring to the same
covenantal relationship that He spoke of in John 15 when
He exhorted them to abide in Him. And in John 17 when He speaks of the parallel
between the Father being in Him and He being in the
disciples, He is speaking of the same covenantal
parallel that He spoke of in John 15. What He adds in John 17 is that not only
are we
in the Son as the Father is in
the Son and the Son in the Father, but also we are in both Father and Son.
The relationship described by the word “in” however is the same. It is the
covenant of love that we are commanded to abide in by obedient love.32
7.
Unchanging God of the Covenant
Abraham
Kuyper offered an argument for a covenantal relationship among the Persons of
the Trinity that I regard as the most
profound argument for such a relationship and as completely
irrefutable. I have quoted and
explained Kuyper’s view at greater length in Paradox and Truth,33 but
the essential point can be seen in the following.
If the idea of the covenant with regard to man and among
men can only occur in its ectypical form, and if its archetypical original is
found in the divine economy, then it cannot have its deepest ground in
the pactum salutis that has its motive in the fall of man.
For in that case it would not belong to the divine economy as such, but would
29
“I am no longer in the
world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You. Holy
Father,
keep them in Your name, the name
which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.” (11)
30
“that they may all be one; even
as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that
the world may believe that You
sent Me. . . . I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity,
so that
the
world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.”
(21, 23)
31
“I have made Your name known to
them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved
Me
may be in them, and I in them.” (26)
32
For an expanded version of this
argument, see “The Trinitarian Covenant in John 17” at trinitarianism.com.
33
Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van
Til on the Trinity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2002, second revised edition),
pp. 73 ff.
- 22 -
be introduced in it rather
incidentally and change the essential relations of the Three Persons
in the divine Essence.34
I cannot quite imagine how any
reformed theologian can disagree with Kuyper here. If the three
Persons of the Godhead do not have a covenantal relationship among themselves
essentially and eternally, then
they entered into a covenant with regard to man. Of course, God’s plan
is eternal so there is nothing in the way of eternal versus temporal here. The
point is that the relationship between the three Persons
considered apart from man and apart from the fall of man
into sin would have to be regarded as not covenantal. But the contemplation of
the fall of man into sin and the method of redemption introduced for the first
time (so to speak) a new sort of relationship among the
Persons. Now the Father, Son, and Spirit (though He is often left out) enter
into a covenant.
This is odd in the extreme. If
Father, Son, and Spirit do not relate to one another in covenant
essentially in their fundamental intratrinitarian fellowship, why should the contemplation
of man’s fall and redemption introduce something new and different in their relationship?
And how should we think of God as the unchangeable God, if intratrinitarian relationships
have been fundamentally and essentially changed in the pactum salutis?
Apparently this argument has been considered speculative.35 It is not. To
assert that the fundamental nature of the
relationship among the three Persons of the Trinity cannot change because
of considerations regarding man and history seems to be a plain and inescapable
deduction from the fact of God’s
immutability. God is who He is from eternity and to eternity. What
He does in regard to man — even when we are speaking of His eternal plan — does
not and cannot introduce a new sort of relationship into the
Godhead — as if the three Persons related without a covenant apart
from considerations of man and history but then find it necessary
to enter a covenant when those considerations are introduced. It would mean
that
God’s ad extra relations such as
planning the creation of the world, the fall of man into sin, and the
redemption of fallen man introduce ad intra changes, a new sort of relationship
between the Father, Son, and Spirit. Rather than positing a
change in the nature of the relationships among the Trinitarian Persons, we
must see pactum salutis as manifesting who and what God is in eternity.
If the reader grasps this point — which is not speculation but theological
reasoning in the most refined sense of the word — then all the
other arguments simply confirm this obvious theological
deduction.
8.
Covenantal Dynamic
When I speak of a covenantal
dynamic in the Trinity, I am thinking especially of the procession
of the Holy Spirit, though I believe that the Father’s begetting the Son should
be understood in the same manner. I concentrate here on the
procession of the Holy Spirit because it
seems to me to be clearer.
At the same time, the procession
of the Spirit is controversial. The Eastern and Western branches
of the Church have disagreed on this point for hundreds of years. In the East,
the procession of the Holy Spirit is understood to be
procession from the Father only. In the West, the
Spirit is said to proceed both from the Father and the Son. I believe the
Western view is
34
Quoted
in Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 295.
35
Richard Phillips, “Covenant
Confusion” http://www.gpts.edu/resources/resource_covconfusion.html.
- 23 -
correct but I am not going to
argue for it here. I am going to assume it since I am writing in the context
of the Western Church and virtually anyone who reads this essay will already
take the
Western view for granted. What is important for
this essay is to consider the implications of this view. First, we need to consider the significance
of the fact that the Spirit proceeds both from Father and Son. Then we need to consider how that is related to the
Scriptures that form the basis for
the Western view.
Cornelius Van Til stated the
profound significance of the Western view succinctly. Athanasius
and Augustine did much to make more clear that all three of the persons are
co-ordinate. And an important point in this connection was to show that the
Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from
the Son (filioque). It is only if the Spirit proceeds from both
that the inter-communion of the Persons of the Trinity is
eternally complete. The Western Church more clearly than the Eastern saw that the
co-ordination of the persons and their exclusively internal intercommunication
could not be expressed without the filioque clause.36
The Spirit proceeds eternally
from the Father to the Son and then from the Son back to the Father.
In this way, the communion of the Persons is complete. This fullness of
communion between the Persons of the Trinity is what distinguishes the Western
view from the Eastern and in my opinion what gives the Western church a richer
understanding of the ontological Trinity. But
we must understand that the Western view that the Spirit proceeds from both
Father
and
Son is a doctrine of the ontological trinity based upon what God does in
history. All branches of the church
and all denominations who hold to the Trinity agree with what Bavinck says when he writes, “The ontological Trinity is
reflected in the economical Trinity.”37 There is simply no other way to build the doctrine of the ontological Trinity.
So what, then, is the Scriptural
basis for the doctrine of procession? Bavinck, following church
tradition, supports the doctrine of the procession of the Spirit from both
Father and Son by reference to two passages in
the Gospel of John: 14:26 and 16:7. But both of these verses refer
to the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. They are not first of all or
primarily about an
eternal
procession.
Bavinck
explains,
But this procession in time is a
reflection of the immanent relation existing between the
three persons in the ontological trinity, and is based upon generation and spiration.
The generation of the Son is the eternal arche-type of the incarnation of the
Logos, and the procession from the Father and the Son is the proto-type of the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit. Hence, the church-fathers derived the knowledge concerning
the eternal and immanent relations existing between the persons of the trinity
from what was revealed concerning those relations in time. In this they were correct.38
36
Cornelius Van Til, An
Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed,
1978), pp. 225-26.
37
Bavinck, p. 117.
38
Herman
Bavinck, The Doctine of God, p. 320.
- 24 -
If
the procession in time is the ground for our doctrine of the procession in
eternity, then it
is vital that we
consider the nature of this procession. What does the gift of the Spirit mean?
The gift of the Spirit is
associated with all of the blessings of salvation. He testifies to us of God’s
love and assures us that we are His children. He is the pledge of all the
blessings we shall enjoy in the future as well as
the highest and greatest blessing we have in the present. To sum up
all that the Spirit is and means
requires that we see Him as the essential gift of the new covenant. Here
is where the doctrines of procession and the covenant intersect.
Consider
the nature of promise of the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel. If we ask the
question
what distinguishes
the new covenant from the old, the answer from John’s Gospel is, “the gift of the
Spirit.” This is emphasized in John’s Gospel through the announcement of John
the Baptist, the proclamation of Jesus in the temple at the
feast of tabernacles (7:37-39), and the teaching of Jesus
in John 14-16. The Holy Spirit was never really given until after Jesus’
resurrection. Jesus explained to the disciples that
the Spirit was with then, but after the resurrection He would be in them (John
14:16-17).
This
importance of the Holy Spirit as the promise of the new covenant is seen in the
synoptic
Gospels primarily in the ministry of John the Baptist. John announces that the
Messiah is the one who baptizes with
the Holy Spirit, virtually defining the Messiah in terms of the gift of the
Spirit. The fulfillment of this promise in the book of Acts further confirms
the point. The
gift
of the Spirit of God on the day of Pentecost is the inauguration of the new
covenant. Thus Richard Gaffin writes, “the gift of the Spirit, shared by all
believers, is the eschatological essence of the new covenant, the fulfillment of the Father’s promise, the
downpayment and firstfruits of the resurrected life.”39
What John the Baptist predicted
and John’s Gospel emphasized through the teaching of Jesus
was that the Holy Spirit would bring in the age of the New Covenant. The gift
of the Spirit, which is predicted in the passages that form the
basis for the doctrine of eternal
procession, is predicted not in
the language of ontological relationships, but in the language of new
covenant promise. The gift of the Spirit embodies all that the new covenant is
and means. Bavinck uses these verses as the basis for the
doctrine of eternal procession because of the analogy
between what God does in time and who He is in eternity. What I want to add is
that
this analogy suggests more than
simply that the Spirit proceeds. He proceeds as the gift of covenantal
love. The dynamic of the Spirit’s procession from the Father to the Son and
from the Son back to the Father is, therefore, a covenantal
dynamic. God is eternally active, the Father always
sending the Spirit of covenantal love to His Son and the Son always responding.
The Spirit is always moving in covenantal procession.
Augustine spoke of the Spirit as
the bond of love between the Father and the Son. There is nothing
wrong with that language, unless we take it to suggest that somehow the Spirit
is less personal than Father and Son. To prevent such a tendency,
we need to add that the Son is also the gift of love from the Father
to the Spirit. For just as the Father sent the Spirit into the world, He
also sent the Son. If the one implies an eternal sending, why not the other?
And just as the Son sends the Spirit into the
world, the Spirit also brings about the birth of the Son (Luk. 1:35), empowers
the Son (Mat. 12:28), and sends the Son into the wilderness (Mar. 1:12). It
seems to me our doctrine of the Trinity would be more biblically rounded if we
saw the Father not only
sending the Spirit to the Son who
sends the Spirit back in reciprocal love, but also understood the 39
Richard B. Gaffin,
Jr., Perspectives on Pentecost: New Testament Teaching on the Gifts of the Holy
Spirit
(Phillipsburg,
N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), pp. 45-46.
- 25 -
Father to send the Son to the
Spirit, who sends the Son back in reciprocal love. The dynamic of the
Trinity is the dynamic of covenantal love expressed in the mutual sending,
receiving, and responding in love with both Son
and Spirit as both givers to and gifts of the Father.
Covenant
and Ontology
Ontological questions are important
from more than one perspective. They have often
arisen in conflict, being forced
onto the church by heretics who attempt to corrupt her Trinitarian faith.
Arians, for example, denied the full deity of Christ, claming that He was
created. Answering Arianism and eliminating its influence from the
Church was very much a part of the early work on the doctrine of
the Trinity. Questions concerning the nature and being of God
have
been part of the arsenal of non-Christian enemies who attack Christianity for
holding false and inconsistent views
of God. Celsus, a second century opponent of the faith attacked the doctrines of Christ’s deity and incarnation,
regarding them (and others) as nonsense. Porphyry in the third century claimed to respect Christ as a
teacher, but pitied those who worshipped Him as a God. Questions about God’s
being have also arisen in the Church’s task of teaching the Word of God, for knowing Him is the most important
truth for His people to know. Thus, apologetics, evangelism, church discipline and Christian theology and worship all
demand a full development of the
doctrine of the Trinity.
Ontological questions about God
include every question that can be asked about His being and
existence. How shall we think about the oneness of God’s being? What is the
relationship between God’s essence and the Persons of the
Trinity? What is an attribute and how are the
attributes
related to the essence and to the Persons? A major question related to the
being of God is the matter of divine simplicity. If God’s essence is simple,
not composed of parts or divisible, how should we think of the Persons
of God?
In
the traditional Latin theology of God, the Trinitarian Persons are defined in
terms of five notions, four of which
are relations of opposition and three of which are person constituting. The five notions are unoriginatedness and paternity
with reference to the Father, filiation with reference to the Son, and spiration and procession with reference to
the Spirit. The four notions which
are considered relations of opposition are begetting, being begotten, spirating
and being spirated. The three person-constituting
relations are paternity, filiation, and procession. Two of these are processions, filiation and procession.
In the traditional scheme,
Father, Son, and Spirit are defined simply and strictly in terms of their
relationships with one another as these relationships are “ontologically”
understood. By “ontologically” understood, I
mean that these notions and relations define who and what the persons are. The
Son is said to be the eternally begotten Son. His procession from the Father in
the form of being begotten constitutes who and what He is
as a Person. The traditional understanding of God is also
ontological in the sense that ideas like notion, relation of opposition,
and person-constituting relation have to be defined in relation to the one
essence of God. Much of the problem in stating the doctrine of the Trinity has
been found in expressing the
doctrines of the
notions, relations, and processions in such a manner that it does not
compromise the oneness of God, on
the one hand, or, on the other hand, reduce the Persons to mere modes.
In
other words, the attempt has been to express the ontology of the Persons so as
to escape both the extremes of tritheism and modalism.
- 26 -
Much of the effort expended benefits
the whole church by helping Christians think about
the greatness of our God. Much
of the effort, however, benefits only those theologians who can wade
through the ontological swamp of abstruse terminology and abstract
philosophical discussion. Perhaps these discussions have weeded
out a few heretics or prevented the growth of some
heretical tendencies. It is hard to say. One thing that seems clear, however,
is that the
Bible has much more to say about
the relationships between the Persons than traditional Trinitarian
theology. The economic Trinity contains riches that have never been mined for
the doctrine of the ontological Trinity. Why the gap? Perhaps
in part because so long as we focus on ontology, we simply have no
way of saying what we want to say. It is beyond us. We are facing
the paradox of God and there is no expression of the doctrine that is going to
be free of
problems.
All of our theological talk about God is
stuttering at best. It is not that we do not know Him. We certainly do. But the God whom we know is
too great for us. He transcends our
understanding.
When we try to think of Him and describe Him, we inevitably confront some sort of paradox. When we try to remove the paradoxes and
speak of Him more plainly, we inevitably fall into some sort of heresy. These in fact are our
only choices: paradox or heresy.
The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity
has been hated and rejected by some who
call themselves Christians as well as by
Muslim, Jews, Christian cults, atheists and others. One of the main reasons for rejecting the doctrine of the
Trinity is that it appears contradictory. To confess it is to confess faith in something mysterious
and wonderful beyond comprehension. Thus it is
rejected. The paradox is an offense. On the other hand, some who call
themselves Christians as well as Muslims,
Jews, Christian cults and others solve the problem of the One and the Many by simply confessing the ultimacy of the One.
Modalism is the heresy that says God is one, and the Persons of the Godhead are simply different
roles God takes in history. Thus, sometimes He is
Father, sometimes Son, sometimes Holy Spirit, but He is always and only the one God. This is a solution to the problem of multiple
persons in the one God that Muslims and Jews can accept from the rational side of things. The
only offence that remains is the identification
of the historical man Jesus with God.
The opposite solution to the paradox is tritheism,
but it is the road less traveled. The historical
tendency is toward unity. The oneness of God is upheld at the expense of a rich
understanding that He is three no
less than one. He is one love and three loves. We cannot really put it all together.
- 27 -
In
this second chapter, I will consider questions of Trinitarian ontology. Richard
Phillips critique of my books
Paradox and Truth and The Eternal Covenant evinced confusion on my views of the Trinity and as a result of his
critique, that confusion has spread. In response, I decided to devote this chapter to Trinitarian
ontology. I should add here that perhaps it is in part because my books did not contain a fuller
statement on trinitarian ontology that Phillips misunderstood what I wrote. To help clear matters up, I am offering here
what I hope will be a fuller and
clearer explanation.
Ontological
questions are important from at least three perspectives, dealing with heresy, answering objections to Christian faith, and
teaching the Word of God. Historically, the most important questions have often arisen in conflict, being forced onto the
church by heretics who attempted to
corrupt her Trinitarian faith. Arians, for example, denied the full deity of
Christ, claming that He was created.
