The Holy Trinity. By Carl Beckwith. Fort Wayne, Indiana: Luther Academy Press, 2016.
In his 1995 work, Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans), Robert Wilken boldly titled the first chapter with the question, “Who will speak for the religious Traditions?” While acknowledging scholars’ need to put distance between researcher and subject, he called academics to speak on behalf of their traditions’ beliefs and practices. In his recent dogmatics volume, The Holy Trinity, Rev. Dr. Carl Beckwith heartily answers Wilken’s call. A formidable patristic historian, Beckwith applies himself to texts and topics that extend far beyond the specialist’s narrow purview. In the process, he walks the fine line of teaching new readers, while engaging substantially with his own area of research (see Carl Beckwith, Hilary of Poiters on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate [Oxford: 2009]). His volume offers a fine point of departure for pastors seeking a deeper understanding of their trinitarian confession. In The Holy Trinity, Beckwith insists that the doctrine of the Trinity be understood, taught, and applied practically in the Church.
Beckwith situates his own work within a reception of ancient, medieval, and reformation theologies. The volume divides its 376 pages among fifteen chapters fittingly apportioned under three parts: On God, On the Trinity, and Dogmatic Reflection of the Church. Part I begins with a panoramic account of modern philosophical developments that impinge upon the Christian’s ability to think, speak, and know the Triune God. The survey leads to an extended argument about natural and revealed knowledge of God, which assigns natural revelation an exclusively negative role. Beckwith claims that “Lutherans approach the Trinity” only through Christ’s revelation in the Incarnation (62). Part II pursues the claim exegetically. Insisting upon both the doctrine and method of patristic theology, Beckwith undertakes an extensive reading of both Old and New Testament texts. He thus seeks to ground the Trinity in scriptural exegesis. This section expounds all the most significant passages that informed patristic trinitarian theology. Part III lays out the technical terminology of the patristic doctrine in greater depth and detail. Where a lesser teacher might have struggled, Beckwith makes the sometimes arid distinctions of trinitarian discourse clear and accessible. In the process, he defines the Church’s traditional language and locates that language in the concerns that historically produced it. Substantial engagement with the Lutheran Confessions and the works of seventeenth-century dogmaticians like Johann Gerhard and Abraham Calov augment the discussion. Beckwith concludes by criticizing modern “social trinitarian” theology and its underlying dichotomies, which pit “eastern” and “western,” “ontological” and “social” approaches to the Trinity against one another. The narrative is readable and often well-informed.
Appropriate to a dogmatics, The Holy Trinity does not only survey other writers. Its three main parts prosecute an extended argument about (1) the character of Lutheran theology, (2) its hermeneutical basis and (3) the relationship between Scriptural teaching and the ancient ecumenical creeds. Because Beckwith grounds his account in primary sources, his volume deserves the complement of leading readers back into the tradition’s texts and contexts. In so doing, The Holy Trinity raises questions that should inspire seminary and winkel debates for some time.
