A Study in Comparative Trinitarian Methodology

For the Academic Paper form with full citations, see here.

The method by which we come to know the Trinity is very different for theologians after Barth than it was among classical theologians. This is not to suggest that the doctrine of the Trinity sounded forth with one voice prior to the twentieth century. Obviously Enlightenment thought had long cast its shadow of doubt upon the whole idea as “an offense to reason.” However, even among orthodox Evangelical theologians, there was a basic shift away from metaphysical formulation to the more narrative path. This was especially the case for those influenced by Barth. Chief among the Latin theologians was Augustine, whose work On the Trinity became the standard throughout the Middle Ages. Whatever minor disagreements there had been, whatever contributions made by subsequent thinkers, there was basic agreement in the West with respect to the content and method of the Augustinian doctrine.

Among more recent thinkers, it seems to me that the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson best expresses the movement away from any sense of a priori approach to the way that Scripture unveils this truth to us. The not so subtle assumption in this movement is that “speculative” accounts and “biblical” accounts stand at odds. The use of such antithetical labels gives shape to the corresponding subject matter. In Volume One of Jenson’s Systematic Theology, we have set forth a Trinitarian account of God in his redemptive works. Like Barthians in general, this will set God for us, in the gospel, as opposed to God in himself, in his eternal being. Unlike more conservative Barthians, Jenson’s Trinitarian theology goes further than a rebuke to the classical method that speculates of God’s essence “back behind” the economy of grace. More than that, the triune God is revealed to be a function of his own decision, and that via his identities in the historical drama.    

Because the methods of Augustine and Jenson are so divergent, it will be necessary to examine the presuppositions of how God reveals himself to us. We should not be surprised if the actual content of the doctrine turns out to be different as well. While the task of the historical theologian will be to set forth what Augustine and Jenson have really said, including the latter’s critique of the former, the systematic theologian must advance beyond merely descriptive analysis. One must bring Scripture to bear and then synthesize all of the available grammar in a way most conducive to edification for the contemporary church.  

What this essay seeks to demonstrate is that the Augustinian way has been misunderstood by Jenson and that the classical way is to be preferred over the newer path. This will be true both of the method and of the content that follows, not to speak of ways that the content often causes aspects of the method to follow.

The contemplative and narrative paths ought not to be opposed to each other in Trinitarian methodology, and the modern penchant for calling of the former “speculative” and the latter “biblical” ought never have obscured that for theologians. When it comes to the doctrinal implications of my thesis, this is only to say that the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are determinative for the economic relations: processions determining missions. Even if we choose to limit the word “missions,” seeing how the Father is not “sent,” or in accounting for ways in which the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit differ from each other, we could say the same in this way: The economic identities of trinitarian persons are determined by what Augustinian doctrine called “relations of origin.” That is to say that the narratively revealed is fitting to what is metaphysically essential. 

In support of that set of claims, this essay will move from 1. comparing Augustine and Jenson as to their presuppositions on revelation, 2. summarizing Augustine’s way of apologetic and analogy, 3. summarizing Jenson’s way of narrative self-disclosure, 4. asking the question of what drives the likeness of missions and processions — divine freedom or divine fittingness, 5. an evaluation of the two trinitarian paths and content, and then some concluding remarks. 

PRESUPPOSITIONS ON REVELATION

The Christian doctrine of revelation is precisely of divine revelation. God is revealing himself. Whatever else theology implies, it is first and foremost the knowledge of who God is. For this reason our exposition of the God who is revealed and our explanation of how God reveals himself cannot be easily separated. One need not be either classical in orientation or an adherent to the modern theology in order to affirm that such revelation must be of the triune God, and not merely that which can serve as an object of worship for all of the monotheistic faiths. This will not be where Augustine and Jenson diverge. 

To say that Augustine was influenced by Platonic thought would be quite the understatement. Those who would defend Augustine, as this essay largely does, ought not to waste time apologizing for the Platonic element. His was a “critical appropriation” of Plato. With some exceptions, Augustine retained what he ought and transposed what was most incompatible in a Pauline key. We will restrict ourselves to those philosophical elements that are pertinent to how God reveals himself to the rational mind. This will require focus on one metaphysical piece of the puzzle and one epistemological piece. I refer here to what Plato called “Ideas” (or Forms) and then what Augustine called “illumination.” Right away we will see a connection between trinitarian method and content, because what connects the realm of Ideas and the way of illumination will be nothing other than the logos.

For Augustine, the logos is both the Image in God and the Light of those images in the world. However, lest we proceed too quickly, we will draw forth each of these concepts: ideas and illumination. 

First to Augustine’s metaphysical vision, we should start with something that is very uncontroversial. Just as it was for any classical theologian, Augustine held that the immaterial was more real than the material. I say that this is uncontroversial, and yet if one listens to the modern theologian it becomes plain that too much focus on this “more real” essence gets us into trouble. Most of these thinkers will not deny that the eternal things of God are in fact more real. Instead they will paint a picture of how remote and impersonal such a scheme was, and consequently how unlike the God who relates to his people in Scripture. However, it is just in the details of the narrative that Augustine’s view had such sensitive implications. We see an example of this in Augustine’s treatment of the theophanies. When the modern reader views these mysterious appearances in the Bible, or when skeptics demand the visibility of God, what they are both looking for is something “more” that is really less.    

Augustine’s realism must be considered here. Although strictly speaking, this belongs to a thinker’s metaphysical assumptions, it is very relevant to how revelation can function and what such can be a revelation of to begin with. Augustine did not simply take Plato’s realism — his realm of the Forms that were independent of a coherent picture of the divine — but rather he reappropriated that vision into a biblical framework. In the simplest terms, for Augustine, transcendent forms such as beauty, goodness, justice, and truth were not merely individual essences, but were either 1. divine attributes and / or 2. divine ideas. Today philosophers would call such ideas universals. They are what give objective sense to all of the predicates we use. For unless there is an eternal, immutable, and immaterial Good then there can be no-thing for a “good work” to be good about, nor even a “bad motive” to have fallen short of. 

Now this had immediate implications for Augustine’s theology proper. A constant refrain, not only in this work, but in other writings, is that it is not one thing for God to be just or self-sufficient or holy or immutable, on the one hand, and another thing for him to be. Long before Thomas had reworked Aristotle’s categories to codify the existence-essence unity, Augustine had already cast the simplicity of God as a theological corollary of philosophical realism.

