The story offers several lessons. My favorite is that learning is just a profound mystery involving the whole person, and that nobody can say in advance or in the abstract how it may happen. Growth like this is possible (I testify), but the key is to be open to its manifestation.
Once (2002) I had a student who hadn't learned to write well. We struggled 3 semesters in a row over composition, revision, everything. Inexplicable diction, rambling sentences, formless paragraphs, theses that tripped over their own dull incoherence. But then one day...
I can easily sing "How Deep the Father's Love for Us" w/a clear theological conscience. Always have. What do I do when I get to the line, "the Father turns his face away?" I instinctively interpret it charitably, in the high-trust environment of my local church.
Father, Son, & Spirit are the almighty God, having the identical divine power & authority over creation. If you take a formal relational structure of power & authority & import it into the life of God, using it to distinguish between Father & Son, you are going to have problems.
The angel admonisheth the recluse: "Seest thou this toilet paper? Thou shalt not hoard it, nor any like unto it!" Recluse: "Nay, but mayhaps I shall wax diarrhoeal, having thereby great need thereof." Angel: "Thou fool, that is not even a symptom! Do thou better henceforth."
The oldest method of teaching Christian theology was to select an Old Testament text (say Psalm 8, Psalm 110, etc) and explain Christ from it. After they did this for a while it was so successful they pulled a bunch of it together and called it the New Testament.
Every so often I get to teach the kids at church (K-5) the intro lesson before they head off to their main classes. Okay, "every so often" means when the Trinity rolls around in our sequence of Core Concepts. Here's the 5 minute lesson I taught this time: (1/14)
Her answer: she was an artist, and in her studio work that term she had really grown into her talents. That confidence somehow bled over into her writing, her self-presentation in prose. The good essay, though we had labored toward it, was a mere byproduct of bigger concerns.
I did not expect that the best theology I would read today would be in the strange genre of a Victim Impact Statement. "I can call it evil because I know what goodness is."
So grateful for the writing ministry of J.I. Packer. Here's his exhortation, published in 1973 that I printed out and taped to my wall as I was writing a book in 2009. It is still accurate. "Learning to know God in Christ."
For those of us whose theological home base is Paul, pondering First John is wonderful but strange. There's no contradiction between John & Paul, but the voice is astonishingly different. One major difference: I John is not structured by the "once lost, now saved" schema.
Christmas Trinity: Only the Son is incarnate, but the incarnation is the work of the whole Trinity. You can see why a distinction is helpful here: to recognize the undivided work of God toward us, but to specify the Son's incarnation exclusively.
I found this note on my to-do list: "Get in touch w/Trinity." I stared and stared. You cannot imagine how long it took me to realize it was a reminder for me to call this one church.
I remained cautious, cross-examining her in oral exams. To my delight, she was articulate about the essay's contents, truly master of the argument & its elements! So I asked her, how had she done this? She knew exactly what I meant (we had both suffered through earlier essays).
I suppose you could call the person of the Trinity "parts," as long as you don't mean "parts." But if you really mean "parts," then you're definitely wrong and shouldn't call them that. Actually, don't call them that anyway. This concludes our helpful lesson.
I read through them serially. Freshman fall & spring, sophomore fall, & now this masterpiece. Laying them all out on the desk, I could see a plausible story: steady progress fixing prose mechanics for 1.5 years, plodding upward. The inexplicably good paper was no quantum leap.
Coming in September: All the things I've been thinking about the Trinity & soteriology for a few years now. Very excited to have this coming out from Eerdmans.
When Matthew says "This fulfilled...'Out of Egypt I called my son,'" (2:15), you have to decide whether Matt's (a) a semi-literate superstitious dummy bad at proof-texting or (b) way ahead of you. Choose (b).
She turned in a sophomore essay that drew together all the elements of writing in service to a great, creative insight. My heart sank. Writers don't just invent themselves. It had to be plagiarism. Late at night, I went over to the office for hard copies of her previous papers.
Just had to rewrite a whole page (450 words!) because I was being a jerk. Check attitude, check sources, repent, pray for God's mercy and ask him for help, revise, revise, revise.
This has happened to me twice in the last few months. I'm writing an essay, and I need to bring in a contrasting view to clarify my point. I correctly identify an author who takes a view opposite to my own ( =they are wrong!). I quote their key claims & show how they're wrong.
Respect for the 19th-c. teen poet who was writing "My Jesus I Love Thee" and decided to include the So Victorian It's Actually Extremely Metal line "when the death-dew lies cold on my brow."