The first of those major questions has to do with the narratives of Luther and Lutheran theology that inform pastors’ theological identity. Part I of The Holy Trinity makes a serious intervention in recent discourse about natural theology and the relationship of natural theology to Lutheran doctrine. Beckwith argues that natural and revealed knowledge of God represent “two types of knowledge [that] are of an entirely different character, qualitatively different” (64). In this vein, he surveys patristic and medieval writers in order to criticize a position typified by Aquinas: “Rather than seeing a disjunction between philosophical theism and biblical trinitarianism, he sees a complementarity (56).” The discussion proceeds to credit William of Occam’s dialectic between God’s ordered (potentia ordinata) and absolute power (potentia absoluta) with the virtue of having “freed the God of revelation from the predictability of human reason” (60). Aligning Luther directly with Occam, Beckwith evokes a familiar narrative of Luther’s theological experience: “Luther’s Reformation breakthrough freed God from our incessant attempt to conceptualize Him, to limit His possibilities and model Him after our best ideas” (270). On this basis, The Holy Trinity stakes its position: “The Triune God of Scripture . . . is not known in the neutral space of scholastic endeavor, but always and only through a person, Jesus Christ, the one crucified and risen and this by the working of the Holy Spirit through Word and sacrament (65) . . . Outside of Christ there is no proper knowledge of God (79) . . . This shadow of knowledge for the natural man results in idolatry and hostility” (83). Such a substantial negation of natural theology thus entails a portrait of Luther and his relationship to earlier writers. In this respect, The Holy Trinity represents an historical and theological judgment traceable to specific secondary sources. Attentive readers might perceive Karl Barth’s influence in Beckwith’s criticism, though Heiko Obermann (60), Bernard Lohse (64) and Oswald Bayer (76) more directly mediate the vision of Luther and his “Reformation Breakthrough” (67–71). Their contributions undergird an opposition between the faithful Lutheran theologian and a hypothetical “theologus gloriae” (91–93) that occupies the latter portion of Part I. In this respect, Gerhard Forde’s inspiration of modern American Lutheranism animates the narrative.
Beckwith’s selection of scholarly voices points to certain omissions. Bruce Marshall comes under criticism (91–94), for instance, but Marshall’s significant analysis of Luther and Aquinas goes unaddressed. One wonders how things might change if insights from Theo Dieter, Berndt Hamm, or David Luy were allowed to season the narrative. As it stands, Beckwith delivers a Luther notably similar to Catholic polemical accounts that lay so many modern ills at the Reformer’s feet, such as Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation or Michael Allen Gillespie’s The Theological Origins or Modernity (2008). Aware of the problem, Beckwith warns that “simplistic judgments proceeding from grand historical narratives will never suffice” (110). The point is well-taken, but forgoes any positive explanation for why such a view of Luther does not lead to the secularizing modern problems censured in the volume’s early chapters. Assigning such a limited role to natural theology could impair the church’s witness to the goodness of God’s creation, and the order of God’s love and wisdom in it. Of course, there are limits to the scope of any one volume. The Holy Trinity does not pursue moral questions, and Beckwith’s account does rely upon one influential trajectory in twentieth century scholarship. For that reason, it should inspire pastors to reflect on the sources and narratives that inform their theological imagination.
Other fruitful questions arise from Beckwith’s deep engagement with the Scriptures in Part II. This section is an education in patristic scriptural reasoning about the Triune God. He predicates his approach upon a rejection of the common historical hermeneutic that “associate[s] responsible exegesis with . . . discerning authorial intention, shaped, so it is assumed, by the immediate historical factors . . . and by the audience’s conceptual horizon” (117). Beckwith thus objects to conservative evangelical and liberal scholarship that aims to move “behind” the text before its language can be understood (118–125). This approach excludes the Trinity from the Bible by “remov[ing] the text from its sacred history, from its place in the spiritual life of the believing community, and from its home in the liturgy” (118). The Holy Trinity thus aims to “follow [the fathers’] lead and establish the eternal identity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit upon God’s revelation, and not upon creeds and the Church’s theological judgments [emphasis mine]” (127). Beckwith means to defend a traditional exegesis, but the pair of comments does create hermeneutical ambiguities. On the one hand, the Scriptures, and not creeds or ecclesiastical discernment, are the basis of Christian doctrine. At the same time, scriptural “meaning” is found not in historical language with all the contingencies language implies, but in the use and reception of the Scriptures by the faithful and within the liturgy. It is not clear how one affirms both statements together. If the creeds “rest upon exegesis,” (127), which is not governed by the historical meaning of the text, what does norm responsible reading of the text? One can imagine a number of responses to such a questions, but which one The Holy Trinity endorses is uncertain. Even when Beckwith “proceeds with the conviction that God is the author of Scripture and the best interpreter of His own Word” (130), the principled hermeneutical basis of the exegesis remains more assumed than stated.