Where modern commentators struggle to reconcile simplicity and triunity, Augustine was quick to relate them. He says, for instance: “True greatness is that by which not only is a great house great or any great mountain great, but by which anything at all is great that is called great, so that greatness is one thing and things that are called great by it another … God however is not great with a greatness which he is not himself, as though God were to participate in it to be great.”

Not only must God be the simple unity of all of what we call his perfections, but each of the three Persons must also be the same in substance. Hence realism was necessary both for real monotheism and for orthodox trinitarianism. 

Before leaving Augustine’s metaphysics for his epistemology, one more thing should be introduced. Given that we cannot grasp incommunicable subsistence, the Scriptures communicate 1. by means of material things (accommodation), and 2. about ways in which the creature is like God only in some way (analogy). This is why theological contemplation and narrative movement are not enemies; yet the order matters, with subsisting deity always remaining the intellectual touchstone for what lies behind a narrated act. For Plato, it was by logical “dialectic,” that is, by abstract reasoning alone, that one ascends to the intelligible realm from out of the transitory world of shadows. Here we see both continuity and discontinuity with Plato. On the one hand, Augustine accepted that there were three basic levels of being: “the highest (God), the lowest (the body), and the intermediate level (the soul),” so that the rational creature could only know that which is higher, by that which is higher in him, namely the mind. On the other hand, this “ascent” is something for which all men, even philosophers, were naturally incapacitated. 

Augustine believed that what communicates God’s truth to the rational creature is, in a word, illumination. Ike Miller defines Augustine’s view of illumination in this way: “illumination is human participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit” or else “human participation in the light of the divine light.” In this harmonious vision of revelation and reason, “light is figurative for God, eyes are the soul, and sight is the soul’s receptivity of truth.” “What we can conclude is that what Augustine calls the ‘eye of the soul’—the intellectus—is only a light insofar as the divine light enlightens it. The intellect is a lamp lit by another light. It is derived and dependent.” Yet in keeping with Romans 1:19-20, God is both the source of light and that which is communicated in that light. 

The “Word became flesh” is foundational to Augustine’s theory of signs in On Christian Doctrine, but it is also crucial to the concept of analogy in his wider doctrine of revelation. The Word accommodates himself to our frailties, so that we can start simply and progress upward. Inscripturation is no different. Note that this shows up more in the way of Trinitarian economy than critics of Augustine have let on. Christ’s role in the economy involves both revelation and redemption. Incarnation and illumination are “indivisible—but not indistinguishable.” Since God dwells in unapproachable light, the incarnation accommodates him to our weakness. There are three basic ways that light functions in relation to logos: (1) the life of the logos is the light of men that purifies man’s sight. (2) This light of the mind is the internal way we see wisdom. (3) This light is a Person: Christ. In all this, “we see the Light, by the Light.” These are the twin pillars to bear in mind — Ideas and Illumination (connected analogically by the logos) — once we arrive at the aim of De Trinitate. 

For Robert Jenson, the classical method was all wrong. The whole tendency to look to God in se is to cast salvation as a return back to the timeless origin, against the aspect of narrative development.

The great Greek “fear” was that all things could be consigned to the category of things that pass away. Early Christian theology attempted to step into this same void. In this Jenson is typical of modern critics who envision classical metaphysics as an answer to either an existential or polemical anxiety. I have made reference to a post-Barthian stream of thought, and its trajectory is unmistakable. On the other hand, Jenson self-consciously advanced such a trajectory far beyond and made use of other emphases from figures such as Rudolph Bultmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Starting with Barth, however, the crucial first step is that revelation is by trinitarian self-disclosure. This is the gospel. There is no true God to be found back behind the Word made flesh. 

Treating God in se is mere abstraction and pits such a God against the active, personal, historical, and narrative; and moreover, treating the “word” as a passive commodity, rather than the “Word” as its content and ground of revelation, tends also to pit the normative word, with its ready-at-hand function to win arguments, against the dynamic word which summons the church to obedience. As Barth pushed against a God of nature over against revelation, Jenson pushed even further against a God of being over against his revealed acts. “It is precisely this distinction between the god and its revelation that the biblical critique of religion attacks. For the space normal religion leaves between revelation and deity itself is exactly the space across which we make our idolatrous projections.” Thus he seemed to agree wholeheartedly with Karl Rahner on the problems with treating God as he is eternally, first, and then following with a discussion of the Trinity.

For Jenson, the Barthian revolution was a promising start, and yet it lacked both a pneumatological and eschatological dimension. It was still beholden to the classical content, even if not method. 

So from Pannenberg, there was a historical development, a telos made known by the resurrection; and Jenson credits Bultmann for realizing that “Faith … is not general trust in an entity called God, but what happens when the gospel is spoken and heard as an address that can only be God’s own speech.” That can sound innocuous enough. Though he also credits Bultmann’s conception of faith as “‘surrender of all security’ in complete openness to the future … [and in] God as ‘the Coming One,’ whose deity is his ‘constant futurity.’” Adding to Barth’s Christocentric Word the more radically historicized eschatology, now Christ the Word was conceived as both Content and Identity of the future, and rooting himself in the Eastern theologians’ emphasis of the “two hands” of the Son and Spirit, Jenson would begin to utilize the language of “identities” rather than either “relations” or even “persons,” so as to pave the way for the Trinity to be revealed as God choosing to be in his saving acts. 

AUGUSTINE’S WAY OF APOLOGETIC AND ANALOGY

Several scholars point to a stated aim in De Trinitate beyond the more obvious two parts. Books I through VII make a defense of the doctrine articulated at Nicaea and Constantinople. Books VIII through XV utilize a series of Trinitarian analogies that may be found in the image of God. Those two sections are apparent to any cursory reading; yet a more careful search begins to reveal a thread that runs through the whole. Gioia suggests about the first seven books that there is an “outer layer” and “inner layer,” the latter of which expands outward into the more obvious goal by the time one arrives at Book VIII. The inner layer may be described as “the way we know God.”

This is a method that moves from apologetic to analogy on the surface, but a better way to express this is as a path of ascent. It is a rational ascent where the way “in” is the way “up.” In other words, in order to find the character of the triune God in that intelligible realm one has to travel by means of the intelligent part of the image: that which makes us more like God than anything else in our own constitution. 

