Book Review: Paul and the Trinity by Wesley Hill
Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing, 2015), 224 pages. Paperback $26. I would like to thank Eerdman's for sending me a free review copy, which in no way guaranteed a favorable review.
Even with recent works from the likes of Ayres, Behr,
Anatolios, and Holmes, pointing out that the primary core of early Church trinitarianism
was not the philosophical obscurantism it is often accused of, but rather was
based on scriptural reasoning, there is always the (well advised) caveat that
their use of proof-texts were situated within larger theological assumptions
and arguments (even, as Ayres notes, “theological cultures”) that are
unavailable, or at the very least, unconvincing to the modern exegete.
And so: what does
the Trinity have to do with the bible? Happily, as Wesley Hill argues in his
recent work Paul and the Trinity,
quite a bit. Much as theologians are
returning once again to reevaluate past-sources either committed to dustbins,
or locked into rigidly categorized boxes (I for one, am pleased we can now do
more after mentioning Augustine, than shake our head knowingly and feel guilty),
so too a slow but steady movement from a new generation of scholars has gone
back to use “classical” theological categories in the aid of exegesis.
High vs. Low
Christology: Toward a Third Way
What does the Trinity have to add to the current exegetical
debates regarding Christ’s identity?
Hill argues (3-18) that today, despite an obvious variety of positions
these tend to fall into one of two camps: those advocating a “Low” Christology,
and those who advocate a “High” Christology.
For those unfamiliar with these categorizations, their assumption and
arguments go thus: assuming Paul maintained his Jewish monotheism, at what
point on a “vertical axis” (Hill’s phrase) does Christ land? Is he at a lower point of the axis, so that
he may be God’s representative, perhaps a “second Adam” but certainly not
divine in early Christian interpretation, as James Dunn argues. Or is he, as
Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado have argued, even in the earliest Christian
worship seen as up so high on the vertical axis, he is assumed within the
divine identity of YHWH?
This is a very clear instance where all interpreters are
working with the same data. Hence
distinctions of opinion are often based, not just on fine points of exegesis or
quite literal jots and tittles, but on broader models which present how to read
the evidence within a spectrum of possible outcomes. This
typical spectrum, argues Hill, has the common assumption that Christ is fitted
into God’s identity (or not) only as an after-thought to parameters of an
already established monotheism. As he
puts it later in the book: “such ways of accounting for the innovative
character of Paul’s theology/Christology depend on an assumption that
monotheism remains the larger explanatory category that encloses and thereby
determines the character of his Christology” (71).
In fact, in a very interesting (but unfortunately cryptic)
transitional argument, Hill points to an interpretive history in which
“Christology becomes an area in its own right, not merely as one part of the
variegated matrix of Trinitarian theology but rather as something discussable,
in principle, in relative isolation” (23).
In turn, “a further factor to consider is how a newly minted
term—‘monotheism’—became available to interpreters to articulate the dynamics
of Pauline Christology and theology without having recourse to Trinitarian
categories” (24). This invention of
monotheism and Christology as independent categories thus sets up the now
routine High/Low Christology spectrum Hill disputes. As such, in addition to his own exegetical
and theological arguments, Hill presents (however briefly) a genetic argument
revealing the historical moments in the construction of the logic of what is
often taken for granted as current common-sense heuristics among Biblical
scholars.
A second assumption is that all parties “share a concern to
distance their reconstructions of New Testament Christology, from later Trinitarian
theology” (18). Both of these Hill sets
out to dispute by displaying that a trinitarian reading accounts for the data
better:
The main task [of the book] …is to
suggest a way of discussing Paul’s theology and Christology that does not begin with the ‘vertical’
question—has Jesus been elevated all the way up the axis to God’s level?—but
rather with the question of relations. The conceptuality of a ‘low’ or ‘high’
Christology threatens to obscure the way in which, for Paul, the identities of
God, Jesus, and the Spirit are constituted by their relations with one another.
(25)
Hill is careful to note that “Trinitarian theology” is not
some gigantic umbrella term, but is rather employed in his work with some
precision. He adamantly insists that his
will be a “self-consciously historical”
reading of Paul “guided by the canons of critical exegesis.” Thus, “Trinitarian theologies will be employed
as hermeneutical resources … mined
for conceptualities which may better enable
a genuinely historical exegesis to articular what other equally
‘historical’ approaches may have … obscured” (45).
In particular Hill is using the concepts of the mutual determination
of the divine identities “Father, Son, and Spirit” (here and throughout, the
language of Robert Jenson and—more distantly—Wolfhart Pannenberg, can be
discerned). For Paul—as Hill argues—the
identity of God is not a fixed referent, with Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) as
the variable as it is in the High/Low schema; rather “Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit” as agents are all mutually determinative for one another: “Despite [Trinitarian
theologian’s] drastic disagreements,” he says, “in marked contrast to the
debate in Pauline scholarship over how ‘low’ or ‘high’ Paul’s Christology was, [these
Trinitarian theologies] frustrate any attempt to identify one of the Trinitarian
persons … in a way that does not also implicate the other two” (43). Instead of a vertical axis, Hill recommends a
“horizontal” one (Jenson again) or, better, a “web” of relations (25) so that
“to pick God out of the crowd” involves talking about Jesus (Jenson’s “’Who is
God?’ ‘Whoever raised Jesus from the dead,’” echoes here).
Mutually implicating Trinitarian identities are, in essence,
what Hill then sets out to demonstrate in the rest of the book: God’s identity
in Paul is determined by who Jesus is and what he does (49-77); he then turns
to whether the obviously asymmetrical relationship between God and Jesus
threatens their unity, and so Hill’s thesis (77-135), and how the Holy Spirit
is both determined by references to Christ and the Father, but also determines
them (135-167) through the Spirit’s agency in resurrection (here I was surprised
not to find Pannenberg cited, given his appearance elsewhere in Hill’s text. This is a reading that reproduces the Munich
theologian’s own work very closely).