Despite the question, Beckwith’s worthy admonition against methodological atheism produces extensive exegesis that witnesses to “the scriptural identity of God” (130). Lutheran pastors will find much to affirm in the reading. Beckwith’s work represents the assertion in dogmatic theology of a recent trajectory in New Testament and Early Christian studies. Since the mid-1970s, historians have recovered the New Testament’s “Early High Christology,” in great part, by demonstrating the Jewish roots of the earliest Christian claims about the divinity of Jesus. Historians have also labored mightily to reconstruct the relationship between ancient philosophical discourses and the Church’s development of doctrine. The Holy Trinity thus relies on scholars like Richard Bauckham (129–140) and Larry Hurtado (134) to demonstrate “the plural identity of the one true God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (132) from the Scriptures. Beckwith thereby asserts the historic Christian faith over and against the still influential view that Christ’s divinity was merely a construction of certain early Christian communities. His account justifiably labels such conclusions as outdated in terms of authoritative recent scholarship.
Such a bold account also demonstrates the difficulty of moving from historical to dogmatic claims. The point is evident from Beckwith’s disciplined usage of “identity” language to characterize the scriptural material. For someone like Bauckham, “identity” language avoids anachronism; but Beckwith formally rejects the hermeneutical assumptions such a concern presumes. What then does the term “identity” contribute? It may be that “identity” language distinguishes between scriptural content and contingent philosophical vocabulary, since Beckwith says that patristic trinitarian insight “ow[es] to Scripture, not philosophy” (128). Again, the Scriptures “led the Fathers to express the relationship between [the Persons] in the terms of their day . . . Platonism did not demand this of them. Scripture demanded it” (129). Beckwith would reject, however, the idea that an ancient author’s use of “philosophy” is an index of his heterodoxy. Hence, the contribution of such a term as “unique identity” to the Church’s dogmatic vocabulary invites further discussion. If “identity” neither defends against anachronism, nor brackets off “philosophy,” what does it accomplish? In this respect, Part II invites a conversation about the relationship between the contingent language of the Church’s creeds and confessions, and the time-bound character of the Scriptures normative revelation.
Beckwith makes his own beginnings of an answer in Part III. The section amounts to several case studies in fourth-century trinitarian theology. The reader learns a great deal in a brief space, as Beckwith treats the Cappadocians and Augustine. In the process, The Holy Trinity assigns a normative authority to the ancient language of person, nature, and essence: “Since this language serves to preserve the meaning of Scripture, there is no graduating from it,” writes Beckwith. “To do so exposes a person to the ever-present danger of obscuring the scriptural witness” (282). Beckwith’s warning thus again underscores the hermeneutical questions that run through the volume, and asks Lutherans to articulate the nature of their commitment to the Church’s ancient symbols. The earliest Christians received their baptismal creeds along with the Scriptures, which (for example, Deut 6, Phil 2, Eph 2) attest the use of creedal statements. And in patristic arguments, the baptismal creed governed exegesis. Tertullian, for instance, regarded fidelity to “the rule” as the distinctive norm of faithful interpretation. Similarly, Lutherans have given their unqualified pledge to the ecumenical symbols (FC Ep I–II) and used them as a norma normans without prior adjudication. Pastors thinking with Beckwith will thus be led to weigh again this perennial question of the relationship between scriptural statements and the normative reality of the Church’s sacramental rites. Their conversation will be much improved by this volume.
Beckwith’s ability to direct pious reasoning into such important questions commends this volume as a fine starting-point for further study. The Holy Trinity introduces the fundamental questions of classical trinitarian theology, models patristics exegesis, and leads the reader back into the primary sources along the way. The Holy Trinity perhaps succeeds most by its ability to lead pastors into the tradition. In this respect, Dr. Beckwith has provided a work of great scope and learning that deserves the Church’s enduring thanks and pastors’ serious consideration.
Jason Gehrke
Valparaiso University, Indiana