Fuller Seminary M.A. Theology – TH511: Systematic Theology I – Theology and Anthropology – Spring 1985. I had taken a few years “off” following my graduation from Biola University (1981), before beginning a Masters program in Theology at Fuller Seminary, somewhat following in the footsteps of one of my favorite professors from Biola, Professor Ron Pierce, who was completing his Ph.D at Fuller. Now almost forty-years removed from these writings, I wonder what would have happened to me, had not dropped out of the program. I’ve clearly come quite a distance since my freshman year as a religious studies major at Loyola Marymount University, but still had the youthful “enthusiasm” to assume that I was in any position to write about the Triune Nature of God. Not only that, but there seems to be two versions of this this paper (the one posted below appears to be the one that I submitted to Dr. Colin Brown). I don’t know which one is the later version. At first I thought that the other version was the second version because it does more “hand-holding” and explanation of terms, but it might that I turned in that earlier version, got feedback and made the changes shown in this version. Too bad the note written by Dr. Brown was completely illegible (see attached below the paper). You can see that other version in the course syllabus and notes PDF. Enjoy. 2024-05-15

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The Trinity: Scripture, Structures and Limits

by Joseph B. Bustillos

A Paper Submitted to Dr. Colin Brown
of the School of Theology
of Fuller Theological Seminary
TH511: Systematic Theology 1

May 16, 1985

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I have two contentions regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. The first is that the doctrine of the Trinity is inextricably tied to the revelation of God given in the scriptures. That is, it was formulated after the closing of the Canon of Scripture in order to bring an understanding to how the doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Christ and the monotheistic nature of God’s being, which are both confessed to by the Biblical writers, work together. The second contention is that because of the literary nature of the scriptures, that is the intent of the original authors and the scope or focus of their concerns, any statement made in reference to the Trinity must be made in a limited fashion as a “model” looking towards aiding our understanding of the Nature of the Triune God of the Christian scriptures. These two contention work together in somewhat of a circular fashion.

THE TRINITY AND SCRIPTURE

Our beliefs, with regard to matters with which we are not directly acquainted, e.g., the facts of the Gospel story, are grounded not on the mental picture which we form of them, and which is usually erroneous, but on general or abstract ideas. But our belief in the Trinity, our belief in God, cannot be based on any “general idea.”¹

That there is a relationship between the concept of the Trinity and the Canon of Scripture should be obvious, that the relationship is exclusive is not so obvious. I find the basis for such an exclusive relationship between scripture and the Trinity in the inability of the Natural or General Revelation to produce an example of Trinity in Nature. Try as they might, the Church Fathers, particularly Tertullian and Augustine, successfully illustrate “three-ness” or “one-ness” but not “one-in-three-ness and simultaneously three-in-one-ness.”² Thus, we are left with just the testimony of Scripture. To be fair to Tertullian and those that followed, they were working with the premise that the Nature of God’s Being should be found imprinted in the Nature of Creation, Vestigia Trinitatis. Where they made a mistake, I think, is in the type of examples that they looked
for.³

Working from his Dialectical heritage. Earth began his theology along the opposite philosophic premise that if God is revealed at all then he must be a Trinity because his Otherness would restrict him from disclosing himself if he were “non-trinitarian.⁴ Barth’s model runs parallel to his three-fold understanding of the Word of God. Because of the revelation of God in Scripture (The existence of the Word of God in the light of God’s Otherness) he views the Trinity as “Revealed, Revelation and Revealedness.”⁵ In some ways this model tends to echo Augustine’s “Love, Lover and Beloved.”⁶

The point of all this is that regardless of one’s perspective, there would be no Trinity or basis for a trinitarian understanding of the Nature of God without first recognizing that its foundation is in the revelation of God found in the scriptures. But what is this revelation of God? In the first instance it is not, “Thus sayeth the Lord God, ‘I am Trinity, and you shall worship as such.'” Unfortunately there are no passages in Scripture that say that. Thus, while Augustine would rather we didn’t base our understanding of the Trinity on a “general idea,” that is exactly what we have in scripture.
This leads us to the question, “Why the Trinity at all? Why not monarchianism or modalism, et al?” The center of the controversy is to be found in ones understanding of Christology, specifically the Incarnation of God in Christ.