What about that orthodox defense? As an apologetic, it functions as a corrective to all forms of subordinationism. There was of course specific preoccupation with the Arians and their later iteration: the Eunomians. Augustine surveys the texts where the uniqueness of God is conceived of as excluding the Son (1 Tim. 6:14, Rom. 11:33-36), which he partly refutes with texts like 1 Corinthians 8:6 and John 1:1-3. He does the same with texts on the Spirit. That the Son is “sent” and “lesser” in this or that verse sets Augustine to dividing between a few basic categories of texts. What emerges are in fact hermeneutical rules. In the first rule there are two classes of texts. There are those which treat the Son in the form of God (forma dei) and others which treat him in the form of a servant (forma serui). Even this rule leaves much undone. Some rule will be necessary to deal with texts that ascribe to God, as subject, that which is human: blood (Acts 20:28) or loss (Rom. 8:32). These will belong to that category of speech where the Son is the subject, so that either the divine or human may be ascribed to the Person as such. We recognize this as the basic application of the communicatio idiomatum. As one ascends into the heights of the doctrine, there are even verses which ascribe deity to the Son or the Spirit, yet still seem to subordinate them to the Father, and thus the Nicene language, “God from God.”

The next question suggests itself. If both the Son and the Spirit are God and from God, then why not call the Spirit “a son,” or say that he is “begotten,” or about the Son simply that he “proceeds”? This is where we are introduced to the concept of fittingness. Given that the Father is unbegotten, nor does he proceed, it is maintained that though the Father was manifest in the world on occasion, we cannot say that he was “sent” because he does not proceed from either Son or Spirit. As one textual example of judging the narrative roles by what is fitting of the immanent Trinity, in John 5:26 Jesus said, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” It is debated whether this is an eternal generation text, since this granting is “as” the Father’s life is in himself. Others will push back on account of the context that Christ is given authority as Man to raise the dead and to judge and so forth. Even if we conclude that it is only a statement of the economic works, we may ask why the Son is given such power to raise the dead.  

If there is a doctrinal bridge between the apologetic and the analogies, it is surely the focus on the Son as the Wisdom of God, and the Spirit as the Love of God. The occasion was a response to the tortured Arian distinction between what is said “substance-wise” versus “relationship-wise,” tortured because of their insistence that it (equivocating over the term “it”) must either be one or the other across the whole range of texts and concept-usages. So these are initially teased out so as to show how an attribute can be spoken of one the Persons in a special way even while we must recognize that this is true of God as to substance. This is actually a crucial point to remember when Augustine’s analogies and concept of persons are accused of being reduced to function. The critic is only looking at one half of the formula: the Son as Wisdom or the Spirit as love — as if the Father is neither wise nor loving. In fact, Augustine painstakingly allays these concerns. Why then is wisdom so frequently discussed as that which proceeds from God? His answer is that in these places “it is the Son who is being introduced to us.” In other words, this is that Wisdom which is begotten, not made. Gioia’s rendering of this is helpful: “Thus each person is wisdom and yet the three together are one wisdom, but with a direction (i.e. the Son is ‘wisdom from wisdom’).”

In order to see how this “way” functions, we have to get a sense of Augustine’s spiritually holistic epistemology that unites believing, knowing, and loving. Their relationship to each other begins in a pair of dilemmas.

Knowing and believing are circular to each other. Unless you believe something about that thing being there and worthy of exploration, you will not understand; and yet one cannot believe that which he knows nothing about. Knowing and loving are also circular to each other. One cannot love what he does not know; and yet one must have some semblance of its good to desire to know it.

The good news here is that these are not vicious circles after all. It is faith that breaks us out; yet “faith or belief in things we do not know presupposes a kind of general knowledge or experience about the things we believe, so that we can at least know what we believe.”

This is where general revelation, and especially in the mold of illumination comes in. The invisible things of God revealed to all become the building blocks for the rational mind to put together even specially revealed theology: “Thus we believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of a virgin who was called Mary. What a virgin is, and what being born is, and what a proper name is we do not believe, we just know.” How do we know? We know it through the created world, through nature. But this is not nature-apart-from revelation. This is that Light that was in the world already (Jn. 1:9) and so it is natural theology via gracious illumination. 

Augustine seemed to see the via negativa as preparatory for positive insight: “if before we can know what God is, we are at least able to know what he is not” Far from pitting the timeless God against the world, as Barthian theologians have maintained, the Augustinian view of illumination has natural theology building up the fabric of belief such that those aspects of human nature most like God become a fitting way of accumulating real knowledge of God. 

Now we are ready to see the analogies for what they are. While they are a rational ascent through reason to God, they are not what we would call “apologetics” or even “natural theology” in themselves. There is nothing in Books VIII to XV of this work that necessarily contradicts the later designation of Thomas Aquinas that the Trinity belongs to those articles of faith which unaided reason could never have discovered. Before listing each of the analogies, it will be useful to have a mental picture of Augustine’s view of the soul. We need to think of “concentric circles,” the outermost being the sensations, one circle in, being memory or imagination, then further in, scientia (knowledge), and then innermost, sapientia (wisdom), which is a species of knowledge but participating in eternal truths as objects of love. All of the analogies will fall somewhere on this map. 

The first triad is the memory, understanding, and willing, immediately of external bodies, and the second is memory stored, recollection, and will, of the same. These instantly elicit an insufficiency, for the body — or that which is seen — that initiates the beholding is external to the mind. It is even external to the body altogether. This has two weaknesses that make it unfitting for a perfect analogy. The first is that it is beholding of the lower realm of material bodies, and the second is that it is indeed external, and thus exemplifies an initiating actor beyond the spiritual triad, which cannot be true of that highest and most blessed Trinity. 

He then moves ever more inward, and it is here in the inward ascent where his discussion of knowledge, faith, and love show themselves to find completion for the image of God only in the essence of God. He had previously discussed the self as an image per se, and that subjective “I” both knows and loves. In fact it knows itself knowing and loves itself in that very constant self-conscious activity. Now love and mind are both spiritual substances, not two beings but one. And of the lover and beloved, “these are called two things relatively to each other.” “So then, insofar as they are referred to each other they are two; but insofar as they are stated with reference to self they are each spirit and they are both together one spirit, they are each mind and both together one mind.” Note that this mirrors helpfully what is unified in essence and what is proper to the persons; but it also brings us to three-ness, as that which both loves and knows itself is one thing, the knowledge and the love being the second and third.  He goes on to show how these feature coinherence and inseparability. 