Answering Arianism and eliminating its influence from the Church was very much a part of the early work on the
doctrine of the Trinity. Conflict with non- Christian enemies of the faith has been another important influence on
the Church. Questions concerning the
nature and being of God have been part of the arsenal of those who attack Christianity for holding false and inconsistent
views of God. For example, Celsus, a second century opponent of the faith attacked the doctrines of Christ’s deity
and incarnation, regarding them (and
others) as nonsense. Porphyry in the third century claimed to respect Christ as
a teacher, but pitied those who worshipped Him as a God. Of course, conflict is
not the only reason the Church
developed a sophisticated doctrine of God. Questions about God’s being naturally arise in the process of teaching the
word of God to believers. After all, the truth about God is the most important doctrine in the Bible.
Thus, apologetics, evangelism, church discipline
and Christian theology and worship all demand a full development of the
doctrine of the Trinity. Whether it
be in dealing with heresy, answering non-Christian objections or teaching
the Word to God’s people, we must
be able to answer fundamental ontological questions. Ontological
questions about God include every question that can be asked about His being and
existence. How shall we think about the oneness of God’s being? What is an
attribute and how are God’s attributes related to His being. What is a Person
and what is the relationship between God’s essence and the
Persons of the Trinity? How are the attributes related to the
Persons? A major question of
Christian ontology of God that influences our answer to all of the questions
mentioned so far is the matter of divine simplicity. How can an absolute one be
described as having multiple attributes and persons?
The
Inherent Difficulty of the Questions
Charles
Hodge and Robert Lewis Dabney both emphasize the inherent difficulty of
questions
about the being of God. In speaking of God, we are addressing the most profound
and sublime subject man can consider. No sane man can be
unaware that he is infinitely beyond his depth.
Why then speak? Why not be silent and save the world the trouble of reading
“words
- 28 -
without knowledge?” The answer is
that God has revealed Himself to us. We are not speaking on
our own. His self-revelation invites and even commands us to speak. Christian
ministers, as I said above, have an obligation
to speak of God. Indeed it is the very essence of their calling.
The obligation, however, is to
speak of Him according to His Word. We are called to unfold
the riches of His self-revelation. Mere speculation is inappropriate. It is more
than
inappropriate, it is an ungodly
imposing our pet theories onto the Biblical doctrine of God or reducing
the Biblical God to the dimensions of our conceptual categories. In denouncing
mere speculation, however, we have to be careful that we are
not denouncing careful theological thinking designed to answer
attacks against Biblical faith or to conscientiously expound the faith to God’s
people.
Every question about the ontology
of God is controversial. Even among Reformed writers, there
is disagreement about how we should think of divine attributes and their
relationship to God’s essence, how we should
define a Trinitarian Person, how we should think of the relationships among the
Persons, and how we should think of the relationship between the persons and
the essence of God.
Charles Hodge has a relatively
extended discussion of the definition of an attribute and the relationship
of attributes to the essence of God in which he explains different approaches
and refers to Reformed writers disagreeing on the matter. On
the definition of a Trinitarian Person, some
reformed writers, like Cornelius Van Til and John Murray, have no difficulty
speaking of a person as a self-conscious subject. Many older
writers in the Reformed tradition follow classic Western
definitions inherited from Aquinas and the theology of the Middle Ages. Thus,
William G. T. Shedd defines a person as “a mode of the existence
of the essence.” What this means is that Van Til’s view of the
Trinity and Shedd’s view of the Trinity differ significantly. The same can
be said of the more recent writer, Robert Reymond, whose discussion of the
Trinity differs significantly from both Van Til
and Shedd, though his view of a person is the same as Van Til’s. With
regard to the relationship among the persons of the Trinity, Reymond, whose
systematic
theology
may become popular in Presbyterian schools, denies the traditional Nicene
doctrines of the eternal generation
of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit.40 This contrasts with most
writers in Reformed history, but not all.
In
spite of the inherent difficulties and the broad disagreement, it is also
common for theologians to discuss
these issues in terms of what they believe to be the direction of the logical thrust of a particular line of thinking. Consider
this quotation from Augustus Strong.
The attributes have an objective
existence. They are not mere names for human conceptions
of God — conceptions, which have their only ground in the
imperfection
of the finite mind. They are qualities objectively distinguishable from
the
divine essence and from each other. The nominalistic notion that God is a being
of absolute
simplicity, and that in his nature there is no internal distinction of
qualities
or powers, tends directly to pantheism; denies all reality of the divine
perfections; or, if
these in any sense still exist, precludes all knowledge of them on
the part of finite beings. To say
that knowledge and power, eternity and holiness, are 40
Robert L. Reymond, A New
Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998),
pp. 317-41.
- 29 -
identical with the essence of God
and with each other, is to deny that we know God at
all.41
Whether or not Strong is correct
in his understanding that the attributes of God have an objective
existence, the fact is this quotation condemns the thinking of the majority of
the older
Reformed theologians in the 17th
and 18th centuries, who held to a strong view of the simplicity of God and taught
the view — or something very close to the view — that Strong labels
“nominalism” and charges with tending “directly to pantheism.” Needless to say,
there have not been many pantheists among
Reformed theologians. Where we think a particular view must lead and
what men actually think are not necessarily the same. However consistent we try
to be, all of us are inconsistent in many things, and it is
sometimes our inconsistencies that save us.
The
point is that we need to understand that we are dealing with issues that good
men
disagree about. In spite of
significant differences on these matters, the men I am going to discuss are
all reformed and all of them are orthodox. Their differences are not
unimportant and will have an impact on their
theology. But theology is an ongoing discussion. Over time as we learn
from
each other and develop the implications of our thinking, some views are
recognized to be wrong, or at least
less helpful. Sometimes the developing discussion leads to a significant advance that brings blessing to the church. In the
end what we seek is to speak the truth in love so that we may grow up in all aspects unto Him who is the Head, even
Christ (Eph. 4:15). With the
difficulty of the subject in mind and a clear notion of our purpose, then, let
us consider these questions in more
detail.
Two
Tendencies in Trinitarian Thought
First,
I think it is important to point to two general trends in Reformed thought. In
fact,
these
are two general trends that characterize Christian thought about God in
general, but they are also found
among Reformed thinkers as well. On the one hand, there are theologians whose
basic concern is to guard the doctrine of God’s oneness. Often this may be
because of fighting against heresies
or attempting to respond to Muslim and Jewish critics of Trinitarian faith. The
result, however, is that they do not
do justice, in my opinion, to the full Biblical truth about God’s threeness.
Of
course, the opposite tendency is to overemphasize God’s threeness with the
result that
our doctrine of the oneness of
God suffers. In most cases, this is a matter of emphasis. Taken to the
extreme, the overemphasis on the oneness of God is seen in the heresy modalism,
in which the three persons of the trinity are reduced to mere names for God or
roles that the one God assumes. God is one God who works
in the world and manifests Himself in various ways. Father,
Son, and Spirit are not persons but simply different roles the one God plays.
The opposite extreme, an overemphasis on God’s threeness,
results in the heresy known as Tritheism. Father,
Son, and Spirit are not three persons in the one God, but three different gods.
Though it is often not thought of as such, Arianism is a
form of tritheism or perhaps bitheism because it asserts that the Son was
created by the Father and has been exalted to the status of a god. When
reading discussions of the
Trinity the opposite dangers of modalism and tritheism occupy much attention.
41
Augustus
Strong, Systematic Theology.
- 30 -
There is another danger,
however, that is related to both of them. That is the danger of rationalism.
By rationalism in this context I mean the danger of attempting to force the
doctrine of God to fit the limits of our puny intelligence. If
the biblical doctrine of God must be expressed in language that will
satisfy the demands of our intellect and remain within the reach of
our minds, I believe we will be forcing it into a minute mold. To state the
full biblical doctrine of the trinity does confront us with
paradox. In my opinion, this is not a problem, it is an
inescapable feature of advanced knowledge of any sort in any realm. Why should
it be different in theology? We are not taught about God so
that we can reduce Him to our neat little formulas
but so that we can worship Him with all our hearts. The truth about God leads
us to bow before Him and commit our minds and hearts to Him.
That He transcends our efforts to comprehend Him is not a problem.
It should be taken for granted.
With
that in mind, I want to briefly discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as it is
developed in
three very different Reformed
writers, William G. T. Shedd, Cornelius Plantinga, and Cornelius Van
Til. These men illustrate the wide divergence in Trinitarian theology. None of
them has usually been considered heretical — though some of Van
Til’s critics do charge him with heresy. They
all affirm the basic truth of the Trinity but with very different emphases.
William
G. T. Shedd
William G. T. Shedd was one of
the great American Presbyterian theologians of the 19th century. Although
dated, his Dogmatic Theology and Historical Theology are still important
reading for students of theology.
His discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity illustrates the tendency
in Reformed theology, and in Western theology in general, to overemphasize
God’s oneness. Like many of the older Reformed theologians, his
discussion of the Trinity follows that of Thomas
Aquinas.
The following quotations show how
Shedd defines a Trinitarian person.
The
term “person” does not denote an attribute of the essence, but a mode of the essence; that is, a particular “form” of its
existence, according to the term used by St. Paul, Phil. 2:6. It is proper to speak of a trinitarian mode, but not of
a trinitarian attribute. A
trinitarian person is sometimes defined as a “relation” of the essence. . . . By a “relation” here is not meant an external
relation of God to the finite universe; as when the essence is contemplated in relation to space and time, and the
attributes of immensity and
eternality are the result; but an internal relation of the divine essence toward itself. It is the essence in a certain
mode, e.g., the Father, as related to this same essence in a certain other mode, e.g., the Son.42
The elder Protestant theologians and symbols
defined a divine person to be, a mode of
subsistence marked by a certain peculiar characteristic: modus subsistendi, tro>pov uJpa>rxewv. The divine essence with
the characteristic which Scripture denominates
generating, is the Father; the same numerical essence with the characteristic
called filiation is the Son; the same numerical essence with the characteristic
called procession, is the Spirit. This peculiarity, which is technically the “hypostatical character,” constitutes the
personality of a trinitarian person; that which distinguishes him from the
others. And this personality of a trinitarian person 42
William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology,
vol. 1, pp. 267-68.
- 31 -
must not be confounded with that
of the essence. The paternity of the Father, or the Sonship
of the Son, is not the same thing as the personality of the Godhead.43
His discussion of divine
attributes includes a careful distinction between a person and an attribute.
The
difference between a Divine attribute and a Divine person is, that the person
is a mode of the existence of the
essence; while the attribute is a mode either of the relation, or of the external operation of the
essence. The qualifying adjective
“external”
is important; because the internal operation of the essence describes a
trinitarian person. When the Divine essence energizes ad intra, the operation is
generation, or spiration, and the
essence so energizing is the Father, or the Son; but when the Divine essence energizes ad extra, the
operation is omnipotence, or
omniscience, or benevolence, etc.
A trinitarian person is a mode of the essence; a divine
attribute is a phase of the essence.44
While Shedd clearly follows
Aquinas in defining a person as an internal relation of the divine essence,
in places he expresses the doctrine of the trinity in terms more personal than
Aquinas seems to use. Shedd’s longer discussion does much to
qualify the impression that might be received from Aquinas that a
trinitarian person is a rather abstract and impersonal mode of relation
of the essence. But the fact remains that a person is defined as a subsistent
relation, a mode of the existence of the essence. The point of
the abstract language is to preserve the oneness
of God. To avoid tritheism, Shedd believes he must assert that the three
“hypostatical consciousnesses constitute the one self-consciousness of the
divine essence.”45 For Shedd, there must not be three understandings,
or three wills, in the Godhead. In conclusion, for Shedd and many
in the Reformed tradition, a trinitarian person is not a self-conscious subject
but a mode of
subsistence
— an abstract and relatively impersonal notion at best.
Cornelius
Plantinga
Cornelius Plantinga
Jr. published a famous article on the doctrine of the Trinity in which
criticized
the kind of view espoused by Shedd.46 According to Plantinga, the Augustinian
tradition, which
Shedd also expounds, teaches a view of God that is impossible to believe. On
the
one hand, the traditional Augustinian understanding teaches that God is three
true persons
who
love one another and interact as persons, a view based upon the Scriptures,
especially the Gospel of John. On the other
hand, influenced by Greek philosophy, the Augustinian view also teaches
that God is one in such a way that the threeness of God fades into a monistic
background.
Plantinga explains that the traditional view holds that the Father is the
essence of
God, and the Son is the essence
of God, and the Holy Spirit is the essence of God, but God is one essence
not three. The result of the traditional emphasis on the oneness of God is that
the three Persons tend to be reduced to something less than persons.
43
Ibid.,
pp. 277-78.
44
Ibid., pp. 335-36.
45
Ibid., p 282.
46
“The Threeness/Oneness Problem of
the Trinity” Calvin Theological Journal, 23, No. 1 (April, 1988). Hereinafter
referred to as TOPT.
- 32 -
In this Plantinga stands in the
line of what has almost become the standard critique of the Latin
theology rooted in Augustine and epitomized in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.
As defined by Thomas, the Trinitarian Persons are understood
in terms of five notions, four of
which
are relations of opposition and three of which are person constituting. The
doctrine of the five notions
structures the whole Western doctrine of trinitarian ontology from Thomas
onward, including the trinitarianism
of most Reformed theologians, even American Presbyterians like William Shedd
and Charles Hodge.47 As I pointed out previously, the five notions are unoriginatedness and paternity with reference to
the Father, filiation with reference to the Son, and spiration and procession with reference to the Spirit. The four
notions which are considered relations
of opposition are begetting, being begotten, spirating and being spirated. The
three person-constituting relations
are paternity, filiation, and procession. Two of these are processions, filiation and procession.
The three person-constituting relations define
the Persons. Paternity is the relation which defines the Father as the Father of the Son. Filiation defines the Son
as the One who is begotten. Procession
is the relation which constitutes the Spirit as Spirit. These relations
establish, or seem to establish,
relative differences among the persons. But, in Plantinga’s words, “Thomas simplifies things so aggressively that even that
difference is eventually washed out. For each person is identical with his
relation: the Father just is paternity; the Son just is filiation; the
Spirit
just is procession. Further, these relations themselves, Thomas explicitly
says, are all really the same thing as the divine essence. They
differ from it only in intelligibility, only in perception,
only notionally, not ontologically. For everything in the universe that is not
the divine essence is a creature.”
Thus, in the theology of the Western church after
Aquinas, the Persons of the Trinity tend to
be reduced to the three constituting relations. That is, a trinitarian Person
is defined as a subsistent relation within the essence of God. Why such an
abstract definition of a Person? In
order to preserve the doctrine of the
Trinity from criticisms from Muslim and Jewish philosophers who attack it as polytheism. Aquinas in
particular, but Western theology in general, has
been very sensitive to assertions that what the church believes is a form of polytheism or tritheism. If the three Persons of the
Trinity are seen as Persons who love one another, communicate, and live in a
fully personal relationship, then there are three subjects in God, not one. This doctrine is attacked as tritheism.
Theologians who fear that accusation and the tendency toward tritheism at a
practical level emphasize the oneness of God. In the West, ever since
Augustine, oneness has held a higher place than threeness.
As Plantinga sees it, when theologians are
talking about the Bible, they emphasize
threeness, but when they begin to
theologize, they emphasize oneness. He claims the two strands of their thinking cannot harmonize.
What he proposes
in the place of traditional Western trinitarianism is a social view of the Trinity.48 Plantinga explains, “According to this view,
the holy Trinity is a transcendent society or community of three fully personal and fully divine
entities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy
47
Hodge wrote, “The
several persons of the Trinity are distinguished by a certain ‘property,’ as it
is called, or
characteristic. That
characteristic is expressed by their distinctive appellations. The first person
is characterized as
Father, in his
relation to the second person; the second is characterized as Son, in relation
to the first person; and the
third as Spirit, in relation to the first and
second persons. Paternity, therefore, is the distinguishing property of the
Father; filiation of the Son; and procession of
the Spirit.”
48
The following paragraphs explaining
Plantinga’s view are copied from my book, Paradox and Truth.
- 33 -
Spirit or Paraclete. These three
are wonderfully unified by their common divinity, by the possession
by each of the whole divine essence — including, for instance, the properties
of everlastingness and sublimely great knowledge, love, and glory.” Each of the
three persons on this view is distinct, but
“scarcely an individual or separate person.”