THE INCARNATION

It appears that in the New Testament there are clear elements for a doctrine of the Trinity. There is a commitment to the unity of God as in the Old Testament, albeit with some modifications of the way in which God is thought to have been revealed; there is a development of a considerable christological tradition and there are some important suggestions of an understanding of the Holy Spirit as revealing the presence of God. However we do not have in precise terms a conscious discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity as an issue.⁷

One cannot discuss the Trinity without also discussing the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Incarnation seems to be with us from the moment we first turn to the pages of the New Testament in the Nativity Narrative of Matthew’s gospel.

“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet; “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel”—which means, “God with us.” (Matthew 1:20b-23)

Yet before I go off and begin citing various passages that seem to reflect the full divine nature of Christ (“See, it’s right there in black and white, “Thus sayeth the Lord God…”) I need to acknowledge the significance that the terms may have had for the original first century (in this case, Jewish) hearers and thus attempt to suppress for a moment my twentieth century bias with its fully developed christology and homogenized monotheism.

The titles addressed to Jesus of Nazareth, for example, may seem to have significant value to us in so far as they “reveal” Jesus’ divinity, but to those who lived prior to the council of Nicea their significance may have had nothing to do with Eternal Realities but with a hope and a belief in a man of whom it was said would come some day and set them free.⁸ This aspect of the question must not be taken too lightly. I must face the reality that in addressing the question of the Incarnation of God in Christ (and the doctrine of the Trinity) I am attempting to put into precise rational words what the biblical writers left in non-technical pictorial language.⁹ Hugo Meynell writes in defense of the obvious gap between the concepts presented by the Church Fathers and the language used by the Biblical writers as being brought about by the need to adapt Christianity to other cultures and, more importantly, the development of Socratic logic and reflection:

As a result of such reflection what was originally expressed in a dramatic and poetic ways is progressively able to be stated in a more and more exact and rigorous manner, by use of the kind of technical terminology which is most familiar to us from the natural sciences.¹⁰

CHRISTOLOGY AND THE EMPIRICAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

Rather than making a brief survey of the various texts of scripture that are normally cited to establish Christ’s divinity (and therefore the Trinity), I would like to turn to an article by Christopher B. Kaiser entitled “The Discernment of Triunity.”¹¹ In this article he develops a Christology that is based on the testimony of scripture and the “empirical-phenomenological” approach. His application of this approach appeals to me because, on the one hand, he’s using a method that reflects a development made in religious studies over the last half century and, on the other hand, he’s intelligently dealing with the written record of scripture. Briefly, the empirical-phenomenological approach involves establishing on an empirical “grounding” (historically verifiable event) an encounter with the Holy (a numinous-sacred presence).¹² The challenge for Kaiser is that, among other things, he must establish that the numinous-encounter in Jesus was definitive of Jesus’ life-time existence (and thus establish a trinitarian model as opposed to the “adoption” or “inspiration” explanations for the phenomenon).

After searching for the proper grounding of his thesis. Kaiser bases his findings on the prayer/personal relationship between the Father and the Son and upon the miraculous phenomenon

surrounding Jesus’ ministry.

I find that the prayer life of Jesus, as observed by the disciples and the early Church, is a suitable empirical basis for the apostolic discernment of triunity and that it is possible to analyze the rather complex nature of this discernment into the following elements (in spite of the fact that they are organically inter-related, they are logically distinct):

1. The presence of God discerned in Jesus (miracles, prophetic teachings, etc.)
2. This presence discerned to be continual and irrevocable (everyday life, suffering, death).
3. This presence discerned to be immediate and ‘personal’ (revision of law, healing on Sabbath, forgiving sins); together with (2) implies ‘Incarnation,’ ‘God with us.’
4. This presence discerned in continual conjunction with the distinct personal presence of God-the-Father (prayers of Jesus, ‘responses’ of the Father); implies two distinct divine ‘persons.’
5. Theses two divine presences discerned to be reciprocally related, ‘coinherent’ (intimacy of prayer, Jesus’ use of ‘Abba’); implies two ‘persons’ in one God (John 14:11, 10:30).
6. Discernment of these divine presences discerned to be due to divine ‘inspiration.’ presence of Holy Spirit in the Church itself (1 Cor 12:3).
7. Presence of the Spirit discerned to be continual, immediate, and intimately related to apprehension of God as ‘Father’ and Jesus as his ‘Son’ (Rom 8:15, Gal 4:6); implies three, and only three, ‘coinhering,’ divine persons, one God.”¹³