His inward trinities likewise have a few versions. One is of a “word” formed. By this he does not mean simply the verbal sounds we utter, but that inward perception of the truth. “And by this form we conceive true knowledge of things, which we have with us as a kind of word that we beget by uttering inwardly … This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of changeable nature or unchangeable truth.”

This word involves “begetting” because in our minds that perception must be formed, but the object itself is unchanging and our minds are simply conforming to the truth as it is. Obviously the very strength of this analogy will be its weakness. That a thing can be both unchanging in its essence, and yet begotten in its form, in us, is precisely because of that sequence that makes up discursive reasoning, and that conformity of mind which also implies finitude of mind. Needless to say, these are two things that Augustine does not want to attribute to God. But at least “what is begotten is equal to the begetter” and “each are loved insofar as we approve of our judgments,” so that there is still equality of substance and threeness. These, however, are not the same in the image of God. One man may have memory, understanding, and will, but he himself is not the essence of the three of these, nor even one of them.

A full treatment of the analogies is certainly an interesting subject, but one that exceeds the purposes of this essay. What ought to be seen in just these that have been mentioned is a preparation of the idea of fittingness. If we can see clearly enough in those “vestiges of the Trinity,” what is fitting about the distinctly three in one in the image of God, then it would seem that we could see even clearer what is fitting in the very actions of the Trinity in his outward works. 

JENSON’S WAY OF NARRATIVE SELF-DISCLOSURE

We can better understand Jenson’s constructive proposal through the lens of his deconstructive work. In the early centuries, his account tells us, both Logos Christology and even the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon fell short of the mark. Where Ignatius represented a conception of the logos that focused on the “speech” of God, Justin Martyr and the other apologists fixated on that Word that amounts to the “logic” of the world order. This was owing to their dialogue with Greek philosophy, but this nonetheless inclined the Western understanding of Trinitarian order toward the functional rather than personal. On top of that, Jenson chronicles three insufficiencies of the credal product from Nicaea to Chalcedon: 1. divine impassibility remained unchallenged (particularly in its relation to the gospel); 2. the logos as God’s “speech” was not recovered; and 3. even the Cappadocians acknowledged only relations of origins for what constituted the divine life and neglected the eschatological dimension of God’s “scriptural history.” 

Then there is his direct critique of Augustine. According to Jenson, Augustine could not grasp the Eastern distinction between ousia and hypostasis. Let us put on record one statement by Augustine that seems to prove the point beyond any reasonable doubt: “The Greeks also have another word, hypostasis, but they make a distinction that is rather obscure to me between ousia and hypostasis.” As Jenson put it: “The Cappadocians cut on this line to use hypostasis for an identifiable individual and ousia for what such an individual is with others of the same sort.” The West by contrast settled down into utilizing both ousia and hypostasis for merely “what is.” At any rate, he makes this out to be total dumbfoundedness, and further works that thread to the effect that Augustine “did not notice that Nicea asserts eventful differentiation in God,” and that because of his a priori “Platonic” commitment to divine simplicity. Moreover, eternal generation is a prejudice to get beyond because it implies this “eventful differentiation in God,” a quality which Jenson wanted to ascribe to God’s action below but which he had no use for in that timeless subsistence above. 

If Augustine’s method was a way of ascent, then Jenson’s method is a way of dramatic telos. It is not simply narrative. It is God driving that history to himself — to and with his Spirit. And yet narrative will be the material of the path: “the God to be interpreted in this work is the God identified by the biblical narrative.”

Jenson prefers the term “identities” in this model. “Among other nuances, it construes self-identity on the horizon of time, as hypostasis does not.” There are two main events by which God identifies himself in this drama: the Exodus and the Resurrection.

Jenson sets this forth as an axiom of sorts: “that an initial and determining theme of theology, and one with systematic emphasis in the system here offered, must be the identification of God by the Resurrection of Jesus”; and that “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.” There are exegetical strengths here, in that certain texts speak of “him who raised” Jesus from the dead (cf. Rom. 4:24; 8:11; 1 Cor. 15:15; 2 Cor. 1:9; Gal. 1:1; Col. 2:12; 1 Pet. 1:21); and Jesus identified the work he was about to perform in Jerusalem as an “exodus” (Lk. 9:31). Thus God is “the agent of” Jesus’ resurrection.

Jenson moves from the resurrection to a more primary identification with the God of Israel. This makes sense to him because the risen Jesus connected the disciples to the one he called “My Father,” and the one they wanted to pray to. To go “back” and yet still have the resurrection be primary is referred to as a kind of “chain” with different links, so long as we come “full circle.” The God-Israel relationship was always developing the Father-Son relationship, which Swain sees as compromising the Creator-creation distinction because, remember, this functions for Jenson as constituting the internal relationship between God the Father and God the Son. As the Hebrew Scriptures are an extension of the exodus reality, the Son begins to emerge as the dramatis dei personae in the position of Israel. 

It is the next move that shows how Jenson’s methodological proposal forms a radically different theology. He draws explicit attention to his own conceptual move, that is, “from the biblical God’s self-identification by events in time to his identification with those events.” He then seeks to justify that with this basic argument:

“Were God identified by Israel’s Exodus or Jesus’ Resurrection, without being identified with them, the identification would be a revelation ontologically other than God himself. The revealing events would be our clues to God, but would not be God.”

For the sake of clarity, Jenson’s formula is that the Exodus and Resurrection are not merely how God identifies himself, but that the actions therein are who he is.

One mistake that can be made here is to suppose that Jenson is offering a narrative account as opposed to a metaphysical one. However, this narrative account is precisely an alternative metaphysical scheme to that of classical metaphysics. Swain’s label for the model is helpful enough: “historicist trinitarian theology and metaphysics.” We may summarize it with a concise principle: the acting Subject in the gospel is the only divine being. Now as mentioned, Jenson will prefer the word “identities” to the words persons or relations; but the identities are of the trinitarian being in act. For example, Jenson wants to assert the necessity of God incarnate. In doing so, he engages in the very metaphysical speculation he shuns elsewhere: “The concept of ‘incarnation’ may not appear in Israel’s Scriptures, but we need only ask what a God would be like who would not incarnate himself, a God of ‘pure spirit,’ to see that it would be the precise antagonist of Israel’s God.” Swain hits on more of the motive behind the choice of the word identities: “Jenson prefers the term identity because it suggests an additional nuance: a person’s choice in time to be ‘this one and not another.’” 