Throughout the entire course of Hill’s elegant argument is the idea that
trinitarianism—better than any static “vertical axis” Christology—accounts for
the dynamic, mutually implicative identifications and interrelations between
divine agents in the economy.
Redoublement
In addition to the idea of mutual reciprocity and identity,
a second Trinitarian element Hill is wont to use throughout his argument, is
the idea of “redoublement.” This is a
term coined in the late 1960’s by Ghislain Lafont, and used more recently and
in an extensive way by Thomistic scholar Gilles Emery and his student, Matthew
Levering—but the concept described by the term is present in the tradition from
very early on. The basic sense of
redoublement is: there must be a twofold description of God to describe both
the three irreducible persons, and also their essential unity. As Lewis Ayres puts it: “we must describe the
same ground twice over.”[1] To collapse these descriptions into a single
frame of reference is to endanger the biblical character of either aspect.
Thus redoublement, much like the reciprocal implications of Trinitarian
identities, gives us a better sense of the dynamic and interactive character of
Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, both in their distinctions and their
ultimate unity, than does the High/Low Christology schema. For example, Hill turns to the debates over 1
Corinthians 8:6 (112ff) and notes that the High/Low Christology debate breaks
down over those who see the differentiation between God and Jesus (here Hill
uses the work of James McGrath) in order to underscore that Christ is merely a
mediator who does not threaten the unity of the divine identity. On the other hand, commentators like
Bauckham, looking at the same passage, underplay such distinctions to emphasize
unity: for Bauckham Jesus is not a
mediator, but is included in the Divine Identity (118). It is the creation of this peculiar
antithesis that catches Hill’s eye.
Rather than allowing this impasse to stand, by breaking it
into the division of High/Low, Hill argues rather that both McGrath and
Bauckham are hamstrung by their interpretive categories. Downplaying either unity or distinction for
one’s interpretation is not necessary, says Hill, for 1 Corinthians 8:6 is a
textual instance of what in theological terms is called “redoublement”: unity
and distinction are here part of a single movement and identification that is
the Triune life. Christ’s economic
mediation of the Father’s will, and their ultimate “kyriotic” unity of Lordship
are not in tension. In Hill’s estimation
they are part and parcel of the same Trinitarian dynamic in Paul’s course of
thought.
Now, while we are not going to go into Hill’s specific
textual interpretation, we do need to head off a misunderstanding: what he is not arguing is that if we import the theological category of
redoublement, we can magically gloss the text and make the difficulties go
away. Rather his argument is: the true
nature of Paul’s logic of unity and differentiation between the Father and the
Son’s sending in the economy (and, of course in the next chapter, the Holy
Spirit) when textually considered, are better read displaying a dynamic logic
of unity-in-difference that later came
to be identified in theological discourse as “redoublement.” Trinitarian theology is not being imported
(at least not intentionally), but rather is seen to resonate with a more robust
reading of Paul’s logic, exegetically construed.
When all is said and done this is an absolutely grand
demonstration of the marriage of theology, exegesis, and historical
awareness. Hill’s knowledge of his
sources is vast and admirable. His
greatest contribution is—using his own words—to show “that Trinitarian doctrine
may be used retrospectively to shed light on and enable a deeper penetration of
the Pauline texts in their own historical milieu, and that it is not
necessarily anachronistic to allow later Christian categories to be the lens
through which one reads Paul” (171). Or,
to put it the other way around: pro-Nicene trinitarianism can be seen as
genuinely Pauline, working out themes and statements in his letters.
Moreover, though Hill does not explicitly put it this way,
his book demonstrates that the controversies of Trinitarian theology—Arianism,
Sabellianism, Marcellianism—are not antiquities and esoterica best left to
Patristic specialists, at which modern exegetes merely roll their eyes and get
on with their business. While at
points—just like any heuristic—Hill’s breakdown of scholars into High/Low camps
in Pauline work is too schematic (and he himself admits this), it, along with
the concomitant textual questions these scholars raise, show that modern
exegetes are circulating around dilemmas startlingly similar to those with
which Nicene Christianity was concerned.
The discussion, for example, on the difficulties involved in
what it means that Christ eventually “gives up” or “hands over” the Kingdom to
the Father (120ff), repeats in a familiar key the problem many had in the early
church: such a handing over of the Kingdom surely indicated that Christ was
subordinate (ontologically) to the Father (Marcellus of Ancyra, in his early
work, in fact, seems to indicate that Christ himself will cease, and be
re-identified with God per se when the
Kingdom is given up). It would seem,
just as Karen Kilby advises us that one cannot, as it were, “kick out the
ladder”[2] of
the Trinity’s formation contexts for a speculative and free-floating doctrine,
Hill may be seen to agree but offer the inverse claim: we cannot kick out the
Trinity, for then the ladder (so to say: the diverse texts of scripture) simply
falls (to pieces).
Hill has demonstrated with his work, therefore, that
pro-Nicene trinitarianism is not merely an antiquated philosophy, but an
exegetical struggle that is still with us today. Hill demonstrates not only that Trinitarian
theology aids exegesis (and vice-versa), but also that the rich history of the
church is not merely a reliquary, but a living thing, whose real struggles and
triumphs are with us still. There are no
abstract musings of a Fundamental Theology here, calling for an ideal reconciliation
between disciplines. Hill has admirably shown us he has already found and
enacted such a way in practice, and in doing so, has set an exciting precedent
for future work.
Comments