The three persons are not, in
this view, “three miscellaneous divine persons each of whom discovers
he has the divine essence and all of whom therefore form an alliance to get on
together and combine their loyalties and work.” A view of this
sort would certainly be tritheistic. It is not, however,
tritheistic to view the Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct persons who not
only share a common divine essence, but who also mutually
indwell one another so perfectly and completely that
we must say there is “in the divine life a mysterious, primordial in-ness or
oneness relation that is short of a oneness of
person but much closer than mere common membership in a class.” This is what
Biblical words like Father and Son point to, for the Son has a relationship
with the Father so that the two persons “are of one substance not
only generically but also quasigenetically. The Son is not
only equally divine with the Father; he is also the Father’s Son; he is, so to
speak, his Father all over again. Father and Son are not just members of the
class of divine persons; they are also members of the same family.”
What this means is defined
carefully.
Each of Father, Son, and Spirit
possesses, then, the whole generic divine essence and a
personal essence that distinguishes that person from the other two. Both kinds
of essence unify. The generic essence assures that each
person is fully divine. The
personal
essences relate each to the other in unbroken, unbreakable love and loyalty. For
the Father has essentially the property of being permanently related to the Son
in an ineffable closeness akin to a parent/child relation. The Son has
essentially the
property of
being permanently related to the Father in an ineffable closeness akin to a child/parent relation. Let us say that the Spirit has
essentially the property of being the Father and Son’s loyal agent. They in
turn have the complement of this property: it is essential to them to have the Spirit as their loyal
agent.
On the social view, the Athanasian Creed
affirms that the Father is divine, the Son is divine, and the Spirit is divine, yet there are not three
Gods. On this social view, the denial of
tritheism has at least three possible interpretations, any or all of which could be the meaning of the creed. First, God may be
used, as it often is in the New Testament, as
the special name of the Father, in which case, the Athanasian Creed affirms that there is only one fount of divinity, only
one God in the way that the Father is God.
Second, God may be used as the name for the divine essence. There are, then,
three persons but one and only one generic Godhead or Godness, which each of the persons possesses. This accords with the
traditional Latin interpretation of the Trinity,
unless it is said that the three persons do not possess the divine nature, but are each identical to it. Third, one could use the
word God to designate the whole Trinity, as
Augustine does. What this means is that “the Father is a divine person, the Son is a divine person, and the Holy Spirit is a divine
person; yet there are not three ultimate monarchies, but only one, the holy
Trinity. For though each of the three is a divine person, each is also essentially related to the
other two divine persons such that none alone
is God the Trinity.”
- 34 -
The problem of equivocation in the use of the word
God — for each of the three above
the
Athanasian Creed — is “no particular problem: verses 15 and 16 do not form an
argument that would be invalidated by
equivocation. They rather make a sequence of confessional assertions that, on the reading just offered, need
to be understood precisely in order that their coherence might be preserved.” Tritheism is also clearly not a problem
here, unless one has determined
beforehand that the very idea of three fully personal entities is tritheist.
Historically tritheism was, as
Plantinga points out, the Arian view that there are three divine persons, two
of which are ontologically inferior
to and created by the first, but all of whom are worshipped as God. Arianism taught the worship of “second-rate
divinity” and, thus, was polytheistic. For worship belongs only to God but in
Arianism the Son and Spirit, who were creatures of the Father, entirely separate beings both from each
other and from the Father, are nevertheless treated as equal to the Father, treated as gods and objects of worship.
Arianism taught the worship of one
God and two creatures all in the name of God. That is certainly tritheism and
polytheism.
Plantinga
closes with the affirmation that the social view is in fact the Biblical
analogy, for in the Bible the Church
as one body but many members is the analogy suggested by Christ in John 17:21.
I wrote
a detailed critique of Plantinga’s view of the Trinity in my book, Paradox and Truth. In my opinion, Plantinga suggests a number
of important points, but one of the basic problems of his view is that it fails to solve one of the main problems
it was designed for.
Plantinga
believes the traditional Western view lacks rational clarity, teaching that God
is both one person and three. What he
offers instead, however, is a view that teaches that God is both one essence and three. This is suggested in his words:
“Each of Father, Son, and Spirit possesses,
then, the whole generic divine essence and a personal essence that
distinguishes that person from the other two.”49 The fact that he equivocates
on the use of the word essence saves him
from the charge of asserting a simple contradiction, but it also points to the
fact that the
traditional view escapes
contradiction in the same way. Plantinga construes the traditional position
in an unusual manner as the assertion that God is one Person and God is also
three Persons. Many would repudiate this portrayal of the
doctrine, but for those who accept it, the answer to the problem of apparent
contradiction is the same as Plantinga’s: it is not a logical contradiction
because of the equivocation on the word “person.”
Cornelius
Van Til
Cornelius Van Til’s view of the
Trinity was explicit about the assertion that God is both three
Persons and also one Person. He has been severely criticized by some for
holding to a
contradiction, but if Plantinga
is correct in his analysis of the Western view, Van Til is simply making
explicit what has always been implicit in the Western view. Where Van Til
differs, however, is in his insistence that both the one and the
three in God are equally ultimate. Van Til would
not agree with the tendency in the West to subordinate the three to the one. In
that sense, Van Til may be closer to Plantinga. But I think he
might find Plantinga’s view weak in the opposite
direction, insufficient emphasis on God’s oneness.
Van
Til’s understanding of the Trinity seems to have been formulated partially
through
the influence of Charles Hodge.
At least it is in conformity with Hodge’s assertion that God is 49
TOPT, p. 51.
- 35 -
addressed as a single person.
Van Til may also have been borrowing from Shedd when he wrote, “God
is a one consciousness being and yet he is also a tri-consciousness being.”
Shedd described the trinitarian consciousness in slightly
different but suggestive language when he wrote,
“the three persons are so real and distinct from each other, that each
possesses a
hypostatical or trinitarian consciousness
different from that of the others. . . . These three hypostatical consciousnesses constitute the one
self-consciousness of the Divine essence.”50 He further explained, “It must be noticed that the Divine
self-consciousness is not a fourth consciousness
additional to the three hypostatical consciousnesses, but is the resultant of
these three. The three hypostatical
consciousnesses are the one Divine self-consciousness, and the one Divine self-consciousness is the three
hypostatical consciousnesses. The three hypostatical consciousnesses in their combination and unity
constitute the one self-consciousness. The essence in being trinally conscious as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is
self-conscious. As the one Divine
essence is the same thing with the three persons, and not a fourth different
thing by itself, so the one Divine
self-consciousness is the same thing with the three hypostatical consciousnesses, and not a fourth different thing
by itself. In this way, it is evident that the three hypostatical consciousnesses are consistent with a
single self-consciousness, as the three hypostasis themselves are consistent with a single essence. There are
three persons, but only one essence;
and three hypostatical consciousnesses, but only one self-consciousness.”51
Whether or not Van Til
was borrowing from Shedd and Hodge, his view on the Trinity is consistent with much of what they wrote, but also
a development of their views. What he added was a clear emphasis on the equal ultimacy of the one and the many.
Whereas the Western tradition since
perhaps the time of Augustine has tended to emphasize God’s oneness more than His threeness, Van Til insisted that God must be
no less one than three, and no less three than one. In every sense and from every perspective, oneness and threeness
must be equally ultimate. In this respect, Van Til brought a new perspective on
the doctrine of the Trinity. With
Van
Til’s doctrine, it is possible to fully confess God’s threeness, including the
personal relationships among the
persons. The Persons of the Trinity are not reduced to mere modes of relation within the essence and the threeness of
God is not seen as an embarrassment to the doctrine of His oneness, for unless the one and the three are equally
ultimate, neither can have
any
real meaning. Although Van Til’s proffered solution to the problem of the one
and the many was implied by traditional
trinitarian doctrine, he may have been the first to state it explicitly. Treating threeness and oneness as equally
ultimate means that the Three Persons must be
seen as having
personal relationships, a point Plantinga emphasized. This is obviously related
to the idea of a covenant among the
Persons of the Trinity. If God is both three subjects and one subject, three consciousnesses and one
consciousness, then a covenantal relationship among the three Persons is conceivable as an aspect of
their interpersonal unity and harmony.
Of course, Van Til was not the
first to suggest a covenant among the Persons of the Trinity
for that was part of traditional Reformed doctrine, though it has not usually
been
understood
as an aspect of the ad intra trinitarian relationship. In the Presbyterian
tradition, the covenant of
redemption is seen as a covenant formed for the salvation of man between the
Father and the Son or among all three
Persons of the Trinity. It is clearly a means to an end and is an aspect of God’s response to the problem of sin.
It is not thought of as an extension of the
internal relations of the three Persons, but as a
covenant entered into with regard to the external
50
Shedd, p. 282.
51
Shedd, p. 283.
- 36 -
relations of God to the creation.
In that sense, the Presbyterian doctrine envisioned a change in God.
In order to cope with the problem of sin, the Persons of the Godhead entered
into a relationship that was new and different from their
eternal and essential internal relations. Though
his emphasis on the equal ultimacy of the threeness and oneness of God makes
possible
the doctrine of a covenant among the Persons as an aspect of their ad intra
relationship, Van Til himself did not
explicitly refer to such a covenant. However, since it was part of the Dutch Reformed tradition, at least from the time
of Abraham Kuyper, perhaps earlier, Van Til must have been familiar with it. As I pointed out in the previous
chapter, Kuyper criticized the idea
of the covenant of redemption as a merely ad extra covenantal relationship. Why
would the three persons of the
Trinity enter into a covenant to deal with the problem of sin in the world if
the covenant was not essential to their ad intra relationship?
Van
Til seems to be following Kuyper’s view when he describes the three Persons as
mutually representative. It is worthwhile to
consider again the words of Van Til I quoted in the previous chapter.
It may even be said that Calvin’s covenantal idea
is Theism come to its own. The covenant
idea is nothing but the representational principle consistently applied to all reality. The foundation of the representational
principle among men is the fact that the
Trinity exists in the form of a mutually exhaustive representation of the three
Persons that constitute it. The
emphasis should be placed upon the idea of exhaustion. This is important because it brings out the point of the
complete equality as far as ultimacy
is concerned of the principle of unity and of diversity. This mutual exhaustion of the persons of the Trinity places
one before the choice of interpreting reality
in exclusively temporal categories or in eternal categories. The demand of the doctrine of the Trinity, when thus conceived is
that reality be interpreted in exclusively
eternal categories inasmuch as the source of diversity lies in the Trinity
itself and could never be found in a sense world beyond God. Hence the problem
of the one and the many, of the
universal and the particular, of being and becoming, of analytical and synthetic reasoning, of the a
priori and the a posteriori must be solved by an exclusive reference to the Trinity.52
Van Til makes a number of
important points here. First, the covenant idea, he says, is
nothing but the representative
principle applied to all of reality. This makes the whole creation covenantal
in the nature of the case. God does not enter into a covenant with man after
creating him, for man is created as God’s image. Man is God’s
representative and therefore a covenantal being
from the first. The same is true in a general way for the rest of creation,
since all the creation is a revelation of God, representing Him
in a secondary sense. As Van Til says, the representative
idea must be applied to all reality.
Second, Van Til sees the source
of this representative, which is to say, covenantal
principle in the eternal
relations of the persons of the Trinity. The covenant in God is not merely a
covenant between Father and Son, nor is it merely an agreement entered into for
the sake of the salvation of the world. To quote
again one sentence from the previous paragraph: “the Trinity exists in the form
of a mutually exhaustive representation of the three Persons that constitute
it.” 52
A Survey of Christian
Epistemology, p. 96. He goes on to say, “It was upon this foundation of a truly
Trinitarian concept that Calvin built his conception of
covenant theology.” P. 97.
- 37 -
In this sentence Van Til clearly
defines the eternal, internal relations of the Persons of the Trinity as
representational and therefore covenantal.
Another quotation from Van Til
shows how important this is for his whole understanding of
theology.
It were quite legitimate and
true to say that the foundation of all personal activity among
men must be based upon the personality of one ultimate person, namely, the person
of God, if only it be understood that this ultimate personality of God is a
triune personality. In the
Trinity there is completely personal relationship without residue.
And for that reason it may be said that man’s actions are all personal too. Man’s
surroundings are shot through with personality because all things are related to
the infinitely personal God. But when we have said that the surroundings of man
are really completely personalized, we have also
established the fact of the representational principle. All
of man’s acts must be representational of the acts of God.
Even the persons of the Trinity are mutually representational. They are exhaustively
representational of one another. Because he is a creature, man must, in his
thinking, his feeling and his willing, be representative of God. There is no
other way open for him. He could, in the nature of the case,
think nothing at all unless he thought God’s thoughts after
him, and this is representational thinking. Thus man’s thought
is representative of God’s thought, but not exhaustively representative.
The doctrine of original sin is
based upon this purely theistic, because purely biblical,
concept of representation. Since the whole being of God, if we may in all reverence
say so, is built upon the representational plan, it was impossible for God to create
except upon the representational plan.53
Note how the doctrine of
representation in Van Til connects his doctrine of God and
creation. The first point — all
of reality is representational — is grounded in the second point — the
Persons of the Trinity are mutually representative of one another. Covenant in
God is the source of the covenantal reality of the world.
When I made this point in my book, I was simply following
Van Til and Kuyper. It was not the invention of some new speculative idea.
Third, the phrase “mutually
exhaustive” repeatedly used here by Van Til is his own idiom for
what is traditionally called “perichoresis.” In The Defense of the Faith, Van
Til wrote the following.
Using the language of the One-and-Many
question we contend that in God the one
and
the many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than
diversity,
and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The persons of
the
Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another. The Son and the Spirit are
ontologically
on a par with the Father.54
Fourth,
Van Til relates this covenantal nature of God and the perichoretic mutual
indwelling
of the Persons of the Trinity to the problem of the one and the many. In fact,
he sees
53
Survey
of Christian Epistemology, p. 78-79.
54
Defense
of the Faith, p. 25.
- 38 -
it as the key to the problem of
the one and the many because it connects the Triune God and the creation
in terms of the principle of covenantal representation. God is three Persons
who mutually indwell one another and therefore they are
mutually exhaustive of one another. Each fully
represents the other, sharing the same essence as equally ultimate Persons.
This covenantal indwelling and mutual
representation in God is the answer to the problem of the one and the many.
God is one Person in the sense that the Three so fully indwell one another that
they have a single consciousness. He is also Three Persons who each are fully
Personal subjects, self- consciously relating to one
another.
The
doctrine of the Trinity as expounded by Van Til is the basis for what I wrote
in my
books The Eternal Covenant and
Paradox and Truth. The view of the Trinity espoused there in some
respects simply making more explicit what Van Til says in the previous
quotations. Van Til places the idea of the
mutual representation of the Persons of the Trinity at the very center of
his
doctrine of the Trinity by relating it to the problem of the one and the many.
He also makes the covenant among the
Persons central because he sees representation as an aspect of the mutual indwelling of the Persons and the key to the
relationship between the Persons of the Trinity and the creation. God creates
the world in covenantal and representational form because He is a covenantal and representational God. Being who He
is, Van Til says, He could not do otherwise. Van Til’s doctrine is not really unique to him, even if his way of
presenting it is.
Abraham
Kuyper, the most important Dutch thinker in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries held a covenantal view of
the Trinity. Herman Hoeksema held a view similar to Van Til’s, emphasizing that the covenant is not a means to an
end, but the very life of the triune God. The doctrine of God that I set forth in The Eternal Covenant simply combined
various strands of Dutch theology,
and in terms of that Dutch trinitarianism criticized Westminster theology.
There was nothing in the book that
was really new or original. But it apparently raised questions. Conclusion
What we have seen in this section
is that three Reformed theologians, William G. T. Shedd,
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., and Cornelius Van Til have views of the Trinity that
differ
significantly.
