Book Review: The Birth of the Trinity by Matthew Bates
The “Read God.”
To narrow the parameters of this gigantic task, Bates turns
to what he calls an investigation of “prosopological exegesis.” This is not a
“typological” reading, where David is “regarded as a type or pattern of the
future Christ” (9). Rather, the divine
agent spoke through the prophet in the semblance of the other persons—“frequently
as the Father and Son” (33). Thus, the
famous example of Psalm 110:1: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.’” Here Bates (quoting Tertullian) writes: “In
these texts … the distinctiveness of the Trinity is clearly expounded: for
there is the Spirit himself who makes the statement [through David], the Father
to whom he makes it, and the Son of whom he makes it” (27).
Bates himself opens with another famous example: where the
author of the book of Hebrews identifies Christ as the speaker of Psalm 40—“Sacrifice
and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.” Bates task is to demonstrate both how this
reading strategy arose, and how its many instances in the New Testament and
post-New Testament period function as a broader hermeneutical strategy Bates
terms “prosopological exegesis.” Put
succinctly: “the earliest Christians believed that ancient prophets, such as
David or Isaiah, could speak in the character of God the Father, Christ the
Son, and others” (34). In a beautiful example outside of Bates' work, Katherine Sonderegger gives a haunting refrain on Bates' theme of prosopological exegesis, noting the pained litany in Jeremiah 4:19, 21-22, 23, 25-26: "Who is speaking in this oracle?" She asks. "Is it Lord whose bowls roil in agony before Israel's folly? Is it Jeremiah who sees the earth in its primal state ... Who is the me in the contempt poured on the foolish
And these Old Testament intra-divine conversations range the
entire economy of Christ’s Incarnation: preexistence, birth, life, suffering,
death, resurrection, ascension, eschatological return. Thus the book manages to do at least two quite
remarkable things simultaneously: First, it locates the emergence of
Trinitarian doctrine in the Old Testament—precisely on the terrain often
thought most barren of Trinitarian thought.
There will be many at this point of the review, skeptical (perhaps
rightly) that this type of exegesis could be anything other than arbitrary
or—along the lines of Longenecker’s famous thesis, unreproducible for
post-Apostolic interpreters such as ourselves.
Bates waits until the end of his book when his material
demonstration of prosopological exegesis has been completed, in order to then ask the
question: is this good exegesis? (175-203) While not endorsing every single
instance where such strategies occurred in the tradition, a general pattern of
proper prosopological reading emerges which Bates outlines (helpfully contrasting
it to Gnostic attempts at their own version of prosopological interpretation).
Where many take discrete instances of mediatorial
figures, or perhaps isolated statements like the “Let us make…” in Genesis as
the locus of potential trintiarian discourse, these are brought into a larger
hermeneutical strategy as part of Bates’ thesis. In general, writes Bates, both the New
Testament authors (and Jesus himself in several instances), and the later
Church Fathers, take valid prosopological exegesis only those readings which:
do not violate the sequence of prophecy, readings where the identity of the
speaker is first taken at the literary-historical level of the “prophetic
horizon,” and the general rule of: “If not the Ancient Prophet, Then a
Theodramatic Character” (182). So, if a
reader cannot reasonably suppose the ancient prophet was referring to himself
(or of his own “person”) then the possibility arises that “the prophet had
slipped into a theodramatic role.”
Putting it in terms that Irenaeus set out, a proper
prosopological reading of the Prophets must follow: the hypothesis (that is, the gist of a literary work—what we might
today call “canonical hermeneutics” or the like), or what Irenaeus often
refers to as the “Rule of Truth.” A
proper reading must also follow the proper economy--or arrangement of
affairs--which have been set forth by God so as to achieve the hypothesis of the work. Gnostic interpretation fails for Irenaeus on
this count precisely because Gnostics achieve what they believe to be the hypothesis
of scripture by completely rearranging the economy to make it mirror one or another “hidden text.” Finally, a prosopological reading must
demonstrate itself by recapitulation
(here the rhetorical-hermeneutical form of Irenaeus’ famous theological device):
showing that any reading leads to the Incarnate Christ as the fullness and
non-identical repetition of all that has transpired in the theo-drama thus far
(184-187).