There's quite a bit of Trinity commotion going on online; some of it good, interesting, & necessary. But I just want to remind everybody that this is 2022, the same year that these 3 excellent books appeared. Calm, clear, profound, Protestant instruction on foundational matters.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a student with an essay to write will begin with a sentence surveying what all people have believed throughout history since the dawn of time.
The formula "from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit" (a Cappadocian summary of the biblical pattern) is so helpful for staying Christ-centered! Memorize the formula, dwell on it, & watch it do its work in your understanding.
Athanasius: If the incarnation were mainly for the purpose of manifesting the Son of God to humanity, the Son could have used "some greater theophany" than an embodied one. Unembodied manifestation would have been clearer. But his mission was to take up our nature & save us.
Gordon Fee, 1934-2022. Just from a trinitarian perspective: Not only did he write ample & definitive books on Pauline pneumatology & Christology, but he deliberately & persistently used the word "Trinity" in Biblical studies proper, since at least the 90s.
Edgar Allan Poe was a Boston-born creator of short stories, best known for macabre and suspenseful tales described as Gothic fiction. E.A. Poe died in Baltimore in 1849. His greatest poem, The Raven, is famous for the line...*
________________
*To the tune of "Mary Did You Know."
“God absolutely delights in himself, absolutely rests in himself, and is absolutely self-sufficient. His life is not a process of becoming, not an evolution, not a process of desiring and striving, as in the pantheistic life, but an uninterrupted rest, eternal peace.” Bavinck
I've studied hundreds of pages of commentary on Ephesians 3:14-19 (Origen, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Goodwin, Calvin, M. Barth, Cohick, Allen, etc.) and one thing I'm noticing is that Jesus loves me and lives in my heart.
Q: "Is the Trinity a hierarchy?"
A: Nope. There is order between Father & Son (for instance) that is structured & irreversible, because the Son is from the Father rather than vice versa. (1/2)
I've just turned in the manuscript for my book on union with Christ w/
@BakerAcademic
. Very excited to have finished the writing phase. 50k words & so much more to say. Much editing & production & time ahead before it'll get to an audience, but hurrah!
Obvs much more could be tweeted about any of this, & my suggestions for further reading would be "almost anything old." I just wanted to make the brief case in public for folks again. Not trying to re-litigate 2016. Trying to re-litigate the whole Bible & Christian tradition.
What we see in the incarnation is the coeternal/ coequal/ coessential 2nd person of the Trinity, in the form of a servant. He eternally stands w/the Father on God's side of all authority, & w/us on the creaturely side.
Does this line from the 1990 song drift too close to suggesting that Father & Son are separable, at odds, broken up? A bit. But if I've heard good trinitarian theology at church, I know in advance not to hear the line that way.
What does characterize that Son, showing him to be eternal Son of eternal Father, is his generation or begottenness from the Father. He is coequal, coeternal, & coessential, but he is Son: of, from, in a relation of eternal origin. That's the key point of the revelation of "Son."
In an attempt to bring
@scottrswain
some of the attention he deserves for his high-quality Twitter work, I've remixed some of his recent tweets as New Yorker cartoons. They really pop.
The error is especially tempting if you start w/a theology of what sonship is in general in the Bible, and then claim it must apply to the unique Son. Sons are younger than dad, have moms, start out smol, obey, etc. None of these characterize the unique Son.
I'm pro-beauty; even majored in art. But "look who has the loveliest buildings" is exactly the criterion you would expect an unregenerate person to use in evaluating Christian traditions.
Spent the morning cancelling numerous things for reasons pandemically coronaviral. Sad about each cancelled event; many regrets all around; so many good plans scuttled.
But speaking as an introvert, I just have to say YOU GUYS THE UNBELIEVABLE RUSH!!!
Ah yes, I see a new book here on creation as sacrament. Also swell & dandy is mission as incarnation. Also hospitality as perichoresis. Also baptism as creatio ex nihilo. Also providence as indwelling, rebirth as aseity, & all the theology words as all the other theology words.
I ran across another case of somebody saying, "how can 3 be 1, and 1 be three; who knows, mystery etc." I don't think people do this on purpose, but notice the moves they have to make: reduce the doctrine to math by subtracting the actual nouns involved.
The unbaptized emperor in your heart bids you be pro-nice rather than pro-Nicene. Refuse him. Leave no Arius unslapped in the ecumenical council of your soul, brethren.
The spiritual and tropological reading of the St. Nicholas Controversy should prompt us as Believers to recognize how we must punch the Arian in our own souls.