Book Review Essay (Part One): Mystery Unveiled by Paul Lim

Paul C.H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 488pp.  $82 Hardcover.  I would like to thank OUP for graciously sending me a free review copy, which in no way guaranteed a favorable review.

[This first part gives the background of several previous works on the subject leading up to Lim's book.  If you want just the review, skip ahead to part two]

At the heart of the last century of Trinitarian theology lay a murder mystery: by whose hands was the Trinity laid low?  Once the center of Christian life and thought, the doctrine was pushed to the margins until it almost completely disappeared.  Suspects for such a heinous crime are typically triangulated along an axis that includes such heady terms as “Hellenization,” the “Latin Heresy,” or “Western trinitarianism.”  When approached as such, a supposedly clear line jumping from Augustine to Aquinas and then on again to culminate in Friedrich Schleiermacher, is created.  And so the conclusion of such a diagnostic is (supposedly) equally as clear: tendencies in the Fathers (say, some philosophical intrusion, or the structure of their work, or even “classical theism” as a whole) germinated into the eventual marginalization of the Trinity, when Schleiermacher relegated it to an appendix (his actual word is “conclusion,” and not appendix, but proper translations are often helpless before the force of a good myth).  (I have written at length about this elsewhere).

And yet, as William Babcock wrote over twenty years ago: “It is just here … that the typical pattern in historical studies of the doctrine of the Trinity puts us at a loss. It leaves blank the very interval that we most need to have filled-in if we are to gain some understanding of where and how this shift of sensibilities took place, the interval between the trinitarian theology of the medieval scholastics and the trinitarian theology of Schleiermacher and those who came after him.”[1]  In the years since Babcock’s essay, several authors have both taken up his challenge, and deepened his basic proposal: we must look to the reception history of the tradition as it was fed through Reformation England in the 17^th century.

Though slightly hamstrung by being too reliant upon a “Calvin against the Calvinists” portion of his narrative,[2] William Placher took up Babcock’s gauntlet in his provocative 1996 book The Domestication of Transcendence.  Of the Trinity, Placher argues “I do not want to enter this field [of studying Trinitarian decline] with a counter-argument for the seventeenth century as the crucial period in the decline of Trinitarian theology, but I do want to argue something changed. … By the end of the seventeenth century … arguments … about the role of God in the accomplishment of our salvation tended simply to talk about ‘God’—the Trinitarian Persons did not play much role in the analysis.”  And he continues with a general conclusion: while “it was not orthodox to deny the Trinity … almost no one could explain why belief in the Trinity was important.”[3]  What is curious about Placher’s extremely interesting work (foreshadowing our later turn in this essay to the actual topic of our review, Paul Lim’s Mystery Unveiled) is not just that he overplays his hand blaming the Trinity’s ill-fate on Reformed scholasticism, but even more so that as he does this Placher nowhere speaks of the Socinians—either in their continental or English variety.  Whatever one’s problems may be with Westminster (and perhaps they are great) it does seem to be an oversight to say they drove the Trinity into the ground, while mentioning nothing of the actual anti-trinitarians.

This lack of focus regarding how the Socinian controversy not only attacked the Trinity, but also paradoxically weakened Trinitarian theology by dictating the terms with which and terrain upon which its defenders responded, is the topic of an indispensible work written in 2003 by Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century.  Dixon focuses his study on how the word “person” came to occupy center stage in the Trinitarian controversy: “in the seventeenth century the word ‘person’ became a highly contested concept in regard to the Trinity.”  His study as such also picks up on how the nature of theological language and argumentation was changing as well, inheriting this theme from Babcock’s essay with which we opened: “part of the problem [of the nature of persons and the Trinity] lay in the changing understanding of the nature and function of language: to oversimplify greatly, analogy and metaphor were at a discount, while univocal usage was increasingly privileged.”[4]  As Babcock himself put it:

If [John] Locke came off better in the debate [with Edward Stillingfleet] (and he did), it was not because he showed that the Trinity was fatally caught in contradiction but because he succeeded in making Stillingfleet’s very style of talk look silly.  Such an outcome was only possible, however, because another style of talk was already in place, already functioning as the dominant language of learned discourse and, in fact, already entangling Stillingfleet himself.[5]

The controversy of the Trinitarians and the Socinians, as Dixon represents it, both embodies, but also drives, larger forces regarding what counts as proper theological method and language.  As the Socinian controversy over the singularity of God more and more focused on a univocal concept of the person and how it is (or is not) possible for three such persons—conceived fairly univocally to what we ourselves are as finite agents—to partake of one essence, Dixon argues that the “Trinitarian imagination” itself shrinks. 