It seems to me fair to say that Shedd emphasized the oneness of God, Plantinga
the threeness of God, and Van Til the
equal ultimacy of both. But all three are orthodox and respected Reformed writers. The diversity in their
exposition of the Trinity has not provoked doubt about their confessional faithfulness. If we included an
exposition of Robert Reymond and
Robert Letham, more recent Reformed writers, we would see that there is not
only diversity, but serious debate about fundamental ontological issues among
orthodox Reformed theologians, for
Reymond regards the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of
the Spirit as errors55, while Letham
regards both doctrines as essential to our understanding of God56.
My books offer a mere
restatement of Kuyper’s view, while Reymond criticizes views that
have been considered essential to
orthodox Trinitarianism. Reymond’s book is praised highly on
the
back cover by J. I. Packer, Edmond Clowney, John Frame, and Roger Nicole.
Whatever
these
men thought of his view of the Trinity, they did not see it as undermining his
whole
55
Robert L. Reymond, A New
Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: Nelson, 1998), pp. 317-341.
56
Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity
in Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian
and Reformed, 2004).
- 39 -
position. If we are going to
consider Reymond’s contradiction of traditional orthodoxy as confessionally
viable, Kuyper’s view should obviously not be considered heresy.
The
Covenant in God and the Ontology of the Persons
One of the questions raised by
my books was the relationship between the covenant among
the Persons of the Trinity and trinitarian ontology. How shall we understand
the
relationship between ontology
and covenant? Are the Trinitarian Persons 1) merely united by the
bond of the covenant (what I have been misunderstood as affirming), or 2) is
their union an ontological sharing of being, or
3) is it possible that covenant and ontology overlap? I believe the
answer is given in part in Van Til’s statements on perichoresis — though for
reasons I do not know he does not use the
traditional language here. Van Til describes the three Persons as being both
mutually exhaustive of one another and as being fully representational of one
another. The two notions are clearly related in the previous
quotations. But Van Til does not put all of this together for us. Neither did I
in my two books.
I would like to try to put things
together explicitly now. I am going to set forth what I
believe
is the covenantal ontology of God. Three perspectives on the ontological
relationships among the Persons of
the Trinity suggest that ontology and covenant overlap in God. The first perspective is the doctrine of the mutual
indwelling of the Persons, perichoresis. A second is the doctrine of the processions, including both the
eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. The third comes
from John 1:1.
First,
with regard to perichoresis, it seems to me that the mutual indwelling of the
three
Persons
of the Trinity — their absolute ontological interpenetration — may be said to
constitute them as a single Person,
with a single consciousness. Of course, this does not in any way compromise the vitality of each Person. God
remains integrally three even in the absolute unity. This is an aspect of the mystery of the three in
one that we cannot begin to fathom, but I agree with Van Til that this is what the Scripture teaches and I believe that
in stating the mystery in bold terms as he does, he is being faithful to the
word of God. Please note that there is equivocation
here on the word Person. As John Frame points out, in Van Til’s formula, the
word “person” does not mean precisely
the same thing when he says that God is one Person and that He is three Persons57. Equivocation is not a
problem in this case because we are not stating an argument when we confess that God is both One
Person, in a sense, and three Persons in a related but indefinably different sense. Though my language is slightly
different from his, what I have set
forth here is simply restating Van Til.
The
interpenetration of the three Persons of the Trinity must be understood as
covenantal according to Van Til’s
description, because he says it is representational and for Van Til representation
is the very essence of the covenant. But does that mean it is not ontological
also? No. Van Til also asserts that “each of the persons of the trinity is
exhaustive of divinity itself.”58 He
also quotes with approval Bavinck’s statement that “Each person is equal to the
whole essence of God and coterminous with both other persons and with all
three.”59 And again, “There is a
deep and rich differentiation in the personal relationships between the three
persons
of
the Trinity. The persons of the Godhead are mutually exhaustive of one another,
and,
57
John Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An
Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed,
1995), p. 69.
58
Introduction
to Systematic Theology, p. 220.
59
Introduction
to Systematic Theology, p. 229.
- 40 -
therefore, of the divine
essence.”60 Van Til’s language, then, points both to covenant and ontology
as essential to perichoresis.
What I think we should say here
is that covenant and ontology overlap in God. While perichoresis
is traditionally understood to be ontological language, and the language of indwelling
can be naturally understood ontologically, a covenantal perspective is not
inconsistent with the ontological. The covenantal perspective
is suggested by the language that the Bible uses to
describe God’s covenantal presence with believers and His covenantal actions.
For example, the Spirit’s indwelling the temple is a
covenantal indwelling; it is not a matter of ontology. The Spirit
is present everywhere because He is God. To speak of Him dwelling in the temple
is to speak of Him being present to bless His people, or to
discipline them if they break His covenant. Thus,
Solomon speaks of His presence in covenantal language in his great prayer to
dedicate the temple (1 Kings 8:15). The Son’s indwelling of
His people is similar, as the Gospel of John makes
clear (John 15:1-16). We abide in Christ by keeping His commandments, just as
ancient Israel could enjoy the indwelling presence of God in the temple by
keeping God’s
commandments.
God’s indwelling His people, then, is a covenantal indwelling. However the same sort of language is used of the
relationships of the persons of the
Trinity (John 17:21, etc.). The
analogy suggests a covenantal dimension to the Father’s being “in” the Son but
there is nothing inconsistent between the covenantal and the ontological. In Herman
Hoeksema’s words, the covenant is the very life of the Triune God.
Having said this, we must add
that in God the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity
is not covenantal in the sense of being an “agreement.” If we begin by defining
the
covenant
as an agreement, then thinking of a covenantal relationship among the persons
may indeed seem odd, as if they
existed separately and decided to become one. But “agreement” is not a Biblical definition of covenant, especially
as it applies to the Persons of the Trinity. I think we should say that in God, the covenant bond is
the mutual ontological indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity. The mutual commitment of love and the fellowship the
three have with one another express
the covenant bond. This is the way God exists necessarily. It is not a
voluntary agreement. The covenant
among the Persons is ontological because it is of the essence of who God is and how He necessarily exists as Three
Persons.
Second,
in the first chapter, I showed that the Biblical notion of fatherhood is a covenantal notion. Fathers and Sons are covenantally
united. What this means for the
ontological
Trinity should be clear. If the Son is eternally begotten by the Father, then
He is in an eternal covenantal
relationship with the Father. If the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the covenant,
the gift that creates the bond of
the new covenant, then the gift of the Spirit from the Father to the Son and from the Son back to the Father that
Van Til describes as the eternally complete inter-communication of the trinitarian persons, is an expression of the
eternal covenant. Eternal generation
and eternal procession are covenantal ideas that express the fundamental
ontology of the Trinitarian Persons.
Related to the eternal generation of the
Son and procession of the Spirit is the notion of
representation. The Son is the
“exact representation” of the Father because He is begotten of Him.
The Spirit is another comforter like the Son because He proceeds from the Son
and the Father as covenant representative. Each of the Persons of
the Trinity represents the others in a perfect
harmony of fellowship. They reflect one another in perfect mutual
representation because they share the same
essence. Note that understanding generation and procession in 60
Introduction
to Systematic Theology., p. 232.
- 41 -
terms of covenantal
representation eliminates every hint of ontological subordinationism since it assumes
their totally equality in essence.
Third,
the Son is called the Word of God in John 1:1. When John says, “in the
beginning,” he alludes to the
creation of the world in Genesis 1, a six-day series of creative actions
that were all accomplished by speaking a Word. In the creation of the world,
the Word of God is clearly His covenant command. God spoke the
authoritative Word and the non- existent world came into obedient
and covenantal existence. In the creation, the covenantal implications
are clear. But John 1:1 is speaking of pre-creation relationships between
Father and Son. That the same title is used here is
significant in itself, but, as we saw in the first chapter, John uses other
covenantally pregnant language here. The Word is “with God.” The title for Jesus
“Word” is used in the Gospel of John to show us the internal communication of
the trinitarian Persons. The depiction of the Father
speaking the Word by His Spirit from all eternity is
very much like the notions of the generation of the Son and the procession of
the Spirit, differing primarily in being explicitly posited.
Since “Word” is a name for the second Person, the
relationships implied are ontological, even though the language of John 1:1 is
emphatically
covenantal. It is this covenantal
ontology which comes to expression in the creation of the world.
Because the Father speaks the Word by His Spirit from all eternity in the
covenant love of the Trinity, He created the world by speaking
His covenant Word. The ontology of Father, Word,
Spirit, therefore, is a covenantal ontology.
Conclusion
These three perspective are
simply an application of what we have seen in the first chapter
where I presented some of the Biblical and theological reasons for believing in
a
covenant
among the Persons of the Trinity. If indwelling is a fundamentally covenantal
idea and the Persons of the Trinity
indwell one another fully and wholly from eternity, then they share a covenantal fellowship of perfect unity and
oneness. The ontology of the Persons and the covenantal unity of the Persons are identified since God is what He is
in His internal relations necessarily.
The begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit, as eternal
ontological relations of the three Persons of the Godhead constitute a
covenantal relationship among the Persons
that is essential to who God is. The Father eternally speaks the Word by the
Spirit in covenantal self-revelation
because it is His nature to reveal Himself.
All
of this shows clearly that the covenant idea is not primarily that of
agreement. The
Father,
Son, and Spirit do, of course, agree with one another and they do plan the
creation of the world and the course
of history and redemption together. Agreement is a function of the covenantal relationship, not its definition. Even
among men this is true. I did not take Adam as my covenantal representative by signing a contract or taking an oath. It
is my nature to be a covenantal
creature and I cannot escape what is impressed upon my very being. Whether I
like it or not, I must relate to God
and other persons in covenant. In the end, I will be judged in covenant.
Men enter into agreements with
one another and establish covenants with one another by ceremonies
and oaths, or by signing documents because for a human person all covenant
making
is
an opera ad extra, so to speak. We are single persons and when we make a
covenant we are dealing with another outside of
us. But the ceremonies we perform and the documents we draw up
and sign are expressions of the fact that we are the image of the Triune God
who speaks the Word from eternity. Ceremonial
oath taking, feasting, singing and dancing reflect the Covenant - 42 -
God in whom three Persons dance
and sing in a perfect fellowship of love and joy for eternity. It is in the
difference between what is ad extra and what is ad intra that the analogy
between the Covenant God and His covenant image display a basic divergence.
Having
said that the ontology of the three Persons is covenantal, there is a
misunderstanding that must be
avoided. The statement that the three coming together in covenantal
union constitute the one may seem to subordinate God’s oneness to His
threeness. Oneness might seem to depend on threeness in a way
that threeness does not depend upon oneness. If the one and the many
are to be equally ultimate, we cannot construe the doctrine of the
Trinity in such a fashion. To the above, we must add that God is ontologically
one in such a way that makes the mutual covenantal indwelling
possible. It is because of the ontological oneness
that the three Persons can mutually exhaust one another and represent one
another with such fullness. The unity of God is the presupposition
of the possibility of the kind of covenantal threeness
God is, just as the three Persons must find the fullness of fellowship and love
in the unity of the covenant. Unity and Diversity are thus
equally ultimate — each presupposing and finding
expression in the other.
The
Covenant in God and the Attributes
Plantinga’s critique of the
traditional view of the Trinity included reflection on the relationship
between the attributes of God and the Persons of God. In the traditional
Western
view each attribute is
co-extensive with the whole being of God and with every other attribute. The
traditional view teaches, according to Plantinga, that “in God persons and
attributes are identical, as are persons and
the sum of the attributes, the divine essence.” He explains more fully.
Thus,
for Augustine the Father is great, the Son is great, and the Holy Spirit is
great, and yet there are not three
greatnesses (not tres magnitudines), nor three greats, nor even three who are great (not tres magni), but
only one great thing (only unum magnum).
In the Augustine/Neo-Platonic Trinity there is exactly one divine essence or substance or nature. This divine essence, says
Augustine, is ‘the thing that God is.’
God the Trinity is simple. God the Trinity is identical with the divine
essence. In fact, in the Trinity
each of Father, Son, and Spirit is identical with this one thing,
with
this one divine essence. No one is just an instance of it, or an
exemplification of it, for then each
would have greatness or other attributes only by participation and could not, therefore, be ultimately divine. Each
of Father, Son, and Spirit is identical with greatness itself, or with the greatest possible thing. In Book 6
it turns out that each of the
attributes—greatness, almightiness, holiness, and so on—is identical with all
the others. In Book 7 Augustine rejects the whole apparatus of
genus/species/individual
in application to God. There aren’t three species—Father, Son, and Spirit—of the one genus God, or three
individuals—Father, Son, and Spirit—of
the one species God, for whether conceived of as genus or species, God, or the
essence of God, has exactly one instance. God the Trinity is the only instance of Godness, the essence of God. God the Trinity is
moreover identical with Godness- itself,
the only divine thing. And each of Father, Son and Spirit is identical with
that
- 43 -
thing. So Godness itself, the
only divine thing, the Trinity, and each of Father, Son, and
Spirit all turn out to be really the same thing.61
Plantinga’s
summary of the doctrine of Augustine shows the problem of identifying the attributes with the essence and with each other.
In the end, Godness itself, the only divine being, the Trinity, each of the
Persons of the Trinity and each of God’s attributes are identical. This has the effect of reducing everything to one. In
Plantinga’s words Augustine’s doctrine is “heavily monist and Neo-Platonic.” He quotes the
well-known saying of Harnack that Augustine “only gets beyond modalism by the
mere assertion that he does not wish to be a modalist.”
It
also seems odd to identify attributes with an essence and not a person. If we
were only thinking of attributes that
could be considered impersonal, like eternality or infinity, then attributes thought of as qualifying an abstract
essence is conceivable. All things have attributes in that sense. But God is not a thing. He is not
impersonal either in His oneness or His threeness. His Personhood is not an attribute stuck onto an essence.
When we think of God, therefore, even
notions like infinity should not be thought of as qualities that belong to an abstract and impersonal essence. God is totally
personal. Love, faithfulness, righteousness, goodness and the other attributes that are sometimes called moral
attributes all define persons, especially
persons as they interrelate. In the Bible, these attributes are covenantal.
Love, for example, only has Biblical definition within covenantal relationships.
To say that God is love is to say that He is three Persons who relate in
self-giving to one another, each sacrificing Himself to seek the blessing of the other.
In the traditional Western view,
the only attribute that the Father has as Father is
paternity. The Son is defined as
filiation. The Spirit is procession. One attribute alone defines each
of the Persons as a mode of relation within the one essence of God. In the
traditional view, the Father has no other
attributes that distinguish Him as Father from the Son. Whatever is
gained by this philosophically,
this is clearly not a Biblical construct. Plantinga is correct to argue
against this view of God’s attributes as Neo-Platonic.
However
the doctrine should be formulated in philosophical and theological language,
the doctrine of God’s attributes
must take into account that the Father loves the Son in a way that is
different from the way the Son loves the Father. For the Gospel of John clearly
describes the fellowship of love between Father and Son in a
manner that points to distinctions in their loves. The
Father loves the Son as a Father and so gives the Son commandments and a
mission. The Son loves the Father as a Son and so delights to
do His will and to fulfill the work He has been given.
Faithfulness, righteousness, goodness, and other attributes similarly differ
according to the nature of the relationship.
If,
in the traditional doctrine, the Father possessing one attribute, paternity,
does not
present a problem for the
doctrine of God’s unity and does not compromise the three sharing a single
divine essence, why should it be thought to compromise God’s unity if the
Father possess all the attributes in a
particularly fatherly way so that paternity defines how God the Father expresses
the attributes? If each person possesses all the attributes according to the
distinction of His own person, then the
attributes become the attributes of Persons, which is the way we would normally
think of attributes.
This
means we would have to change Augustine’s formula. Instead of saying the Father
is great, the Son is great and
the Spirit is great, but there are not three greatnesses or even three 61
TOPT, p. 45-46.
- 44 -
who are great but only one great
thing, we would have to say that the Father is great, the Son is great,
and the Spirit is great, but these three great Persons are also one great
Person. All the
attributes
of God belong to God in the unity of His being as well as in the three Persons.
Just as the notion of Personhood must be different when applied to the oneness
of God, so also the attributes would
be different in an indefinable manner. When we contemplate God in the absolute oneness of His being, it may be
legitimate to say that the attributes of God all equal each other and are co-terminous with the being of
God. But when we contemplate God in His threeness, each of the attributes comes to unique expression in the
covenantal relationships of Father,
Son and Spirit. Or, perhaps we should say that the Father, Son, and Spirit each
possess the attributes in a manner that is appropriate to the Person.