As such: “When a prosopological assignment is made to
explain a dialogical shift in the Scripture, the reader who posits this
theodramatic utterance is not claiming that this is an additional ‘spiritual
sense’ but built on the ‘historical sense’”--which is to say: “the context that
supplies the ‘literal sense’ for the divine author is nothing less than the
entire divine economy” (193). These are
not the only “rules” Bates elaborates (see his “Critical Controls” on 196-202,
for example), but they should be enough to attain a sense of what he is after.
Thus what Bates is attempting to do is not necessarily
supplant other reading methods, like Hurtado and Bauckham’s arguments of
Christ’s divinity through early non-incremental Christian worship of Christ,
and the like. For if he were to do so,
the question of vicious circularity would arise: prosopological exegesis could
not “birth” the Trinity in a proof-text sense, since no one would have the
inkling to read the texts in this manner unless a nascent triadology of persons
was already arising. Rather what Baker
wants to show is how a dense inter-textual process occurred over the
centuries (and in the Biblical texts themselves) to produce a textually-rich
“read God”: “Extending the master plot and divine economy of the ancient Jewish
Scripture in light of the apostolic preaching about Christ, the earliest
Christians used that apostolic proclamation as a key to unlock the dialogical
puzzles they found in what they would come to term the Old Testament” (203).
Found: One Immanent
Trinity
The second impressive thing this work does: it finds textual warrant for a richly conceived
doctrine of the immanent trinity of
persons, the unicorn of the Trinitarian renaissance (to put it as stupidly as
possible). “When stitched together,”
says Bates, “these individual pictures form a panorama of the interior divine
life” (41).
For Bates, as for the early Christians, the immanent Trinity
is not some abstraction from the economy (as Catherine LaCugna charges), some
theoretical entity (Ted Peters), static (Jürgen Moltmann) and unconnected to
the economy (Karl Rahner, or at least some interpretations of him). Rather, it is a scripturally grounded reality—indeed, a robust and richly textured
one—found not through a metaphysical imposition, but precisely by reading the
Prophets and the Psalms through the
divine-historical economy by way of “personal” or “prosopological” exegesis. As Bates notes, in concluding his study:
[P]rosopological exegesis helps show that the Christology of our earliest Christian sources is as high as that of our later sources. Those who employed prosopological exegesis regarded Jesus as a preexistent person, the Son, and as such he was deemed capable of conversing with God the Father prior to his incarnation (204).
As such, explicitly taking aim at narratives of rupture or
discontinuity between the Bible and later “pro-Nicene” discussions, Bates
writes:
This book as a whole seeks to show, that this[Nicene] augmentation [of Trinitarian discourse], inasmuch as it sought to add precision to the previously established person metaphor, was primarily a reaffirmation and extension along the ‘person’ trajectory already embedded in and fixed by prosopological exegesis as it was practiced in the New Testament and early church. …[P]rosopological exegesis informed emerging metaphysical models of unity and distinction with respect to God, and these together resulted in the full-orbed Trinitarianism of the third and fourth centuries and beyond (39).
This makes Bates book a very welcome (and unexpected)
complement to the nearly contemporaneously released book by Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity. Hill, though arguing classical Trinitarian
doctrine is indispensible for proper Pauline exegesis, is adamant that his
study has “bracketed out” as it were, questions of the immanent trinity.[3] Reading these two alongside one another was,
as such, fruitful indeed (which is not to say that they were completely
complementary).
This is, all said, an eye-opening read. Bates’ delirious level of learning drips on
each page, and each of his many footnotes packs considerable punch. While he tries to avoid asides into textual criticism and
Wirkungsgeschichte, these do arise by
necessity at several points through the work.
But rather than a distraction, these are necessary technical diversions
to bolster Bates’ thesis by—at least to some extent—acknowledging the emerging
work being done on textual variety and its hermeneutical (rather than merely
critical) upshot for how interpretive strategies were linked to “communities of
reading” and transmission. Bates goes a long way not just to fill some gaps, but
also provides some new mountaintop vistas to gaze on covered ground with new eyes.
[1]
Stephen Holmes, The Quest for the
Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Downer’s
Grove: InterVarsity, 2012), 200.
[2]
Fred Sanders, “Redefining Progress in Trinitarian Theology: Stephen R. Holmes
on the Trinity,” Evangelical Quarterly
vol.86 no.1 (2014): 10.
[3]
Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity:
Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 2015), 165n.80.
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