Even apart from the intensely polemical nature of theological pamphlets and treatises arising at that time, defensive and rigid tones begin to creep into Trinitarian catechisms in the early 1670’s (Dixon, 14) and in hymnology we find “further evidence” that there was an “emptying of the devotional and emotional appeal of the doctrine [of the Trinity] after the Restoration” (19-20).  This alienation of the Trinity due to the nearly exclusive focus on polemical points “is reflected in the [Trinitarian] imagination [of the mid-seventeenth century].  As the doctrine of the Trinity is eviscerated of its popular appeal, the bones are left to gnaw on, but the milk has dried up” (25). 

For our purposes we must bypass doing full justice to Dixon’s nuanced work, and say—broadly speaking—he has three major points to take away from this period of English theological history.  The first is that we must be attentive to shifts in how language and logic function.  The increasing demand for “univocal precision” of a certain sort leads to “the deadening of analogical imagination” (47).  Atomistic theories of how language functions as an addition of self-contained and contextually isolated units to create a complex concept in thinkers like Locke, Hobbes, and later Isaac Newton with his protégé Samuel Clarke, elevates the prestige of the isolated proof-text string into a position that the Trinitarian cannot win (185).[6]  This is precisely what many Trinitarian defenders did not see: to concede that scripture is made up of virtually self-contained bits with no overall “shape” is already to lose the fight to the anti-trinitarian cherry-pickers.

But what’s more, the change in the nature and function of language creates a bizarre situation in which traditional terms and concepts are often passed on in an attempt at preservation, but whose internal logic has been radically transformed due to new philosophical and argumentative contexts.  As Dixon puts it: “The parroting of the approved language was counted as a sufficient indicator of belief, while the doctrine’s lifeblood ebbed away” (213). As such Dixon’s second point is that many of the defenders of the Trinity were in fact its worst enemies.  As he puts of William Sherlock in particular: he was an example of “that strange but persistent phenomenon, the champion whose very defense wreaks more destruction and havoc than any opponent could ever hope to achieve” (109).

These are sobering words, and lead to the third broad point we might take away from Dixon: it was the narrowing of Trinitarian doctrine to argumentation over whether God was one or three persons—and if the latter, how this was possible given the common definitions of personhood on offer—that eventually destroyed the doctrine’s credibility.  This is perhaps a sobering warning for our own day, when social trinitarianism of all sorts are championed as theological panacea.  Dixon’s arguments shows that wrangling over the nature of person in God in order to make an analogy workable on the human level is not only foolish (because impossible), but it also inverts the logic of earlier claims.  One of the more striking aspects of the book is how often Socinians independently reproduce the logic used by Augustine or Gregory of Nyssa, only to collapse their arguments into a single univocal direction, and so implode them.[7] 

For example John Frye (45ff) begins to sound like Augustine, asking “whether persons are accidents in God”? Frye, responds (like a good Augustinian) and says: no, they are not accidents.  But he then assumes that, like in the finite realm, persons are individuals and so: three persons in God means three substances, and so three gods (and as such he rejects the claim of three persons). 

In a similar way Thomas Hobbes does not reject the Trinity, but along the lines of Dixon’s general thesis “[was concerned] to ‘translate’ the complexities of scholastic jargon into the vernacular of ‘ordinary’ language … but his theory of language and thought, his nominalist logic, and his Unitarian politics prevented him from doing so in adequate terms” (97). John Milton (yes, that John Milton) similarly interprets Augustine’s careful parsing of Porphyry’s genus-species-individual schema in a univocal direction, in order to explode it.  Where Augustine rejects that any of these categories can apply either to God in his unity or his trinity, precisely because this leads inevitably to a sort of part/whole relationship, Milton demands that different essences means different persons, while “of the same essence” would mean “one and the same person.”  He thereby implodes the unity-in-distinction logic of the tradition by flattening it into the same univocal logic Eunomius and Aetius had used against the Cappadocians (103).

Yet, as Dixon represents it, almost the entirety of these arguments revolved around the circuit of such obscure things as the definition of person, substance, and the like—and this only so that our proper epistemological relationship to these arcanum be secured.  As Dixon poignantly concludes: “The doctrine [of the Trinity] cease[ed] to be celebrated as the center of faith and life, and starts to be defended as something to be accepted” (212).  What is intensely suggestive—but sadly outside the scope of our review—is that Dixon’s account means that the Trinity was transformed into “something to be accepted” and so marginalized at precisely the same moment in English theological history that Peter Harrison records Christianity itself was being transformed into the modern “propositional” forms of assent we now associate with the term “religion.”[8]  To leave a provocative thought hanging in the air: it seems at least historically speaking the Trinity matters to Christianity in inverse proportion to the extent Christianity is construed under the newly minted category of “religion.”[9]