I
am not going to attempt anything like a summary statement on the whole doctrine
of
God’s
attributes. I simply want to emphasize that to regard each of the Persons of
the Trinity as persons in the full
sense of the word requires us to see each of them possessing all of the attributes in a unique manner. There are subtle
but important differences in what it means for a father to be righteous and what it means for a son to be righteous for
the simple reason that fathers and
sons have different responsibilities in the relationship. Our doctrine of God’s
attributes has to take those
differences into account without going to the opposite extreme of so emphasizing the differences that we undermine
God’s unity.
Conclusion
I hope that this has
clarified my understanding of the Trinity and demonstrated that the
notion of a covenant among the
Persons of the Trinity does not carry with it inherent dangers of a tendency
toward tritheism. Remember I am simply rephrasing Abraham Kuyper, Cornelius Van
Til and Herman Hoeksema and I do not know of anyone
suspecting them of tritheism. The idea of a
covenant as one of the defining marks of the internal relations of the Persons
of the Trinity perhaps is one of the
distinctive aspects of Dutch Reformed theology. It may be that part of the misunderstanding
that arises is rooted in the differences between Presbyterian and Dutch
Reformed
theology.
In my books I referred to James
Jordan’s definition of a covenant and the fact that he systematically
relates it to the doctrine of the Trinity. It was Jordan who pointed me to the
Dutch theologians to begin with. And the doctrine that I am
teaching somewhat more explicitly than they
did is faithful, I believe, to the doctrine they taught. Presbyterians may
indeed disagree, but the arguments for a covenant
among the Persons of the Trinity that have come from Abraham Kuyper
and Cornelius Van Til still have to be answered. I hope that this essay helps
those who may have misunderstood what I wrote in my books and I would like to
say that if I get the opportunity to revise my books,
I will add material to make a fuller statement of the doctrine so that
readers will not be mislead by the fact that only one aspect of the Trinitarian
ontology appears in the essay.
- 45 -
Monocovenantalism
and Other Problems:
Answering
Phillips’ Specific Charges
In
this chapter, I intend to answer some of Phillips specific criticisms and to
address the
issue of the covenant, that is,
so-called monocovenantalism. Before we turn to the details here, let
me mention that I have written an article and published it on our web site that
explains why I believe that Phillips has so grossly misunderstood my
position62. I want to reiterate that I do not believe
Richard Phillips is intentionally misrepresenting me. I have come to suspect
that he is not as theologically competent as he should be.
But that is the not the deepest issue. What I believe
is that he suffers from paradigm blindness. He cannot see what I have said and
what I mean because his own paradigm is so deeply rooted in him
that he cannot read my view with the sympathy necessary to
understanding. When he reads me through the colored glasses of his own view,
he is hardly unique. All of us are both given sight by our paradigms and also
have our
sight clouded by our
paradigms. None of us has achieved the perfect paradigm yet.
And it may well be
that I am misunderstanding some things that Phillips says because of
my paradigm. I hope not. I can say for
myself that I was converted to the Reformed faith from the outside. I was previously a dispensationalist. It has
been 20 years now since I was converted to Reformed faith and coming into it as a deeply
convinced dispensationalist has made me think through things and study things in a way that those
raised in the Reformed faith do not have to do. I hope that has given me an ability to see things
from more than one perspective and to think through different paradigms more clearly. But perhaps
not. The point here, at any rate, is that Phillips has so grossly misrepresented my views that I
cannot imagine an explanation other than paradigm blindness. I am not willing to believe that he
is dishonest or that he quotes me out of context with intention. I disagree with Phillips’ view
on the Covenant of Works and I will show that he has not understood my views, but I am not trying
to denigrate the man himself. I will try to respond to each criticism clearly, but it is not my
intention to be severe. What I believe we have here is gross misunderstanding because of paradigm
blindness, a common disease in theological debates.
Specific Criticisms
Phillips essay made a number of specific
criticisms, most of which I have not yet taken the time to answer. Though I see them as arising through
misunderstanding and not as being particularly
important, I will offer a brief response to some of his comments on my books. 62
http://www.berith.org/essays/covenantal_confusion.htm
- 46 -
First, Phillips seems to be
accusing me of teaching a different Gospel. In his introduction,
he
says clearly that some people are using the word “covenant” with a new meaning
that also brings with it a new theology. Phillips begins his discussion of this
new idea of covenant by referring to
my two books, Paradox and Truth and The Eternal Covenant. He adds, “I believe
the result is the propagation of a new and different gospel from the one taught
in the great Reformed confessions
and in the Bible.” To suggest that I am preaching a new and different Gospel is a very serious charge.
When he explains what this “new”
idea of covenant is, however, he acknowledges that I am actually repeating
Abraham Kuyper. Perhaps it is better to say that I am reintroducing
Kuyper’s position on
the trinity and the covenant because I believe it has never been given a fair and full hearing in America. But please note:
Kuyper is not recent theologian and his views on the covenant hardly fit into the category of “new.” Nor has anyone, to
the best of my knowledge, ever
accused Kuyper of denying the Gospel. Herman Hoeksema teaches the same view of the Trinity and the covenant. Again, he
is not recent nor has anyone accused him of teaching a new and different Gospel
because of his views of the covenant. In fact, the view of
the covenant taught by Kuyper
and Hoeksema is relatively common among the Dutch Reformed. My
work is also rooted in Van Til, and Jordan. Jordan’s work is the most recent,
but he is
clearly
drawing on Van Til and the Dutch tradition in general. The definition of the
covenant which I quoted came from Jordan’s The Law of the Covenant published in
1984. Again that hardly qualifies as
new. Moreover, this book comes with an introduction by John Frame. Frame apparently did not believe that Jordan radically
distorted covenant theology, offered a defective doctrine of the Trinity, or altered the Gospel. Nor has anyone else
suggested so for the last 20 years.
Of course, there is nothing wrong
with disagreeing with this view. Characterizing it as a new
idea strikes me as odd. But the real point is that if my repeating what Kuyper
and
Hoeksema taught about the trinity and the
covenant is going to be opposed as a distortion of the Gospel, Phillips is going to have to show either
1) that Kuyper’s view of the covenant also denied or distorted the Gospel or that 2) my view significantly
diverges from his so that my view undermines
what his preserves. Phillips has not attempted anything of the sort.
Covenant
and Lordship
Second,
Phillips argues that covenant is an aspect of God’s Lordship and therefore not
an aspect of the intratrinitarian
relationships. He says, “With this in mind, I would like to suggest that there are in fact better explanations for the
preponderance of covenant in history than that the Trinity must involve an essential covenant relationship. The first
is that the Creator-creature
relationship
necessarily involves lordship and lordship expresses itself through covenant, a
point Smith himself labors to make.
But this situation does not pertain ontologically to the Trinity. Covenant is the outflowing of God’s lordship as
manifested in commands, sanctions, and promises
of blessing. But as the Council of Nicea insisted so long ago, there is no
ontological
- 47 -
subordination within the
Godhead, hence no lordship, and hence no covenant, which is, by Smith’s
own reckoning, a function of lordship.”
There are a two things to be
noted here. One, in the Bible, a father can be called lord (Gen. 31:35)
and Jesus referred to the Father as His God (Rev. 3:12). If we thought of the
Father’s relationship to the Son as analogous to lordship, since
the Father commands the Son and gives Him a
commission, etc., the fact that covenant involves lordship would not contradict
the notion of a covenant among the Persons of the Trinity. Nor would such
lordship imply ontological subordination. When we speak of
the Father commanding the Son and sending the Son into the world
or of the Son’s obedience to the Father, we are not suggesting either
ontological
subordination
or that the Son is in any respect ontologically inferior to the Father. He is
inferior in office. The Son is under the Father and bound to
submit to Him. But the Son is not inferior to the
Father in the possession of the attributes of God. They share the same single
divine essence. Ontological subordination is not
in view.
Two, if Phillips believes that
the Covenant of Redemption was a covenant among Father, Son, and Spirit whereby
they planned the salvation of the world, then even in his view, the
notion
of covenant is not restricted to Lordship or to God’s relationship with the
creation. The Persons of the Trinity
are covenanting with one another. However, not all reformed theologians have
believed in a Covenant of Redemption and those who do disagree about the
details. There have been some who
deny the Covenant of Redemption and assume that in the Covenant of Grace, Christ enters into a covenant with God not
as the Second Person of the Trinity, but as a representative man, the head of a new humanity. If Phillips holds a view
of this sort and does not believe in
a Covenant of Redemption, then in his understanding, the covenant idea may be restricted to the sphere of God’s relationship
with the creation.
But it is common for reformed
theologians to believe in a Covenant of Redemption. For those
who do, there is a covenant among the Persons of the Trinity. Which brings us
back to Kuyper’s problem. Why should the Persons of the Trinity
enter into a covenant with one
another?
The Covenant of Redemption is an intratrinitarian covenant. No doubt it
contemplates lordship over the world,
but that is not the point. The Covenant of Redemption itself is a covenantal
arrangement among the Three Persons, or at least the Father and the Son. In
this covenant, Father and Son in
order to deal with the problem of sin enter into a covenant with one another. In the Covenant of Grace, Christ stands
as the representative of His people and the mediator between God and man, but in the Covenant of Redemption, Father,
Son, and Spirit are covenanting with
one another to save the elect from sin. As Berkof wrote: “Now we find that in the economy of redemption there is, in a sense, a
division of labor: The Father is the originator,
the Son the executor, and the
Holy Spirit the applier. This can only be the result of a voluntary agreement
among the persons of the Trinity, so that their internal relations assume the
form of a covenant life. In fact, it is exactly in the
trinitarian life that we find the archetype of the historical
covenants, a covenant in the proper and fullest sense of the word, the parties
meeting on a footing of equality, a true suntheke. ”63 Thus, the Covenant of
Redemption is an
63
L.
Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1939), p. 266.
- 48 -
intratrinitarian covenant. What
Kuyper asks is why the Persons of the Trinity in planning the salvation
of the world make a covenant?
It
seems to me that Phillips has not quite grasp the point of Kuyper’s view. It
may be that
he does not believe in a Covenant
of Redemption so that Kuyper’s point is irrelevant from his perspective.
But he has not made this clear. And however we view things, all of this has
nothing to do with whether or not one’s view is a denial of the
Gospel.
Tritheism64
Third,
Phillips argues that I have done serious damage to the doctrine of the Trinity.
In
his words, “Apart from its
intended recasting of covenant theology, Smith’s teaching does grave damage
to the doctrine of the Trinity. Smith, following James Jordan, argues that the
form of unity within the Trinity is covenant. This is a serious
departure from orthodox Trinitarian theology, falling into a tacit
tri-theism. Instead of the classic view that the Trinity is three persons
united in one being, this view argues that the Trinity is three divine persons
united by a social bond. Smith’s presents his final conclusion
in strikingly tri-theistic terms: ‘God is three persons
united in covenantal love.’”
Again, this is a
complex charge. To begin with, I have never asserted that the unity of the Persons is first of all or fundamentally a
covenant, as if the Three Persons were not one in Being but only one in a
covenantal relationship. For that matter, neither of my books was attempting to
set forth a full view of the
Trinity. I believe I made it clear that I was suggesting matters that should be added to the traditional doctrine of the
Trinity. Admittedly, the subject is sufficiently complex that misunderstanding naturally arises.
Another
aspect of the problem is Phillips’ view of the covenant. Since Phillips regards
the covenant as an agreement, he
apparently assumed I was asserting a unity based upon an agreement. This
suggests that the three persons exist independently but on the basis of an agreement called a covenant, they become one.
This is not my view. In the first chapter I have spoken more about this and it should not be necessary to repeat all of
this now. But to make things clear,
I do not believe that the Three Persons exist as independent Persons who are
one only on the basis of an agreement.
I have already outlined my view. The three Persons of the Trinity share the same divine essence. One essence
not divided among three but perfectly and inscrutably shared by the three so that each is the whole essence.
Also, the Persons mutually indwell
one another so entirely that each of them is perfectly unified with the other.
Perichoresis is covenant and
perichoresis is ontology.
Now I do not see anything like
tri-theism in what I have said, but it is true that
emphasizing that the Persons are
united in a covenantal fellowship of love does seem like tritheism
to some because it means that there are three subjects in God. Three “I”s who
relate to one another as subjects. For some, like Karl Barth, this smacks of
tritheism. I disagree. I do not regard this as tritheism at all.
I regard it as Biblical truth. The Father loves the Son and gives Him
commands and instruction. The Son loves the Father and always does those things
which please Him. The Gospel of John sets forth not only clear distinctions among
the Persons but also
On tritheism, see: http://www.berith.org/essays/tritheism_and_christian_faith.html
- 49 -
very real personal
relationships. This would only be tritheism if one denies that they share the same
divine essence.
I
agree with the Dutch tradition as exemplified in Kuyper and Van Til that the
Bible
demands
that we regard the three Persons as full persons in every sense of the word. If
that were tritheism, then it would be the “tritheism” of
the Bible. The Gospel of John especially, but all of the
Gospels in fact, present the Son of God as a personal self in the fullest sense
of the word. He loves the Father and does the
Father’s will because of his devotion to the Father. He sends the
Holy Spirit to be another
comforter like Himself. Here are three Persons who share personal fellowship
with one another. In fact, their personal love and fellowship is the ideal for
man’s relationship with God, as our lord said: “Just as the Father has loved
Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My
commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s
commandments and abide in His love.” (John 15:9-10) Berkhof refers to these and
other passages saying, “the self-distinctions in the
Divine Being imply an ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ and ‘He,’
in the Being of God, which assume personal relations to one another.”65
Confusion
Fourth,
related to this, Phillips thinks my view confused. At least that is the best
word I
can think of to summarize what
he has to say in the next quotation. “As Smith proceeds from this thesis, he
seems to be aware of the tri-theistic leanings of his argument. Thus he tries
to temper it by advancing perichoreisis, that is, mutual
indwelling, as the basis of Trinitarian union — in
which case there is no need for covenant as the basis of union. Later still, he
tries to distinguish covenantal union from ontological union,
noting vaguely that ‘in God covenant and
ontology intersect or share
common ground.’ But the damage is done: if the three divine persons of
the Trinity have an ontological union of essence — one based on a shared being
and mutual indwelling — then it is hard to see how one being
is joined together by covenant, unless we totally
redefine the meaning of the word covenant, which is the whole point of Smith’s
exercise.” Now, let me say that I was not then, and am not
now, aware of any tritheistic leanings in
my
view. If believing that Father, Son and Spirit are persons in the fullest sense
that the word bears — or, actually, in a fuller sense than we can finally
comprehend — then of course, there are a lot of tritheists in
recent trinitarian history, including Van Til.
Interestingly, Phillips’ final
phrase seems to undermine the whole point of his paragraph: “unless
we totally redefine the meaning of the word covenant, which is the whole point
of Smith’s exercise. “ If the whole point of my essay is to
redefine covenant and redefining covenant solves the problem, then it seems to
me he should do a whole lot more with my definition of the covenant. Repeating
Witsius hardly serves as an answer to Kuyper’s view. But
I am afraid that Phillips completely missed the point of my pointing to
perichoresis.
What I am saying is that the very
idea of mutual indwelling is a covenantal notion, as I pointed out
in the previous chapter. The mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity is
an evidence of the covenantal ontology of God.
65
Berkhof, p. 88.
- 50 -
But Phillips was right that I did
not express myself concerning the relationship between covenant
and ontology very well. I have tried to correct that in this essay. I have tried
to say more clearly that covenant in God is ontology and
ontology is covenantal. God is what He is essentially.
He does not change. When Kuyper taught that the Persons of the Trinity relate
eternally
in covenant, he offered a view of who God is essentially. Kuyper posits that
covenant is the way the Persons of
the Trinity relate as Persons. I am not sure whether Kuyper viewed the covenant as an eternal personal relationship
grounded in the ontology of the persons as mutually indwelling one another, or as identical to the
ontology of the persons. I am assuming the later — that Kuyper thought of the covenant among the
persons as another way of stating the basic ontology of the Persons. I am not sure if Kuyper ever considered the
evidence from the Biblical idea of begetting or not. But he seems to have
understood covenant as essential to the eternal relationships between Father, Son and Spirit and therefore to have
viewed the covenant as a feature of
the ontology of God. Hoeksema says the covenant is the very life of God.