Another concept to introduce is what Jenson calls “dramatic coherence.” This is God’s commitment to his people throughout the narrative. It is Jenson’s stand-in for an ontological perfection; though when he leans on Aristotle for the idea, he must show why Aristotle was wrong to consider temporal dependence an ontological imperfection. In this context, there is one incommunicable attribute that it might seem that Jenson is retaining from classical theology. That is divine infinity, which he appropriates from its use in Gregory of Nyssa. As we look closer, however, this “infinity” is not a transcendence of all creaturely limitations at all, as the classical doctrine would have it. Rather it is God’s “transcendence” to be limited by any being.  

Now it was mentioned that eschatology and pneumatology marked the distinctive advance beyond Barth. To the first, not only does this mean that God takes on a narrative self-identification process, but that this “self-identity … is established not from the beginning but from the end.” This is where Jenson borrows from Pannenberg, to highlight the “ontological priority of the future.” Secondly, what is distinct about the Holy Spirit’s role for Jenson? He introduced the problem in this way: “Is Pentecost a peer to Easter or does it merely display a meaning that Easter would in any case have? The first position has been endlessly pressed on the West by Orthodoxy; in the judgment of the present work, rightly.” Even more to the point, he says, “The Spirit is the Liveliness of the divine life because he is the Power of the divine future. He is the one who, when he in time gives a ‘down payment’ on the Kingdom, gives precisely himself … Where the Spirit works … he makes history enter the last times.” The language of “liberation” is even used in this context. The Spirit is he who “liberates” the Father to be in fact fatherly — the implication that it is in the historical raising of Jesus, the Son, that is how he becomes this. Along the narrative way, we find that “the gospel does not tell of a work done by a God antecedently and otherwise determined, but itself determines who and what God is.”

FITTINGNESS OR FREEDOM? THE QUESTION OF WHAT DRIVES LIKENESS

This section is about the nature of the relationship between the triune identities as they appear in the gospel missions and what they are in the eternal processions. That requires a disclaimer. The comparison here is not between one view that insists that there is such a connection and the other view that denies it. Rather, both theologians granting such a connection, the question is over the nature of that connection. 

For Jenson, we can take the saying literally that “what you see is what you get.” At least that is the case on the surface. One way that he articulates the likeness is to say, “the true God blesses and the gospel agitates no religious dynamism not identical with God’s own active presence,” or else, “any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God ‘himself’ from the actual historical dynamism of the church’s life has no place in Christianity.” In other words, you take seriously the God who acts in the Exodus and Resurrection, and if you find yourself abstracting out of dilemmas because your God must be some “other God” than this dramatically acting Person, then what you have is not at all the biblical God.

It seems that for Jenson, what determines that God is Israel’s Father is the Exodus, and what determines that saving status is that he did so. But then what determines that Christ will fulfill, or that the final salvation will fulfill all these events? It is simply that he had done so before. Thus God “transcends” time, not in timelessness, but in constancy through time. God is sovereign over events, but only by having performed in each. Whatever God must be, Jenson is ready to find agreement, but still insists that this is a meaningless concept unless he had saved.

And here is the key: these events “do not merely reveal who and what God is (epistemology). They determine who and what God is (ontology).” Or, as Swain has fairly summarized it: “God is as God does” in these events.

Another piece derived from Barth must be factored here. God is his own decision. This means his predestination in Christ, but the real emphasis is simply divine freedom to be. God’s own identity and being are rooted in his decision to be God in the person of Jesus Christ and so to be united to humanity. Now how this makes the Son “less arbitrary” than he sees Augustine’s view of person I cannot tell; but it seems to be because it is “the biblical Son” that is his own presupposition in God’s eternity. This was Jenson’s means of affirming transcendent, divine attributes while quite obviously spending most of his words on how God’s actions in history determine his being. Above and beyond the points on the temporal line — and yet still, we must say, in and through that timeline — there was God’s decision to be determined in this way. 

He has a central identification for Jesus in the drama. Christ is 1. the full historical reality of his whole work; 2. the Word; and 3. the Identity of the future so opened up. At this point another criticism presents itself, not unlike the priority of contemplative theology over the narrative. It is that even the most faithful biblical theology is really an exercise in some amount of systematic theology. How, for example, does Jenson know that Christ is these things? For “the Word” he can naturally appeal to John 1, although even there he seems to disagree so sharply with the classical concept. This does not begin to speak of the other two concepts enumerated here: “the full historical reality of his work” and “the identity of the future” that is opened up by that work. One potential answer is in how the resurrected body of Christ is “a ‘revelation’ (apokalypsis),” as Paul called it. Jenson sets aside the typical historical revisions of the resurrection appearances; but he does not do so in the manner of the evidential apologists. Rather, what makes it so clear that these appearances are indeed of the full human Christ is that this revealed “God’s final future” by the Spirit to the disciples. This is why he passed through walls. Jesus was now the first inhabitant of the new world showing forth that world at a point in ours. That is interesting, plausible, and not in any obvious way unorthodox. But why must it have been precisely the Son of God that they were seeing as that visitor?  

The clearest sense we get of Jenson’s grounding of the triune identities is with respect to past, present, and future faithfulness. It may be too much to say that the Father represents the past, the Son the present, and the Spirit the future. However, the Exodus and Resurrection certainly do stand as those first two “points” yet with an eschatological aim.

One question may be whether this is not a “temporal modalism.” Whether or not one wants to use that label, Swain’s contrast between the two models captures how the narrative method implies a temporal trinity: “God is not constituted triune by timeless relations of origin; God is constituted triune by temporal, narrative relations of outcome.”

It is this tunnel vision for the narrative that leads to an astonishing misreading of Augustine. First, Jenson was persuaded that for Augustine’s view to be consistent, there would be no reason why the Father or the Spirit could not become incarnate. One reason that Jenson reacted this way was how Augustine taught the indivisibility of the works of the Trinity ad extra. For example, “just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inseparable, so do they work inseparably … the trinity works inseparably in everything that God works.” We saw this specifically about the Old Testament theophanies. Augustine’s only point was that one is hard pressed to say that any particular manifestation must be one of the three Persons apart from the other two. Strictly speaking, the Son and the Spirit are only plainly revealed in the Incarnation and at Pentecost. Jenson would emphasize that latter historical point, but he would not root it in any necessity in the being of God.