Thus, although I’ve gone about it in a round-about way, we are left with an understanding that the doctrine of the Trinity is inextricably tied to the revelation of God given in the scriptures.

STRUCTURES AND LIMITS

To repeat my second contention: because of the literary nature of the scriptures, that is the intent of the original authors and the scope or focus of their concerns, any statement made in reference to the Trinity must be made in a limited fashion as a “model” looking towards aiding our understanding of the Nature of the Triune God of the Christian scriptures.

To the systematic or logical mind a preliminary reading of the Scriptures should reveal a naggingly consistent trajectory towards open-endedness in terms of definitive doctrinal statements. Undaunted, such a mind might respond that this is because people today are asking different questions than they were during the Apostolic period. This is a good response. It is a far better response than the one made by those that completely ignore the discrepancy and either go about answering questions that no one is asking or roto-tilling the scriptural record to fight their vision of Reality. But the question still remains for both of them: Why is there such an Open-endedness to Scripture? Just about every major doctrine has some elements of Open-endedness in it; whether it be the doctrine of Election, or the Sovereignty of God, or the Inspiration of the Scriptures, or Kingdom of Heaven/God, or the Triune Nature of the Godhead. This question points us in two directions. The first is the nature of structures and the second, which is very closely related to the first, is the nature of our “knowing” things.

There seems to be a nasty tendency among Christian to see structures as Realities and not Utilities. This tendency can be seen from Augustine on down the line, and is an obvious throw back to the Platonic notion that beyond all phenomenon is the Perfect/Ideal Reality. Thus, Christians often see the doctrine (or doctrinal statement) as the Reality and the phenomenon as the Image. All seems well and good until our beloved Open-endedness comes along and presents an overwhelming number of exceptions to our newly devised rules, forcing us, we think, to either give up our Reality (the doctrine) or the phenomenon (the Image), This would not be a dilemma if we understood that structure is a construct of our own mind, devised to aid our understanding of the corresponding Reality. This is why I use the word “model” when referring to the doctrine of the Trinity. Because there is no scripture that explicitly declares, “Behold, I am Trinity, and I am Trinity in this manner…”; because the doctrine is a synthesis of the foundational Old Testament Monotheism and the heavenly vision of God incarnate in Christ, it is something that our minds have put together to aid us in understanding how God could be one and at the same time three.

The second direction is in terms of how we “know” things. As was once pointed out in class, our knowledge is a collection of approximations. “We are used to giving objective absolute certainties on things, but life isn’t that way; it presents good approximations but not objective absolute certainties.”¹⁴ Again, in reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, we have a model of the Inner Being of the Godhead and not a photograph or family portrait of the Father, Son & Holy Ghost. We live with this sort of approximation in every area of our lives and so it should not come as a surprise that.

Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1st Corinthians 13:12, 13).

It's a typical day for the man of steel 
a little bit happy and little bit sad
That seems like a reasonable way to feel 
for a man in a world gone mad...
'Cause there's a poor man begging for a crust of bread 
on a hard mean street downtown
And there's a rich woman sewing with golden thread
on the train of her wedding gown

And the man of steel has a tear in his eye for the homeless one
And the man of steel has a lump in his throat for the
owner of love
And the man of steel has hope in his heart for anyone 
who will see both sides and still decide to carry on...