To speak of a
covenantal ontology implies that what is voluntary among men is essential to God’s being. But that should not be a problem
since it is the same with begetting and sending. Among men begetting a child involves voluntary activity and voluntary
relationships. Commissioning and
sending do also. We cannot have relationships of this sort with other men without interacting with persons who are outside
of us. But in God, begetting and sending are eternal and necessary internal relationships. They are not merely
voluntary relationships and they do
not concern how God relates to Persons outside Himself. Begetting, sending, and
mutual indwelling express the
covenantal life of God. They reveal God as a God of love in whom the three Persons live a life of mutual joy and
fellowship, mutual self-denial and self-giving. Anti-forensic Agenda
Fifth,
Phillips apparently believes that I define a covenant as a relationship because
that allows me to accomplish my
anti-forensic agenda. He speaks as if my work on the covenant
among
the Persons of the Trinity is part of a conspiracy to undermine the Reformed
faith. Here are Phillips’ words,
“Following this revisionist approach in which the biblical structures of covenant
are removed, Smith proceeds throughout Eternal Covenant to apply covenant to
practically
everything with little definition. Covenant is relationship, and so it becomes
hard to know what it is about a relationship that makes it a covenant, except
that it becomes whatever Smith wants
to make of it at any given time. As such, covenant serves as an ideal vehicle
for Smith and his cohorts’ purpose,
which, it becomes clear, is a way of defining salvation in such a way as to remove the forensic theory of
justification as classically understood in Reformed thought.”
This
is another case of a complex assertion. Three points in response are important.
One,
I
have no cohorts and I am not conspiring with a cabal of crafty people for some
surreptitious purpose. Two, I do not
deny the forensic theory of justification. Three, since it has been suggested here that I am redefining the idea of
the covenant in order to promote an agenda, let me point out that John Murray devoted an entire essay to refuting the
classical reformed view of the
covenant as an agreement. In his conclusion, Murray wrote, “And when we
remember that
- 51 -
covenant is not only bestowment
of grace, not only oath-bound promise, but also relationship with
God in that which is the crown and goal of the whole process of religion,
namely, union and communion with God, we discover
again that the new covenant brings this relationship also to the
highest level of achievement. At the centre of covenant revelation as its
constant refrain is the assurance ‘I will be your God,
and ye shall be my people’.”66
John Murray’s definition of the
covenant as “not only the bestowment of grace, not only oath-bound
promise, but also relationship with God” is behind my redefinition of covenant.
I read Murray before I read Jordan. He was among of the
Reformed thinkers who influenced me away from dispensationalism and
his work on the Covenant of Grace is one of my favorite books.
Though John Murray viewed a covenant as a relationship, he did not deny the
forensic theory of justification.
O. Palmer Robertson, too, denies
that a covenant is merely an agreement. He wrote,
“Extensive
investigations into the etymology of the Old Testament term for “covenant”
(tyîr;b)V have proven inconclusive in
determining the meaning of the word. Yet the contextual usage of the term in Scripture points rather consistently to
the concept of a “bond” or “relationship.”67 And again, “A long history has marked the analysis of the covenants in
terms of mutual compacts or
contracts. But recent scholarship has established rather certainly the
sovereign character of the administration of the divine covenants in Scripture.
Both biblical and extra- biblical
evidence point to the unilateral form of covenant establishment. No such thing
as bargaining, bartering, or
contracting characterizes the divine covenants of Scripture. The sovereign Lord of heaven and earth dictates the
terms of the covenant.”68 Again, O. Palmer Robertson does not deny the forensic theory of justification.
Defining the word covenant as a relationship does
not imply denial forensic theory of justification.
In my case, I do believe that Adam’s sins were imputed to all mankind since he was the covenant head of the human race in the
Garden. I also believe that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the new humanity which He died to save. I believe
that justification is a judicial
declaration that believers are righteous in Christ. I do not know where or when
I have ever said anything that even
remotely suggests that I deny “the forensic theory of justification.” MonoCovenantalism
We are now ready to consider one of Phillips most
serious charges and misrepresentations. What
follows is an extended quotation from Phillips, in which he distorts my views
beyond recognition — at least by me.
Kline’s assertion bears out with
particular clarity in the case of Ralph Smith, with whose
book Eternal Covenant I began this study of covenant confusion. Smith’s book
follows essentially the same outline as I have in this seminar, only with far
66
John Murray, The
Covenant of Grace (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1953), pp.
31-32.
67
The
Christ of the Covenants (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), p. 5.
68
Ibid.,
p. 15
- 52 -
different conclusions. Starting
with his speculations on covenant as the ontological basis
of Trinitarian union, he moved forward to redefine covenant not as a pact but as a
gift of relationship. As I have done, he then moved forward to consider the covenant
of works, which he assailed, making God’s covenant with Adam no different from
any other redemptive covenant presented in the Bible.
Where does this lead him? Smith
posits, without qualification or embarrassment, that God’s covenant with Adam
in the Garden is the same covenant God offers to sinners today
for their salvation, without modification since the Fall. This is the mono- covenantal
scheme in full bloom. Where Adam failed, despite his sinless state, we sinners
are now to succeed if we are to be declared just by God. Like Adam we have received
God’s covenant favor and must simply maintain it “by being faithful, living out
his faith in God by doing works that correspond to with it... The basic
situation
is still similar. We are required
to be faithful to the covenant by having a living faith in God, one that works
by love.”
As Kline foretold, having removed
the covenant of works what Smith really has abolished
is the covenant of grace. What about Christ’s saving blood? Smith allows that
we need to be forgiven through Christ “when we sin,” which one gains the
impression is not likely to be
very often for a faithful covenant keeper. But we are justified
by works, that is, by our works, at least so long as we continue to do them. One
wonders what impact was made by the Fall; it must have been very slight if the view
of Smith and Shepherd and others if their camp is correct. Perhaps here more than
anywhere else, in its low view of the Fall, this new theology of covenant intersects
with Roman Catholicism, along with sharing an approach to justification which
depends on the grace of God working in us rather than the alien righteousness of
Christ imputed to us by grace and through faith alone.”
It may help to list the charges
here:
1.
I am said to believe a covenant is the basis for
the ontological union of the Trinity.
2.
I have made the covenant with Adam no different
from any other redemptive covenant
presented in the Bible.
3.
Phillips says, and here I must quote, “Smith
posits, without qualification or embarrassment,
that God’s covenant with Adam in the Garden is the same covenant God offers to sinners today for their
salvation, without modification since
the Fall.”
4.
It is claimed that I have
abolished the Covenant of Grace.
5.
It is claimed that I see the
fall as having only a slight impact.
6.
It is claimed that I hold to a view of
justification which “intersects” — whatever
Phillips means by this — with the Roman Catholic view of justification based on God’s work in us rather
than Christ’s righteousness being imputed
to us.
- 53 -
All
of this is thought to be the result of my monocovenantalism. I will try to
answer each
of these assertions, though I
will vary the order in my answer since some of the points are minor and
do not require much explanation.
With regard to point
one, I have answered it in the first two chapters. Rather than making
a covenant the basis for the
ontological union of the trinity, I make the ontology of the Trinity covenantal.
If ontology in God is covenantal, then neither depends upon the other.
Point 5 that I see the fall as
having had only a slight impact on man is simply not true. I hold
to the total depravity of man.
Point
6 was that I believe in a Roman Catholic view of justification. This is related
to
Kline’s assertion referred to at
the beginning of the quotation. Kline wrote: “What this amounts to is
a retreat from the Reformation and a return to Rome.” So, according to
Phillips, I am among those returning to Rome
because denial of the Covenant of Works carries with it that implication.
I disagree. Denial of the covenant of works does not mean denial of the Gospel
and the effort to prove that it does is quixotic at best.
With respect to justification, as I said previously,
I do believe in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the elect. We are
justified by what Christ did for us on the cross not by what God does in us by
the Spirit, though the two are not separated in Biblical soteriology. There can
be no justification without sanctification. Points 2, 3, and 4 require more explanation.
First, let me answer points 2 and 3 together.
They are essentially the same.
He asserts that I make the pre-fall covenant with Adam “no different
from any other redemptive covenant presented in the Bible.” Later he says,
“Smith posits, without qualification or embarrassment, that
God’s covenant with Adam in the Garden is the
same covenant God offers to sinners today for their salvation, without
modification since the Fall.”
The short answer to this is that I do
not believe the pre-fall covenant with Adam to be “no
different from any other
redemptive covenant presented in the Bible” and I do not believe that the
“covenant with Adam in the Garden is the same covenant God offers to sinners
today for their salvation without modification since the
fall.”
I have written an entire book on
what I believe about the covenants and it is available free online
for anyone who wishes to look into it. Of course, I cannot complain if someone
criticizes me without reading one of my books, but I have
written enough on the subject of the covenant that
there really is no need for this kind of misrepresentation.
Now for the long answer. To
begin with, are Phillips assertions in these points indeed
what I have asserted in the
places he refers to — or anywhere else for that matter? No. Let me quote
at length the original context that Phillips is referring to in the section I
quoted from him. Kline’s two basic criticisms of
the traditional Covenant of Works have profound
implications. If
Adam’s relationship with God is by creation a covenant relationship that defines what it is that man is God’s image
and if merit for Adam means
“covenantal
faithfulness,” then what is required of Adam is that he persevere in the covenant by being faithful, that he live out his
faith in God by doing works that correspond
with it. In this way, though Adam has no sin nature and is not in a
covenant
of redeeming grace, he is in a position similar to ours. He is in covenant with God and what is required of him is just
perseverance, faithfulness to the
- 54 -
covenant. What is required of a
Christian? We could say, believe! Nothing more, nothing
less! That would be a correct answer, as far as it goes. But we could add, as James
did, that faith without works is dead. Adam’s problem in the Garden was not his
theological orthodoxy, it was a problem of orthopraxy. His works were contrary
to
faith in God. In Adam’s case, without the provisions of forgiveness that come
with the Gospel, one sin brought about the end of the
covenant. In our case, because of the death
of Christ, we can repent and return unto God when we sin. But the basic
situation is still similar. We
are required to be faithful to the covenant by having a living
faith in God, one that works by love (Gal. 5:6).
In the fuller context of the
words quoted by Phillips it is clear that what I am trying to do is draw
out the implications of Kline’s critique of the traditional view. As I said in
my book, Kline is one of the most profound
critics of the traditional view, even though this is not often appreciated.
Since
this is relevant to understanding my position, lets just take a minute to look
at
Kline’s
critique of covenant theology. First, the traditional view, expressed in the
Westminster Confession, implies that the covenant is added
on, after the creation of man as a special act of condescension.
Kline says, No. Creation in the image of God already means covenant.
Second
Kline has rejected the whole medieval notion of merit and redefined the word.
Kline’s follower, Lee Irons,
admits that he is revising the view of the Reformed confessions. I agree
with his revision. But make no mistake about it. It is Kline here who is
revising the reformed tradition. Not me. I am simply agreeing
with Kline — except that I don’t criticize the Westminster
Confession as severely as he does.
To
get a good picture of just how radical Kline’s critique is, consider the
question of merit.
Lee Irons, explaining Kline’s
position and showing how it is a revision of traditional reformed views
wrote, “the voluntarist school of thought had a significant impact on Reformed formulations
of covenant theology. Scholars suggest that Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin and
others in the first generation of Reformed theologians to
develop the rudiments of what we now know as
covenant theology derived much of their impetus and inspiration for covenantal
thinking from the voluntarist wing of medieval theology.” The
voluntarist wing of medieval theology is, of
course,
Franciscan, Roman Catholic theology.
Irons
explains that the Reformation made great strides in developing a truly
covenantal
view of salvation. Justification
was understood to be based upon the righteousness of another. But a
problem remained, according to Irons. Even the Reformation perpetuated what he
calls “the remnants of an ontologically based system of merit
and justice.” Irons asserts that Reformed theologians view of the
Covenant of Works was defective. In his words, “While unequivocally
rejecting the notion of congruous merit in the operations of God’s gracious restoration
of fallen man, covenant theologians did not scruple to smuggle this concept
right back into their system, but this time in the pre-fall
situation.” In this regard, he blames the Westminster
Confession: “Note the fundamentally voluntarist reasoning of the Westminster Confession’s
opening statement on the covenants” at which point he quotes from WCF Chapter Seven,
paragraph 1. “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that
although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their
Creator, yet they could never have any - 55 -
fruition of him as their
blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part,
which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant”.
Irons
explains that “This statement is representative of the mainstream of
seventeenth
century Reformed thought. [18]
All the basic elements in this statement are derived directly from the
Franciscan notion of covenantal or congruous merit” His indictment of the
theology of the Westminster Confession could not
be expressed in stronger language. “Do we not see the covenant
being appealed to as a way of allowing the finite creature to obtain a reward
from an infinite Creator? Is there not a hidden premise that
human works, if viewed according to the strict
standard of an ontologically-defined justice, are intrinsically
disproportionate to the
prospect of enjoying God in
eternal blessedness? It seems that the covenant is being introduced to
overcome the awesome metaphysical chasm between God and the creature in order
to make possible that which would otherwise be impossible — man
putting an infinite, a se God in debt by a
finite obedience. It presupposes an ontological scheme of moral valuation which
places God and the creature on opposite ends of the scale of
being. This supposed ontological disproportion is
what accounts for the inherent inability of the creature to do anything
meritorious apart from a covenantal “condescension” on
God’s part. But once the covenant is superimposed upon the created
order, then the creature can produce obedience and expect a reward in return.
But this obedience is necessarily congruous merit, merit that has
been freely and graciously accepted by God by virtue of his self-commitment to the
terms of the covenant.”
Irons clearly agrees with the
verdict of Steven Strehle “that the Reformed were deeply influenced
by Franciscan voluntarism and its attendant pactum theology.”
Irons concludes this
section of his essay in the following words.
Although
we are grateful to our Reformed forefathers for the overall covenant
scheme they have bequeathed to
us, we must ask ourselves whether some of the details
of that scheme may have come from a polluted source. Have we gone far enough
in our covenantal thinking? Or do we still harbor ontological presuppositions regarding
justice and merit? Is the distinction between condign and congruous merit helpful?
Is it legitimate to take a distinction, which in its original formulation was part
and parcel of the Semi-Pelagian drift of the late medieval church, and apply it
to pre-fall covenantal arrangements?
It
is imperative that we reexamine these and related questions. No longer will it
be possible to appeal simply to the Reformed tradition on these points as if
the die has already been cast. As usually happens in
historical dogmatics, the errors of
succeeding generations of theologians
provide a new opportunity for us to hone our
formulations
more sharply. Arguments which before seemed innocuous and
traditional are now seen, in
light of their gospel-undermining tendencies, to be seriously
flawed and in need of a critical evaluation and systematic overhaul.
We have to keep in
mind that Irons is speaking here of the Westminster Confession of
Faith as harboring ontological
presuppositions which contain a Semi-Pelagian drift. Irons and Kline are
claiming that the theology of the Westminster Confession is seriously flawed
and in need of critical evaluation and systematic overhaul
because it incorporates Gospel undermining - 56 -
tendencies. It is hard to
imagine stronger language in criticizing the theology of the Westminster Confession,
yet Kline and his followers are considered the great defenders of Westminster. Phillips
appeals to Kline against me as if Kline’s theology is traditional reformed
theology when in fact Kline offers very significant revisions
of traditional reformed theology.
It
is true, of course, that I am also suggesting revisions to traditional Reformed
theology.
But my criticisms of the
Westminster Confession are less radical. I only said that its view of the covenant
is inconsistent. What I suggested is that we should revise the Confession
according to the true genius of the Confession. That is, bring
the Confession’s theocentric focus and its doctrine
of the covenant together by seeing the covenant among the Persons of the
Trinity as the paradigmatic covenant.