Building on this same misreading, Jenson presses the point in tracing out a move in Augustine from the a priori denial of succession in God to the conclusion “that there can be no real narrative differentiations of any kind in God, not even among the identities: ‘Whatever … is said of God is said of the Father, the Son and Spirit triply, and equivalently of the Trinity singly.” This is taken from On the Trinity, V.9. Here Augustine was dealing with his rules for different classes of texts. But beyond that, since Jenson has recast “persons” and “relations” as narrative “identities,” there is a sense in which he can rightly attribute this denial to Augustine. After all, narrative differentiations are not what shape that which is distinct in eternity. They may give us glimpses of the relations, but we must not “read into” the eternal relations what are essentially movements of temporality, often expressed in language so analogical that it is often phenomenological and anthropomorphic.

As it is, there is evidence that Augustine was merely confessing humble ignorance at a more specific point. In other words, the minimum that we know of the eternal relations (that one is essentially paternal, the second essentially filial, and the third essentially spiration) driving the nature of the economic relations at least argues for equality of substance. He says, for example, “If however the reason why the Son is said to have been sent by the Father is simply that the one is the Father and the other is the Son, then there is nothing at all to stop us believing that the Son is equal to the Father and consubstantial and co-eternal, and yet that the Son is sent by the Father.”

To summarize the whole thought: Why is the Son sent and yet not lesser? The answer is simply that he is the begotten one, rather than the begetter. However, such an eternal relation is not nothing. It is something. And thus Augustine’s profession of ignorance here is not to be taken as a denial of any specific propriety (fittingness) in the eternal persons being those that do precisely what they do in the economy of created works. 

Fittingness is a metaphysical category. Although Barthians have an alternative metaphysic, because their critical model depends on the illegitimacy of true knowledge of God being a priori in relation to the biblical narrative, it is not surprising that Jenson could so badly miss Augustine’s reasoning here. That the relations of origins are both speculative and formal, one might say “analytical,” they can understandably not be saying much more than what we say when the idea of cause is related to the idea of an effect, or if one informs us that a square is non-circular. Surely there is more to paternity, filiation, and spiration as such.  

What then is fittingness in classical theology? At the very least we can say it is that relationship by which the lesser in any analogy properly participates in the being of the higher.

So for example, the Son (as to his humanity) was born of the Virgin Mary and not the Father because the Son was begotten of the Father and not the Father of the Son. That is to say that his earthly generation in the economy was fitting to the eternal generation in the immanent Trinity.  There is bound to be misgivings about the extent of such analogous relationships, but I would challenge all such misgivings to be realistic about the extent of analogies in general. Trinitarian fittingness demands that the relations of origin is indeed the correct way to view what is distinct about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Manifestly, if there is no real distinction between the persons beyond that, by sheer will, God decided to be whatever it is the persons show themselves to be in the redemptive drama, then clearly the classical mode is all wrong and we cannot really know what the distinct persons are eternally at all. But then we would be left with Trinitarian Voluntarism. The answer to the question: “Why was the Son sent and not the Father?” could only be: Because God willed it to be so.

At this point we must answer another obvious objection: Augustine flatly admitted that we say ‘Person’ merely so that we are not reduced to silence. Hence nothing substantive was meant beyond what amounts to function. This is one understandable way to read Augustine about the meaning of persons. However, I will argue that it is an incorrect reading, at least insofar as it is read to negate the objective nature of fittingness. One clue is that the word “merely” has been read into Augustine’s voice. He actually said no such thing. Now Augustine does express that the terms “Person” and “substance” are used by “convenience,” rather in spite of their exact natures than because of them. If it is not what is proper — not three Fathers, nor three Sons, nor three Holy Spirits — what then is Person that they each would have in common? Augustine lands on naming the relations of origins with reference “to one another,” and all other predication with reference “to self.” 

This only raises another question. How does Augustine justify the Filioque concept given fittingness to the eternal processions? We can understand the proof texts used by the Western church. John 15:26 and 20:21 show some sense in which the Spirit is proceeding from the Son. One can even throw in Acts 2:33 as Christ is the acting Subject, pouring out the Spirit, having received him as a promise from the Father. The trouble is that these show the Son sending the Spirit in the economy, that is, in virtue of the exaltation of Christ to the throne, or else as a power for the church’s mission. If Augustine was going to justify that this particular economic sending was rooted in the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Son, he would have to turn to other grounds. The Spirit of “Gift” will not do, as one can only gift another who is yet without; and in the Acts 2:33 passage, he can only be shown to be granted to the Son as exalted human King, rather than as an eternal procession. Only one such line of reasoning can be found in De Trinitate, and that is the place that the Spirit plays in his analogies. That is the Holy Spirit as the love of God. What is more immediately loving for God to give to his people that himself in the form of the Spirit’s work in uniting us to him in regeneration?

For all that, he does make a distinction that is difficult to conceive. The Spirit is “everlastingly gift, but donation only from a point of time,” and the closest he comes to explaining this is that, eternally, “he so proceeds as to be giveable.” Jenson makes his sharpest criticism of this concept by taking on Thomas Aquinas’ appropriation of the same, although the same logic will obviously apply to Augustine’s argument as well. “According to Thomas, if the Spirit did not proceed from the Son, ‘he could not be personally distinguished from him at all.’ The identities are distinguished only by their relations, and Thomas argues that the relations can distinguish identities only by ‘opposition.’” For instance, “‘Being begotten’ and ‘somehow otherwise proceeding’ are not thus ‘opposed.’” “Under these circumstances, if the Son and the Spirit are to be understood as two identities, we cannot think only of the relations between the Father and each of the Son or the Spirit, but must somehow with one of these relations construe an ‘opposed’ relation between the Son and the Spirit themselves.”  

One more category of fittingness only adds richness to Augustine’s doctrine. That is the link between epistemology and soteriology. In Book IV, it seems as if he roots our way of coming to know God with the necessity of redemption, and then in Book XIII he speaks of the fittingness of the Incarnation. And here is the point of fittingness: even soteriological purposes are rooted in eternity (counsel and decree). The design of salvation does not emerge in temporal narrative. The narrative is of a salvation by the Author of that historical flow. One will not ascend into heaven except by him who descended. He writes, “Another point about the incarnation is that in the man Christ advertises the grace of God toward us without any previous deserts on our part.”