And the man of steel has hope in his heart for anyone 
Who will sing a clear and truthful song
Who can hear a lie and still be strong
Who can see both sides and still decide to carry on.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1981.
• Augustine: Later Works. “The Trinity.” Library of Christian Classics: Ichthus Edition. John Burnaby, Ed. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955, p. 37.
• Barth, Carl. Church Dogmatics. trans. G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975, I, pp. 297ff.
• Bauckham, Richard. “Jurgen Moltmann,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980.
• Bettenson, Henry, ed. & trans. The Early Christian Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
• The Later Christian Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• Bray, Gerald Lewis. “The Patristic Dogma,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980.
• Dodd, C. H. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1953, pp. 228-285.
• Ellis, Peter. Matthew: His Mind and His Message. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1974, pp. 101-112.
• Guthrie, Donald. New Testament Theology. Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1981, pp. 235-407.
• Hocking, David L. The Nature of God in Plain Language; Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1984.
• Kaiser, Christopher B. “The Discernment of Triunity,” in. One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980, pp. 27-41.
• Kaye, Bruce N. “The New Testament,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980, pp. 22-23.
• Meynell, Hugo. “Bernard Lonergan,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980, p. 96.
• Nicole, Roger. “The Meaning of the Trinity.” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980.
• Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
• Rahner, Karl. The Trinity. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974.
• Roberts, Richard. “Karl Earth,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980.
• Spiceland, James D. “Process Theology,” in One God in Trinity. Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, Ed. Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980.
• Terry, Pat. “Man of Steel,” The Silence. Waco, Texas: Word Music, 1984.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. Augustine; Later Works. “The Trinity,” Library of Christian Classics: Ichthus Edition, ed. John Burnaby (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), p. 37.[↩]
2. Augustine, pp. 38ff and Class notes: Dr. Colin Brown, Systematic Theology I, Fuller Theological Seminary, May 16, 1985.[↩]
3. One of the concepts that Augustine develops is based on 1st John 4:16; he sees the Trinity as “Love, Lover and Beloved.” I feel that up to this point Augustine presents some real insight into the Nature of God. There is a Subject/Object nature to Love that requires relationship or communion. So that for God to be love, he must also be in communion with the Object of his Love, and thus it follows that there is a plurality, a trinity to God. Augustine’s mistake is that he then attempts to identify the “Love, Lover & Beloved,” attempting to discern a one-for-one correspondence between the Trinity and the “Love, Lover, Beloved” analogy. He goes from the concept of communion within the Godhead (something that is immanent in God) to dividing God into three roles (something functional, “economic”), and the image gets lost in a pile of disjointed metaphors. Augustine, p. 56.[↩]
4. Carl Barth, Church Dogmatics. tr. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), I, pp. 297ff.[↩]
5. Barth, p. 295.[↩]
6. Augustine, p. 56.[↩]
7. Bruce N. Kaye, “The New Testament,” in Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, eds.. One God in Trinity (Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980), pp. 22-23.[↩]
8. Further reading on Christology and the titles for Christ see: C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 228-285; Peter Ellis, Matthew; His Mind and His Message (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1974), pp. 101-112; Donald Guthrie, New Testament Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter- Varsity Press, 1981), pp. 235-407.[↩]
9. That the Bible is written in non-technical pictorial language is certainly part of a larger discussion than can be adequately addressed here (one then wonders about the logic of addressing the question of the Trinity…). It’s not even a question of precision or style but one of the ever elusive intent. An interesting book dealing with the literary nature of the Scriptures is: Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1981).[↩]
10. Hugo Meynell, “Bernard Lonergan,” in Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, eds.. One God in Trinity (Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980), p. 96.[↩]
11. Christopher B. Kaiser, “The Discernment of Triunity,” in Peter Toon and James D. Spiceland, eds.. One God in Trinity (Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980), pp. 27-41.[↩]
12. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). Kaiser’s face-lift of mysterium tremendum et fascinans is a heartwarming reminder of one of the classes that I took as a Religious Studies major at Loyola Marymount University. Ah . . . nothing like applying my personal (Reformational) encounter with Christ to the old Jesuit musings about the Holy. Class notes: Herbert Ryan, S.J., Exploring Christian Mysticism (RS 160), Loyola Marymount University, Fall 1976.[↩]
13. Kaiser, p. 37.[↩]
14. Class notes: Dr. Colin Brown, Systematic Theology I, Fuller Theological Seminary, April 11, 1985.[↩]
15. Pat Terry, "Man of Steel," The Silence (Waco, Texas: Word Music, 1984).[↩]