My critique of the Covenant of
Works — though not at all original with me — was from two
perspectives. First, I criticized the Covenant of Works from the perspective of
biblical theology. The Covenant of Works simply does not fit the
Genesis narrative. Nor does the
theology of the Covenant of
Works fit the rest of the flow of the Biblical Covenants. Covenant theology
speaks in terms of the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace, but the
Bible
speaks
of the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. It refers to the old
covenant and the new covenant. The covenantal structure of the
Bible itself should provide the framework for our covenant theology.
Second,
I criticized the Covenant of Works from the perspective of systematic theology.
Here there are two general
problems. One is that the doctrine of the Covenant of works involves numerous
inconsistencies. The other is that the Covenant of Works — a covenant with man
in the Garden — becomes the paradigmatic covenant for
understanding the covenant of redemption, a covenant between
the three persons of the trinity. Why should the persons of the trinity make a
covenant to procure man’s salvation to begin with? And why should that covenant
be modeled after the covenant with Adam? Rather than a covenant
with man as the central and organizing theme for all of
systematic theology, I believe that we should view the covenant
among the trinitarian persons as
the central and organizing theme and re-interpret the covenant in the
Garden in terms of the covenant among the persons of the trinity.
As I said, the
critique of the Covenant of Works outlined here is not original with me. It is
a composite from various sources,
including especially James Jordan and Herman Hoeksema. A recently
published article by Jordan footnoted an article by W. Wilson Benton Jr., a
leading pastor in the PCA. Benton’s arguments against the
doctrine of a Covenant of Works, published in
1980, are essentially the same as mine, though he includes a great deal more in
the way of historical criticism. Benton concludes that the
Covenant of Works is “without biblical foundation”
and calls for a revision of covenant theology so that “the covenant concept can
be freed from the shackles of a system which has confused,
if not corrupted, that biblical truth.”69 Essentially
every criticism I have made against the Covenant of Works has been made by a prominent
member of the PCA and has been in print for 20 years. No one that I know of suggests
that Benton denies the Gospel. To the best of my knowledge, no one in the PCA
has
“Federal
Theology: Review for Revision” in Through Christ’s Word: A Festschrift for Dr.
Philip E.
Hughes,
W. Robert Godfrey and Jesse L. Boyd III, ed. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian
and Reformed, 1985), 180-
204.
- 57 -
ever recommended judicial
proceedings against him for holding views that imply a denial of justification
by faith.
Keeping
in mind that I am simply rephrasing criticisms of the Covenant of Works that
have been presented by others,
let me repeat briefly what I have said before, though in somewhat different
language.
Meredith
Kline’s critique of traditional Reformed theology brought to light some of the
basic problems in the doctrine of
the Covenant of Works. Though he does not specify who he is referring
to, Kline was in fact pointing to the Westminster Confession when he wrote:
It
is not the case, as some theological reconstructions would have it, that the
covenant
was superimposed on a temporally or logically prior noncovenantal human state.
The covenant character of the original kingdom order as a whole and of man’s status
in particular was given along with existence itself.
The
Confession speaks of the Covenant as a gift to man who is already created and
enjoying a pre-covenantal
natural relationship with God. This is problematic for a number of reasons,
but it is also inconsistent with the notion that the law of God is written on
the heart of man in his creation (WCF: 4:2; etc.). It is
common in Reformed theology to refer to the law written on the heart as
evidence of a covenant and an aspect of the Covenant of Works. But if the
law written in man’s heart is an aspect of the Covenant of Works, then the
Covenant of Works is not an agreement that man enters after
he is created, it is impressed in his very being.
To be in God’s image is to have
the Covenant of Works inscribed in one’s heart. The nominalism
that Lee Irons finds in the Confession is offset by the doctrine that man is an
essentially and inescapably covenantal creature. We have
both the idea that the Covenant is a post creation gift to man and
the idea that the covenant is inscribed in man’s nature.
If the covenant is inscribed in
man’s heart — whether we call it a Covenant of Works or
not — it is clear that the
covenant cannot be defined as an agreement. Though that definition is common
in the history of Reformed theology, it is hard to imagine how an agreement can
be inscribed in the heart.
Ironically, even Kline’s
objections to what he calls a departure from Reformed theology illustrate
my point that Reformed theology’s doctrine of the Covenant of Works is
hopelessly inconsistent. Kline emphasizes that without merit,
there can be no Covenant of Works and without the Covenant of Works there can
be no Covenant of Grace and thus no Gospel.
But a survey of Reformed opinion
about the notion of merit in the Covenant of Works shows
clearly that it is Kline who departs from the Reformed tradition. It is common
in the
reformed tradition to deny the
possibility of Adam earning merit before God. The Covenant of Works
is almost always understood to be a gracious covenant. And most Reformed
writers will say that whatever good Adam did, whatever test
Adam might pass, he would still be rewarded by grace.
His achievements could never merit the blessings granted. Thus, from Kline’s
perspective, most of the
theologians in the history of Reformed theology understood the Covenant
of Works in terms that virtually undermine the Gospel.
On this point, I disagree with
Kline. I believe the traditional denial of the possibility of
merit for Adam is quite correct.
But I agree with Kline that if one were to attempt to formulate a - 58 -
consistent
doctrine of the Covenant of Works, it would require a stricter view of merit.
Kline differs from the tradition by
being more consistent than others.
Kline
and Irons also offer a fundamental revision to the notion of merit in order to
rescue
the
term from its medieval and Franciscan connotations. Merit for Kline simply
means fulfilling the stipulations of the covenant. When we speak of Adam’s
merit, therefore, we are not thinking in
terms of ontological separation between God and man, but simply of the Covenant
that God gave Adam. Fulfillment of
the covenant’s stipulations earns the reward as a matter of strict justice. God made conditions and offered promises
to Adam if he would fulfill the conditions. God had made a legally binding promise and He would keep it. Winning
the promise, then, is a matter of
merit in the sense that it is simply a matter of doing what the covenant
requires.
By redefining merit
as faithfulness to the stipulations of a covenant, Kline has eliminated
the medieval problems
associated with it. But I suspect that many of his readers still read the medieval idea when they see the word merit. They
are not translating the word “merit” into “fulfill the stipulations of the covenant” or some similar expression.
In that sense, the continued use of
the word merit is confusing. The point is, however, that in arguing for merit
and against any grace whatsoever in
the Covenant of Works, Kline is differing from the Reformed tradition, not upholding it. He believes that his revision
is necessary for the preservation of Reformed theology, that he is eliminating a dangerous error. But as long as he
continues to use the word “merit,” I
personally believe that he perpetuates a problem. Of course, that is secondary
to the larger issue of the Covenant
of Works itself. With regard to the Covenant of Works, we have to understand that Kline denies the Westminster
doctrine and introduces a new one, even claiming that his new version is essential to the Gospel.
What
makes the Covenant of Works doctrine problematic and confused is the crucial
issue of Adam’s pre-fall status.
Here is another area where I disagree with Kline. But on this point
also he differs from many in the
reformed tradition. The issue of Adam’s pre-fall status concerns
whether or not Adam was justified — using the
word improperly, of course, since Adam was created without sin or the need of justification as the word is usually
used. If Adam was an unjustified
man, that is created with something like “neutral” status and therefore in need
of earning righteousness,
justification, and life through his faithfulness to the covenant — the view apparently espoused by Kline — then we do have a
situation that might be defined as a Covenant of Works. This, therefore, is the question: Was Adam created with a
status like that of a
justified
man, enjoying the blessings of the covenant as a child of God? Or, Was Adam unjustified, neutral, or in some sort of special
status in which he was not yet able to enjoy blessing until he earned it? Was Adam’s status like that of a man who
does not yet possess the blessings of
life because he has not yet earned the merit he needs to be justified? Or was
he already in possession of life and blessing? This is an important issue for
understanding the Covenant of Works.
It is also important for
understanding Phillips misunderstanding of my position. I referred
to
the Christian’s position as being similar to Adam’s. In saying that I was
assuming Adam was created righteous
and holy and therefore right before God, regarded as God’s son and enjoying the blessings of the covenant. If that is true,
then Adam’s pre-fall situation is similar to the Christian’s. He, too, was a child of God enjoying the blessings of the
covenant. When I said all Adam had
to do was be faithful, I was speaking of perseverance, not justification. Adam,
in my - 59 -
view, was already right before
God. Like Christians, Adam too had to be faithful, not in order to be
right before God, but in order to be saved in the end. Perseverance is not the
ground of the Christian’s salvation, but he cannot be saved
without it. The same would be true for Adam. Phillips
at one point says we have to look to the Bible for an answer to our questions
about
the
Covenant of Works. But he does not deal with what the Bible says in Genesis 2
at all. We are told, “So clear is
the biblical testimony as to creation and fall, involving a Covenant of Works between God and Adam, that Neo-Orthodox
objectors like Karl Barth and James B. Torrance
simply rejected the testimony of Genesis chapters 2 and 3 as mythological. They
realized
that they could not object to the Covenant of Works and still accept the
teaching of those chapters.” After
this, Phillips makes various assertions about the Covenant of Works being clear
and undeniable, but he never talks
about what is written in Genesis. Nor does he interact with what I have pointed out about these chapters.
To
answer the question about Adam’s state, we cannot simply quote the parallel
between Adam and Christ. The
parallel between Adam and Christ is a parallel of two heads and two races. But it does not necessarily indicate Adam’s
status. If Adam was like an unjustified man
working his way to
justification, then the parallel in Romans 5 would work along the lines Kline suggests. If Adam is right before God and only
required to persevere by faith in righteousness, the parallel in Romans 5 still stands. What is important in Romans 5 is
that both Adam and Christ are
regarded as the covenant heads of their respective races. Adam is the head of
the old humanity. Messiah is the head
of the new humanity. Adam’s apostasy from God brought condemnation and death to the race he represented;
Messiah’s faithfulness to God brought justification and life to the race He
represented.
That there is more than one way
to read the details here was shown by John Murray in a
small
but important book devoted to the discussion of the imputation of Adam’s sin.70
One thing that emerges clearly from
his investigation of Romans 5 is that Reformed writers hold vary diverse views on the subject. Which is to say
again that simply referring to Romans 5 and the parallel between Adam and
Christ in Romans 5 does nothing to answer the basic questions about a Covenant of Works. We have to go back to the
Genesis text.
We have to consider how Genesis answers
the question of Adam’s status before the fall.
Following the Romans 5 formula
of righteousness, justification, life, we have to ask whether the story in
Genesis pictures Adam as not yet enjoying the blessings of life. Is Adam — as
Kline’s version of the doctrine of the Covenant of Works would
have it — an unjustified man put in a place
in which he must earn merit — however conceived — in order to obtain the
verdict that he is righteous and thereby enter
the blessings of life?
The answer from Genesis is
clearly and emphatically, No! Adam is in he place of blessing already.
He is dwelling in the sanctuary of God. For the Garden of Eden is the symbolic sanctuary
of the world. It is the place where God meets man and fellowships with him. As Kline
points out, the presence of God in the Garden of Eden was the same glory cloud
that
descended
upon the tabernacle and temple. What the narrative in Genesis shows us is that
Adam dwelt in the most holy place. Though Adam was immature
and though it was possible for him to 70
John Murray, The Imputation of
Adam’s Sin (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1977). - 60 -
fall, there is no question about
the fact that he was given the highest degree of blessing possible at
the time of his creation.
For Meredith Kline Adam did not
enjoy the “eschatological” blessing of life. His use of
the word eschatological here
suggests that Adam enjoyed life and blessing to a degree, but not the
“final” blessing. There is a sense in which this is true. Everyone agrees that
Adam was not confirmed in holiness and that confirmation in
holiness is one of the greatest eschatological blessings.
But apart from confirmation in holiness, Adam enjoys the blessings of life in a
paradise that is the Biblical paradigm for heaven. Adam’s
dwelling in the sanctuary of God and enjoying the presence of the
glory Spirit indicates the highest blessings of life in the Garden.
This is entirely incongruous with the idea of a
Covenant of Works. An unjustified Adam should
be on the outside of the Garden looking in. He should be trying to earn the
privilege of entering the Garden to dwell with God. An unjustified man should
not be in God’s sanctuary enjoying the direct presence of God’s glory. The
story of Adam in the Garden suggests that he already enjoyed the blessings of life. What about eschatological
blessing? Eschatological blessing
waited for the eschatological era. If we follow Gerhardus Vos’ exposition of 1
Corinthians 15, we understand the eschatological era to be the era of the
resurrection and the spirit. If Adam
had not sinned, he would not have immediately entered into the eschatological blessings that Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians
15. Those blessings would have waited for the eschatological era. The question of eschatological blessing is not
really relevant to the question of
whether or not Adam was justified and had the blessing of life.
But
there is another question that is very relevant: Did Adam have access to the
tree of
life?
Both John Murray and Meredith Kline assume that Adam did not have access to the
tree of life and they explain
themselves in similar language. Kline wrote: “We are probably to assume then that man had previously been apprised of the
symbolic import of the tree of life and accordingly realized that, though not
it but the tree of knowledge was more specifically the forbidden tree in this special testing,
nevertheless his partaking of the tree of life was reserved for an appropriate future time and purpose.”71
Murray wrote: “Although from Genesis 3:22 we infer that Adam had not partaken
of the tree of life, and although it was not forbidden as was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (cf. Gen.
2:16), yet, apparently, by the arrangements of providence or of revelation, it was recognized as reserved for the issue
of probationary obedience.”72
Contrary to both Murray and Kline, the book of
Genesis suggests nothing of the sort. The Reformed tradition however is not unanimous on this point. What does
the text of Genesis show us? Here are
the words of Genesis 2:16-17: “The LORD God commanded the man, saying,
“From any tree of the garden you
may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
(Gen. 2:16-17). First, God invited Adam to eat
from every tree of the Garden. Then He added the prohibition of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Since there were only two trees in the
Garden with names, this is not merely permission to eat from
the tree of life, it is a virtual invitation. Even though
Adam is immature, one of the first things he learned was the significance of
names and
71
Kingdom
Prologue, p. 94.
72
Collected
Writings, vol. 1, p. 48.
- 61 -
naming. The fact that only these
two trees had names and one of them was forbidden would naturally
attract him to the other.
Thus, I believe it is relatively
clear that Adam had access to the tree of life. Given the symbolic
meaning of the tree, this is an important point. If Adam had access to the tree
of life before the fall, then he must have been right before God,
with a status similar to that of a justified sinner. His dwelling
in the Garden-sanctuary already makes that clear enough, but access
to the tree of life further establishes the point.
It
is worth pointing out that on this point, Calvin disagrees with Murray and
Kline.
Calvin’s view is worth quoting at
some length because his is relatively typical of Reformed thinking.
.
. . . He gave the tree of life
its name, not because it could confer on man that life with which
he had been previously endued, but in order that it might be a symbol and
memorial
of the life which he had received from God. For we know it to be by no means unusual that God should give to us the
attestation of his grace by external symbols.
He does not indeed transfer his power into outward signs; but by them he stretches out his hand to us, because, without
assistance, we cannot ascend to him. He
intended, therefore, that man, as often as he tasted the fruit of that tree,
should remember whence he received
his life, in order that he might acknowledge that he lives not by his own power, but by the kindness of
God alone; and that life is not (as they
commonly speak) an intrinsic good, but proceeds from God. Finally, in that tree
there was a visible testimony to the
declaration, that ‘in God we are, and live, and move.’ But if Adam, hitherto innocent, and of an upright nature, had
need of monitory signs to lead him to
the knowledge of divine grace, how much more necessary are signs now, in this great imbecility of our nature, since
we have fallen from the true light?
Yet I am not dissatisfied with what has been handed down by some of the fathers, as Augustine and Eucherius,
that the tree of life was a figure of Christ,
inasmuch as he is the Eternal Word of God: it could not indeed be otherwise a symbol of life, than by representing him in figure.
For we must maintain what is declared
in the first chapter of John (John 1:1-3,) that the life of all things was included in the Word, but especially the life of
men, which is conjoined with reason and
intelligence. Wherefore, by this sign, Adam was admonished, that he could claim nothing for himself as if it were his own,
in order that he might depend wholly upon
the Son of God, and might not seek life anywhere but in him. But if he, at the time when he possessed life in safety, had it
only as deposited in the word of God, and
could not otherwise retain it, than by acknowledging that it was received from Him, whence may we recover it, after it has been
lost? Let us know, therefore, that when we have departed from Christ, nothing
remains for us but death.