While this kind of fittingness does not speak of any “condescension” or “grace” within the Trinity, what it does show is the fact of descent, the infinite to the finite. Paradoxical as that may strike us, it signals that all of our analogous thinking must run only one way: the lower being about the higher, never the other way around.

But more to the soteriological point, one cannot know the eternal relations of Christ by the missions in such a way that one comes naturally to the missions. We are aliens to the Incarnate Christ unless there was a prior will to redeem. That antecedent will is the cause of the Incarnation. It is a matter of theological common sense as well. What are the missions but saving missions? Hence there is simultaneously a fittingness in God’s saving act and an “unfittingness” in our sinful approach. While the one is being displayed, the other is being resolved. 

AN EVALUATION OF TWO TRINITARIAN PATHS (AND CONTENTS)

By now it is clear that this is more than a methodological difference between Augustine and Jenson. If the latter path is pursued, we have a deity who has left behind atemporality, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity. He builds upon Augustine’s own statement that,  “It is hard to see … how God creates temporal things and events without temporal movement in himself,” once again, out of context, as Augustine was in no doubt of atemporality but merely setting up the dilemma to be solved by contemplative theology. But the punchline is: “At this precise point, the Western tradition must simply be corrected.” The recasting of infinity was mentioned in passing. The mutual activity of the trinitarian persons is considered to be “infinite” in that such acts cannot be limited by being: “What happens among them accepts no boundaries; nothing can hinder what they enact.” 

It is not only infinity that is transformed, but even impassibility. Jenson does not so much give us a “lesser impassibility” as a temporal and narrative alternative in constancy. He says on the one hand, “The God of Exodus and Resurrection is assuredly absolute Lord, and so indeed not subjected to created time’s contingencies.” First, note the distinction “created time,” so as to hold on to his card of divine sequence (albeit in a higher realm). Second, how would one who defends this concept reply if we were to ask, “But what prevents this God of the Exodus and Resurrection from being subject to those contingencies?” Is it something of necessity or something of contingency? If the former, would this necessity about God not be a necessity in God?

Moreover, in the classical understanding of immutability, Jenson argues, the missions of the Son and the Spirit do not constitute changes in God, but rather change in us. They are “about our exit and return to the Father, who is our eternal and unchanging origin.”

Note how timelessness is pit against teleology and eschatology: “Salvation on this scheme is eternal return.” The classical mode is also depicted as ironically obscuring God himself, since Jenson believes that the “story of God” only tells us things about him if he is “in” it.

This misgiving is very common in modern theology, as ordinary personal relationships do not seem to go together in any sense with immutability, which is viewed in this context in a very static way. 

The whole of classical metaphysics is overthrown: being and participation. Jenson dismisses the very concept of “being” as such, by reducing it to those Greek anxieties about the shifting shadows of the temporal world. Three aspects made up the classical notion of being: first, “immunity to time,” second, “form,” and third, “knowability,” so that these eidos comprise “the shape that the mind’s eye sees.” In this way, classical thought was simultaneously an escape from the uncertainties of life and an ironic taming of heaven’s certainty. In this deconstructing shift, we have two different concepts of “participation” in the relationship between God and the creation.

For Augustine, the lower participates in the essence of being; for Jenson God participates in the narrative of the creature. Certainly Augustine would not have denied those words to the latter, but would define that narrative participation in entirely analogical terms. 

Speaking of analogies, Jenson offers one of his own. He opens up the suggestion that “The apparent one-to-one correlation between identity and personality” may have more to do with “Western interpretation of the self,” and it is plain that he wants to move beyond the problem he sees in “persons” conceived in either Modalistic or else Tritheistic fashion. The newer conception he wants to take seriously has three “components,” which Jenson calls “phenomena,” namely: 1. The transcendental unity of apperception; 2. The diachronically identifiable individual; 3. Freedom. The first says “I” in distinction to “not I,” the second says, “It was I” and “I will be,” and the third is the “mysterious relation between” them. There is a suggestion that the “Father, Son, and Spirit could not each be personal quite in the same way.” It is not clear how he can provide an alternative that does not compromise the equality of substance.

The analogy is linked to a plausible argument about other notions of personhood that we find even in Reformed theology. He borrows from Jonathan Edwards’ reflections on the federal representation of Adam and Christ. So, for instance, God “treats Christ and us as a single person, which we truly are just because he so treats us.” 

While recognizing the “arbitrary air” of all proposals, Jenson makes this one along the lines of the aforementioned three phenomena of the Self. In the manner of Augustine, this becomes Jenson’s trinitarian analogy: “this consciousness [the Father] finds his ‘I’ in the Son … and in such fashion that the Son and the Father are free for each other in the Spirit.” Whatever we may think of the analogy itself, we should not too quickly gloss over the methodological question. What became of the priority of the narrative over and against the a priori approach? Have we not conceded that this threefold phenomena of the Self was a “modern” insight? Perhaps he will justify it by narrative, but that will be a confirmation of the a priori, and not its ground. 

Jenson makes one more criticism of note against Augustine. Given that he sees a reduction of person to function, especially in the analogies, he sees the finished product as Modalism. What should we make of this? The Latin personae seemed to enter into Trinitarian discourse with Tertullian, and the trouble with using it was that this idea of the actor behind his “mask” could suggest to some a mode rather than full subsisting identity. But Jenson is sympathetic to Tertullian’s use as “a subsistent social relation,” and links it to his use of personae dramatis dei. It was Augustine’s focus on the specific eternal relation that was really guilty of the reduction of person to mode. As I have already argued, Augustine’s discussion of the limitations of the word “person” were targeted and not meant as a wholesale denial of distinction. The concept of origin of relations may be disagreeable to Jenson, but it is hardly a non-answer and he offered no serious refutation of it.

In the final analysis, there is both a gospel shift and a theological shift in Jenson. A concise summary may be given: The Resurrection eclipses the cross (which in one sense, we agree, it does), and in that same flow, the future of God (Theology as Eschatology) eclipses the timeless, original God (Theology as Protology).

Theology as a whole is reconfigured: “The biblical God is not eternally himself in that he persistently instantiates a beginning in which he already is all he ever will be; he is eternally himself in that he unrestrictedly anticipates an end in which he will be all he ever could be.”