It is here in the claim that the Trinity became merely “something to be accepted” that Dixon’s work overlaps with an even more recent book by Jason Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology.  As Vickers summarizes:

My purpose is to call attention to the devastating effects that at least one version of sola Scriptura has had for Trinitarian theology, effects I believe are still very much with us today.  In much English Protestant theology, the combining of sola Scriptura with a rationalist hermeneutics and a canon of essential doctrine has shifted the emphasis in Trinitarian theology from invocation to assent, that is, from reflection on the use of the divine name in the full range of the church’s catechetical and liturgical activities to reflection on the rationality or intelligibility of a network of propositions and assertions regarding the divine nature ad intra (the immanent trinity).[10]

We need not detain ourselves with the whole of Vickers’ argument, for the basic direction of the whole is already contained in the quote above.  Over time, “the content of the rule of faith shifts from the Trinity to scripture, that is, from a set of identifying descriptions concerning divine identity and divine action supporting the use of the triune name for God in the catechetical and liturgical life of the church, to a source containing clear and intelligible propositions to be consulted in a range of epistemological activities, most notably intellectual assent” (Vickers, 30).[11] 

In this shift, Vickers note that “in the wider context of the debate over the rule of faith, the Trinitarian controversy exhibits a distinguishing feature of Christian theology in the modern West, namely, granting primacy to epistemology over ontology” (69) or as he also puts it “from doxology to epistemology” (45).  In essence “in the modern period the Trinity appeared made for nothing else than to be proved” and so assented to in belief (188). Just so, in a sort of update of Catherine LaCugna’s famous claim, in this “epistemologizing” of the Trinity to a mere datum of assent, or into a network of ideas and propositions, “there was a tendency to reflect on the doctrine of the immanent trinity in isolation from the divine economy” (188).[12]

---

[1] William S. Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the 17^th Century.” Interpretation no.45 (1991), 135.

[2] On this in particular see: Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 51-70.  For a counter to this claim, arguing that there was more division than Muller allows, cf. Ron Frost, Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness (Vancouver: Cor Deo Press, 2012), esp. 25-71.

[3] William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John-Knox, 1996), 166-168.

[4] Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 3.

[5] Babcock “A Changing of the Christian God,” 145.

[6] Vickers, Invocation and Assent, xvi, has a very similar interpretation to Dixon: “The problem … [was] with the use of a term whose meaning was tied to empirically observable analogues, namely, the term ‘person’ or ‘persons.’  According to Baconian sensibilities about language, the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ had to be used in a way that cohered with empirical observations about actual persons.  If this could not be done, then the use of the term ‘persons’ to describe God would be unintelligible; if unintelligible, it would not be among the propositions necessary to be believed for salvation.”

[7] Cf. Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 136: “The ethos of theology in general was changing in a very profound way.  In a departure from previous perceptions that saw talk about God as inherently problematic [that is, inherently apophatic], many of the participants in the dispute claim to have clear ideas about the nature of God. … Once it was conceded that ‘God’ was clear but the ‘mystery of the Trinity’ dark, then the Trinity was bound to become a ‘problem’ in theology.  If the disputers had been less clear about the nature of the God under discussion perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity would not have seemed so exceptionally problematic.  To previous generations talk about ‘God’ was no easier than talk about ‘Trinity.’  Much of the dispute revolved around questions concerned with the best way of speaking about God: Was he one person or three?  A subtle but important shift had occurred here too.  Previously theology had scrambled around to find a word that could be used to speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Now the meaning of the word ‘person’ was increasingly taken as having a fixed, agreed content to which God could be matched to see if he were one such ‘person’ or three.”

[8] Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).  Cf. Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 83-117.

[9] Much more is at work, of course.  Nonetheless cf. the largely parallel narrative in Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale, 1987), esp. the final summary, 322-364.  Cf. 346: “Christianity, in order to defend its God, transmuted itself into theism.”

[10] Jason E. Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2008), 191.

[11] As Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, 23-24 puts it, “God’s place as an object of saving faith was subtly usurped by a set of doctrines.”  Cf. Vickers, Invocation and Assent, 35: “It is crucial to recognize what was going on here.  The problem of ecclesial authority was prompting Catholic and Protestant theologians to put forth warrants for their respective visions of salvation.  Ironically, the efficacy of Catholic and Protestant visions of salvation and Eucharistic and baptismal practices increasingly came to depend directly on epistemic proposals and only indirectly on divine identity and action.”

[12] Cf. Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 136-137: “The defenses of the Trinitarian divines are also quite notable for the absence of what might be called the vital dimensions of the Trinity.  When one reads their works one is left with a feeling of indifference: even if the doctrine of the Trinity is true, so what?  The loss of the economic dimensions of the doctrine is clear and the debate takes place largely as a discussion of the immanent trinity.”