Allow
me to make a few points in passing, one if we are going to claim that anyone
who
views
Adam as justified in the Garden inescapably denies the parallel between Adam
and Christ in Romans 5 and thereby denies the Gospel, we are
going to have trouble fitting Calvin into our procrustean
bed, for he seems clearly to view Adam as right before God and enjoying the
tree of life. Indeed — this is my second point — Calvin even
refers to the tree of life in the language of - 62 -
the Lord’s Supper — “as often as
he tasted the fruit of that tree” and “should remember.” By saying
the tree is a figure of Christ, the connection with the Lord’s Supper is even
more clear. Calvin sees Adam as innocent and upright, with
access to the sacrament of the tree of life from which he would partake often
to remind himself of the grace and kindness of God in giving him life.
Third, Calvin speaks of Adam needing to persevere. In so doing, he sees Adam’s
position as similar to that of the justified Christian today. So he says that
Adam could not retain life without acknowledging that it
came from God. He sees the sacrament in the Garden as important
for Adam’s faith and draws the parallel to the Lord’s Supper.
I
agree with this view of Adam and the tree of life in the Garden. But this is
contrary to
the notion of a Covenant of
Works. Or, I should say, to a consistent picture of the Covenant of Works.
Because it is not unusual for Reformed theologians to assert both that Adam was
in a Covenant of Works and that he was allowed access to the
tree of life. Murray and Kline attempt to be
more consistent, but even in their case, there is so much in the Garden of Eden
that points to life and Kline has expounded it so eloquently
that the inconsistency is striking. Adam obviously
is enjoying the blessings of life in the Garden with God at the same time he is
thought to be under a Covenant of Works in which he is waiting
for blessing in the future because he is not
yet justified.
My own conclusion is that the
Covenant of Works doctrine, as traditionally conceived, does
not stand. It is full of inconsistencies and can not be made to fit the story
in Genesis. Covenant of Love
The question then is, What is
the alternative? Phillips claims that I believe in what he calls “a
mono-covenantal scheme” and that such a view implies a denial of justification
by faith. Neither of these assertions is true. Though I deny a Covenant of Works,
I do believe that the Bible presents the covenant in
two forms, the old covenant and the new covenant. The redemptive historical
division of covenant history is not the same as the Covenant of Works/covenant
of grace distinction. But it is a bi-covenantal view that takes seriously the historical
import of the coming of the Messiah and the gift of the new covenant.
I
also believe in justification by faith. It came as a complete surprise to me
that someone
could
read my books and infer that I somehow must deny justification by faith, but,
as I said in the essay published on the internet, this is the way paradigm
blindness works. Phillips believes he
knows what my theology must imply. In fact, however, he is telling us what my
theology must imply in terms of the presuppositions of his theology. He has not
been able to gain an internal
perspective on the theology he is opposing.
The
view I proposed in my book The Eternal Covenant follows part of Kline’s
revision of
the
understanding of the covenant in Genesis. Rather than seeing the covenant with
Adam as a post creation gift based
upon a natural relationship between Adam and God that is prior to and more fundamental than the covenant, I agree with
Kline that the whole act of creation was covenantal. When Adam was made from the ground on the sixth day, it was
covenantal dirt that God used to construct him and it was covenantal air that
the Spirit breathed into his lungs. Adam was a covenantal creature from the beginning in every aspect of his
existence. So was the rest of creation.
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I believe that God created the
world this way because He is a covenantal God, a God in whom
the Three Persons relate in a covenant of love and life. God created the world
covenantally because the world is
the expression of who He is. The whole creation declares His glory
as the Covenantal God of love and life.
When
we view the covenant as the inner life of the three Persons of the Trinity, the
bond of
love and friendship between
Father, Son, and Spirit, we have a unified worldview that is centered on
the Triune God Himself. Traditional reformed theology offers little connection
between the doctrine of who God is and the doctrines of
creation and redemption. But when doctrine of God the
Trinity is seen as covenantal, the Trinity can finally be the key to all
Christian doctrine because the doctrine of the
covenant, which is clearly the center of biblical and systematic theology,
is the expression of who the Triune God is73.
Seeing
the covenant as the expression of who God is does not mean “mono-
covenantalism.” I do view the
covenant as twofold. There is an old covenant in Adam and a new
covenant in Christ. But these two covenants are not the same as the traditional
reformed Covenant of Works and Covenant of Grace. The two
covenants should be understood in terms of
redemptive history, not as two covenant options hovering over the history of
the world. It may be overstating the case to call the
traditional doctrine static, but it certainly tends to be static. In the
Westminster view, from the fall onward all men are either in the Covenant of Works
outside of Christ or in the covenant of grace in Christ. That is not what the
Bible presents.
In
the Biblical picture, the covenant given to Adam is renewed with redemptive
provisions that look forward to the gift of a new covenant at
the time in the future when the seed of the woman
comes. Until then, men are in Adam which means under the old covenant and
condemnation. Like Adam after the
fall, they have to offer animal sacrifices. Like Adam, they are not permitted
to return to the sanctuary. But they also have the promise of the Messiah to come
and by faith in Him, they are saved on the basis of the new covenant to come.
For men in Adam, there is racial
covenantal progress. The covenant given to Noah includes
greater revelation of God and His grace and greater responsibility for man. The
covenants given to Abraham,
Moses, David and the Israelites who returned from exile exhibit the same
progressive growth in revelation of who God is and the same progressive growth
in the blessings and responsibilities of the covenant. But there
is no salvation until the Messiah comes. The world was waiting for him.
When Jesus comes, dies on the
cross and rises from the dead, the world is definitively changed.
The old covenant era is over. The world that had been defiled and unclean
because of Adam’s sin is now clean. There is no longer a
distinction between the holy land and the unholy
land because the whole world has
been finally cleansed by the death of Christ. God’s people are now all priests
and all have the right to enter into the most holy place through the blood of
Jesus. We are even seated with Christ at the right hand of God. The differences
here are not merely positional; they are historical.
What Jesus did through his death and resurrection changed the
73
I
have tried to show something of what it means to consider the doctrine of the
Triune God as central to all
Christian thought in my
introduction to the Christian worldview, Trinity and Reality, published by Canon
Press.
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history of the world more fundamentally
than any other event since the fall of man, even more than
the Noahic deluge.
Such a view of the covenant does not
undermine the parallel between Adam and Christ.
Adam
was created as God’s image, which means that he was a covenantal creature. The covenant was inscribed in his heart and from his
first moment, he enjoyed covenantal fellowship with the triune God. The covenantal relationship that Adam had with God
was an extension of the Trinitarian
covenant to man the creature. Adam was brought into the fellowship of love that
is essential to who God is. In the
nature of the case, this fellowship of love is absolutely pure and righteous.
No sin can be tolerated or even imagined in the Triune fellowship of love. A breach in the covenant between Father, Son, and
Spirit would be the death of God. It is not conceivable. In a similar way, for
Adam to break the covenant means that he kills himself. He cut himself off from the love of God and the
fellowship of the Trinity.
The
reason that breaking the covenant in the Garden meant death is not that God
made an arbitrary and very strict
penalty to apply to a relatively small offense. It is rather that Adam and Eve
were created into the most intimate and holy covenant fellowship. They were the
image of the most Holy God. Any
unrighteousness whatsoever would destroy their relationship with God. Father, Son, and Spirit are perfectly open with
one another, perfectly devoted to one another, totally self-sacrificial in their pursuit of the blessing of the other.
Their fellowship is a fellowship of
light in which no darkness at all can enter. When Adam introduced sin into the sanctuary of God, he had to be judged. He had to
be cast out.
When
God reached out in grace to Adam after the fall, it was a renewal of the Adamic
covenant
with redemptive provisions. Those redemptive provisions already promised the
gift of a new covenant. The seed of
the woman would be another representative head of the race like Adam was, but
he would defeat Satan and save mankind from the misery introduced by Adam. It was only because of the promise that a new
covenant head would come and save man that the Adamic covenant could be renewed. Until the time that the seed of the
woman came and defeated Satan, Adam
and his descendants would have to be outside the Garden looking in.
They were under the sentence of
death, but the promise of a new covenant leader meant the promise
of life sometime in the future.
When Jesus came into the world,
he was born, Paul says, under the law. Paul is not talking about the Covenant
of Works. He is talking about the law of Moses. Jesus had to be circumcised.
Circumcision is a bloody sacrifice and an aspect of the old covenant under
which man is condemned. Although it is clear that he began to
visit Jerusalem even before he was 20, from
the time that he officially became an adult, Jesus was required to visit the
temple three times a year and participate in redemptive ritual. He also
submitted to baptism. In all of this, Jesus
was very much unlike Adam. Adam in the Garden was inside the sanctuary enjoying
the fullness of God’s blessing. Jesus though sinless was with
sinful men outside the sanctuary offering sacrifices that could
never really take sin away. Jesus had to submit to rites that expressed
God’s hatred of man’s sin because He could only inaugurate a new covenant by satisfying
the wrath of God that had come upon man in Adam under the old covenant.
As
the new and final representative man, he was faithful to God, loving Him with
all his heart and strength. He loved his neighbors so much he
died for them. His keeping of the - 65 -
covenant was necessary because
only one who was holy and pure could bear the sins of the world
as a substitute. His satisfaction of the wrath of God on the cross and
resurrection unto life defeated sin, death, and Satan.
His people are saved by faith in Him alone.
That is a rough and simple sketch
of how I see the parallel and I do not see how my view of
the covenant or of Adam’s and Christ’s covenant headship endangers the doctrine
of
justification
by faith. I have never even hinted that we are justified by faith plus our good
works or that justification was based upon God’s work in us
rather than Christ’s work for us. I do agree with
the Reformed tradition that good works are necessary for salvation, but not as
contributing
grounds for our justification.
They are the natural and inevitable outworking of true faith. The only
faith that saves is the faith that works by love.
Conclusion
That
brings me to the conclusion of this essay. I hope that I have answered the
questions
and
concerns that Richard Phillips brings up and that my answers clarify my views.
As I have said in this essay and indicated in my books, I am not offering
anything original in the views I have put forth here. There is little here that
can be rightly labeled recent. My critique of the Covenant of Works repeats what Herman Hoeksema
wrote in his dogmatics, published in 1968, and what W. Wilson Benton wrote in his essay published in 1985. James
Jordan and many others have
criticized the Covenant of Works along similar lines. The doctrine of a
covenant among the Persons of the
Trinity was introduced to me by James Jordan. Kuyper and Van Til persuaded me that it was true. In any case, it is
not a new idea. Nor does it imply tritheism. All of which should indicate, I hope, that what I am doing is not novel,
original, or dangerous.
My
statements about perichoresis in the book Paradox and Truth, published in 2000,
are virtually the same as those made
by Lane G. Tipton who published an article in the fall 2002 issue of the Westminster Journal. Tipton’s
article, entitled “The Function Of Perichoresis and the Divine Incomprehensibility,” is an exposition
of the importance of perichoresis in Van Til’s understanding of the Trinity. He shows the same connection between Van
Til’s and Hodge’s doctrine of
perichoresis that I pointed out. He speaks in the same way of perichoresis
bringing the three Persons of the
Trinity into one. He does not use the covenantal paradigm, but otherwise his language is much the same as mine.
Though no doubt, they would not
agree with all that I have written, recent Reformed writers
Peter Wallace and Rowland Ward both believe in a covenant relationship among
the Persons of the Trinity and both see the intratrinitarian
relationship as the source of God’s
covenants with man. Ward writes
of the Trinitarian covenant in terms virtually identical to mine. The
Bible speaks of the three persons of the Trinity in terms of love and
fellowship
and
faithfulness. In God himself there is an ordered relationship, a personal
- 66 -
commitment
of love, a covenant bond between the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit.74
It is also worth mentioning in
passing that they also both hold to the Covenant of Works, and
the form in which Peter Wallace expresses the doctrine fits quite well with my
own
understanding of the covenant,
since he sees Adam as a son who is only required to persevere in faithfulness
in order to inherit the blessing of the covenant.75 If that is an acceptable interpretation
of the Westminster doctrine of the Covenant of Works, then I could subscribe to
it also. But the point is that holding to an intratrinitarian
covenant does not necessarily mean that one
must deny the Covenant of Works. It is also noteworthy that neither of these
men has been publicly accused of tritheism for holding views
similar to Abraham Kuyper’s and Peter Wallace is relatively favorable to,
though not entirely uncritical of, the view of Norman Shepherd.
Let me end this on a personal
note. My initial response to Richard Phillips article was surprise
that anyone could so utterly misunderstand what I wrote. As I learned more
about
Phillips
from people who knew him, I understood that he is a good man. His record shows
he is academically capable. That is why I tried to take time to
understand how he could so drastically misread
me. As I said, I believe it is a case of paradigm blindness.
It reminds me of my
dispensational days and the critiques of dispensationalism that I read before
I was converted to reformed theology. I found them very unpersuasive and
dismissed their criticisms because it seemed obvious that
they not understand dispensationalism. But in seminary
I discovered that it works both ways. When I wrote a paper on amillennial
eschatology, I realized that
dispensationalists had not been fair to the Reformed theologians either.
It came as something of a shock to discover that dispensational criticism of
reformed hermeneutics suffered from gross bias and
misrepresentation. It was not until many years later that
I actually converted to Reformed theology, but the lesson I learned in seminary
stuck. Cornelius Van Til’s works on apologetics and Thomas
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions helped me to understand why it
is so difficult to interact fairly with views different from
our own. We all read others through the colored glasses of our own theories and
experiences. It is the only way anyone can read. The
point, then, is not to throw away our own glasses but to learn how to see with
other glasses also in an effort to understand where the other person
is coming from.
I was converted to Reformed
theology about 20 years ago though the process of conversion
began earlier, almost 30 years ago when I read an book review by Benjamin B.
Warfield in the April 1919
Princeton Theological Review criticizing Lewis Sperry Chafer’s view of
sanctification. Warfield persuaded me that the dispensational view of the
Christian life suffered from serious problems. I
began to read John Murray. Later Dr. John C. Whitcomb, in our
apologetics class, introduced us to Cornelius Van Til. In 1981 I began to read
Van Til seriously. To help me understand Van Til, I also began
to read John Frame, Vern Poythress, R.
74
Rowland Ward, God & Adam,
Reformed Theology And The Creation Covenant (An Intro To The Biblical
Covenants,
A Close Exam Of The Covenant Of Works) (Melbourne: New Melbourne Press, 2003),
p. 19. I am
indebted to Joel
Garver for this quotation.
75
Wallace, http://www.peterwallace.org/essays/inheritance.htm
.
- 67 -
J. Rushdoony, and Greg Bahnsen.
It was in the early 80s that I also came in contact with the writings
of James Jordan.
These
men and other persuaded me that dispensationalism was wrong and that Reformed theology was essentially correct. John Murray’s
exposition of the covenant was more persuasive to me than the dispensational view. James Jordan and Gerhardus Vos gave
me a wholly different picture of
redemptive history from the one I previously held. They did not persuade me by quoting confessions and catechisms. I was
persuaded of reformed theology because I could see it was more Biblical than dispensationalism. The
Scripture changed my mind.
Reformed
theology is built on the foundation of Sola Scriptura and it is committed to
the principle of continuing
reformation and growth. It would be a tragedy for Reformed thinkers to substitute a commitment to Reformed confessions
for Sola Scriptura or to give up the quest for further reformation. What I fear is that the loose use of words like
“heresy” and “heretic” will inhibit
the development of reformed theology. It is important to fight for the truth of
the Gospel, but it is also important
to be able to distinguish when we are contending for the Gospel and when we are simply being contentious. We must not give
up debate, but conduct it in the godly and humble manner that furthers our understanding of the truth of Scripture
and promotes the progress of the
Gospel.
Good
and upright is the LORD;
Therefore
He instructs sinners in the way.
He
leads the humble in justice,
And He teaches the humble His way. (Psa.
25:9-10)