There are other casualties here as well. A historicized gospel drives the cross to the resurrection in such a way that the “death to life” concept, which is of course biblical, becomes the whole. In short, Jenson resolves one reductionism (of the resurrection’s merely evidential place in the gospel) with another (the purpose of the cross to bring death to that climax of Life as the solution). He sees the crucifixion predominately through the lens of the problem of death, which God resolves by the resurrection, making Acts 2:23-24 the signature verse. The formula is: “You killed him … but God raised him up.” This ignores that the same verses, together with 4:27-28, make the human evil of crucifixion a secondary cause within God’s definite plan and foreordination. Leaving aside Isaiah 53:10 that God was prime Actor in both the death and resurrection of Christ. Its “necessity is dramatic necessity.” Jenson flags Anselm’s theory for three shortcomings: first, its lack of historical consensus; second, that God cannot show mercy without retribution; third, that another can pay one’s own debt, even if he assumes one’s nature. He adds that the solution is itself another act of injustice. He fails to mention that Anselm fielded this very objection.

While perhaps not the primary metaphysical problem, David Bentley Hart points out that this would make God identical to the Holocaust or any other such event, and not merely to the exodus or resurrection. On what ground would we distinguish between the unspeakably evil event and the saving event? Jenson counters that one is utterly sin, that evil is not a “given” given God’s relationship to Israel, and that from first to last, God is death’s opponent. Very well, but how does one get to these places without going back, behind the Exodus event?

Jenson bears reluctant witness of his own deficiencies. In working out how dramatic coherence, well, coheres, he muses that while God “could have been himself on different terms,” yet, granting that I or some other contingent x could have been different, “how God would then have been the same God we now know, we can say nothing whatever.” Jenson asks how Bultmann would handle the question “Why Jesus?” about the resurrection. But this is really a question that is begged throughout Jenson’s entire treatment. What difference would it make whether it was this God or that god when it comes to the “accident” of history that is the Exodus or the Resurrection? Bultmann’s answer is that “he ‘is proclaimed as such,” and it does not seem that Jenson will allow himself an answer that can rise any higher. To go “higher” than the left-to-right drama is to return to Greek speculation.  

There is also a lesson to be learned about the previous disconnect between modern Evangelicals and the Patristic sources. Prior to the current movement of “theological retrieval,” it was mainly the opponents of classical theology who were its curators to Reformed seminarians. Jenson’s misreading of Augustine is a case in point. Countless students were likely to have stopped short of engaging De Trinitate directly because Jenson’s summary had made that unattractive. 

Along with such misreadings come a host of non-sequiturs about deficiencies in the old system as if they were intrinsic to the old logic, rather than (what I would argue) being incompletions which subsequent generations would be more faithful to extend. A large and small example in Jenson can be provided. The larger example involves the dichotomy between metaphysics and narrative than runs through the work of Barthians as a rule. The irresistible inference that the more passive reader will draw is that the Augustinian way of thinking would never (could never) have drawn out the richness of personal particularity in redemptive history. 

The smaller example is his amendment of Boethius on what constitutes a person. This is made to go hand in hand with Jenson’s previous critique of the apologists’ Logos Christology. They had ignored the logos as God speaking, favoring the logos as the rational ordering principle. Thus when we amend the Boethian definition of person as “an individual entity endowed with intellect,” to the improved, “one with whom other persons—the circularity is constitutive—can converse, whom they can address,” one upshot is that “the biblical logos as communicated sense replaces the Greek logos as merely possessed sense.” The rhetorical point hardly needs to be pressed that the rational, eternal logos cannot be contemplated as God in himself and also accommodate the communicative sense of the logos. 

As a final thought, it is providential that the doctrine of the Trinity should be receiving the renewed interest that it is in our day. There is even a concerted effort to let the Barthian and older classical modes of expression (whether Augustinian or Thomist) flourish side by side. I have my own doubts about those prospects. Gioia suggests that what Augustine was up to transcended both Trinitarian doctrine and even theology as a discipline. Not that there was a “higher” discipline, but in the sense that Augustine was commending a superior mode of human thinking altogether than what either the natural sciences or even philosophers had set their minds upon, and not one disconnected from the purposes of redeeming man from sin. By a “trinitarian epistemology,” or a way of ascent to God, all of those vestigia trinitatis that make up the analogies of God in both the old creation (Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:19-20) and the new (Col. 3:10), may be set in orbit around their proper chief science, and the words of the Psalmist may again serve as the maxim of all educational life: “in your light do we see light” (Ps. 36:9).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Because the doctrine of the Trinity is so vast, an exploration of its many problems, even in a comparison of two thinkers like Augustine and Jenson, would far exceed an essay such as this. The basic aim here was to set forth a charitable reading of the two thinkers, and to demonstrate that the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity and method of construction is to be preferred to the Jensonian innovation. 

This essay set out to show, with respect to our general method, that the Augustinian way has been misunderstood by Jenson and that the classical way is to be preferred over the newer path. As an implication of this on our doctrinal content, the aim was to also show how the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are determinative for the economic relations: processions determining missions. Not everyone will be convinced.

It may be said that those who are more predisposed to systematic thinking will side with the Augustinian approach and those who tend more toward biblical theology will find Jenson’s innovations appealing. However, it seems to me that this ignores that what is revised in the latter method stretches most conceptions of biblical theology to their breaking point.

More accurately, the latter method will appeal to a certain kind of theology (whether expressed in systematic or biblical terms), and that is the theology of voluntarism over the classical position of realism. For there is something “liberating” from true being in the notion that “To be is to be willed” rather than to be what one is. 

Would Jenson’s doctrine of God’s identity by anticipation not suggest that the Christian conception of the triune God in the Resurrection of Christ is a fuller, truer picture of God than that of the Exodus? If the identity of God’s being, and not merely the identification about his being, is progressing in the drama, how else should we put things? It does at least call attention to the affinities that those following Barth seem to have with models like Open Theism. I do not draw out these last implications in mere criticism, or at least not without understanding. There is something irresistible about a metaphysics of hope, if I can call it that — that is, to view what is most real and morally perfect and aesthetically pleasing to be that which is being perfected, that which is promised, that which never needs to be contemplated again as a distant object, but with that theology of vision possessed by Christ alone now and the saints made whole then. 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine. On the Trinity (De Trinitate). Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991

Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine. Providence: Cluny Media, 2020

Gioia, Luigi. The Trinitarian Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008

Jenson, Robert. Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 

Levering, Matthew. The Theology of Augustine: An Introductory Guide to his Most Important Works. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013.

Miller, Ike. Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020

Swain, Scott. The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013