Trinity and Incarnation: A Post-Catholic Theology

By Steven Nemes

This book argues that the doctrine of God taken for granted in the catholic tradition (divine transcendence, creatio ex nihilo, divine simplicity) makes it impossible to give an intelligible and coherent interpretation of the verbal formulas of the catholic dogmas of Trinity and incarnation. By way of response to this apparent incoherence at the heart of the catholic theological tradition, it proposes an alternative post-catholic take on these central doctrines in the light of a qualified monistic conception of God and a "Spirit Christological" interpretation of Jesus's relation to God the Father as presented in the New Testament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666773583

Steven Nemes

Steven Nemes received his PhD in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, where he studied under Profs. Oliver D. Crisp and Veli-Matti Karkkainen. He has written a number of books of academic theology, and has published more than two dozen journal articles and book chapters on subjects of theological and philosophical interest. He currently works as an instructor of Latin, Greek, and Humane Letters at North Phoenix Preparatory Academy in Phoenix, Arizona.

Book preview

1

Introduction

This is a book about the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation. These doctrines constitute the central and most distinctive dogmas of what Jaroslav Pelikan calls the catholic tradition of Christian theology. ¹ This catholic tradition is the theological mainstream of Christianity which first distinguished itself sharply from various forms of Gnosticism in the second century as apostolic by episcopal succession and later developed official statements of its theology through the assistance of the secular powers in the so-called ecumenical councils of the fourth through eighth centuries. Catholic Christianity is thus this episcopal-conciliar Christianity. Modern-day Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and more traditional forms of Protestantism to various degrees claim the theology of this catholic or conciliar tradition as their proper inheritance. And in the context of this catholic tradition, these dogmas of Trinity and incarnation make up what many think of as simply the Christian doctrine of God, to borrow this time the words of church historian and Anglican bishop R. P. C. Hanson. ²

What are these doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation? They can be understood as follows. According to the catholic doctrine of the Trinity, the one God is said to exist in three persons (ὑποστάσεις, personae) that share a single nature or being (οὐσία, substantia). These persons are named Father, Son (or Word), and Holy Spirit. In encountering these three persons, one is encountering the one God. One cannot speak truly and fully about the one God without speaking of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So also, according to the catholic doctrine of the incarnation, Jesus of Nazareth is said to be a single person (ὑπόστασις, πρόσωπον, persona) in or with two natures (οὐσίαι, φύσεις, naturae). In encountering the human Jesus of Nazareth, one is encountering God. One cannot speak truly and fully of Jesus of without speaking of both a divine nature and a human nature. These verbal formulas summarize the essential assertions of the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation.

These doctrines developed historically in conjunction with one another during the first half-millennium or so of the history of Christianity and were defended by many of the same heroes within the catholic tradition. The fine details of the doctrines were clarified over the course of five centuries and official statements formalized in the so-called ecumenical councils. Consequently, in the post-Chalcedonian Quicunque Vult—or the Athanasian Creed, wrongly so-called, as J. N. D. Kelly notes³—these two doctrines are together proposed as constituting the essence of the catholic faith (catholicam fidem), which anyone who wishes to be saved must believe before all else (quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est ut teneat).⁴ More precisely, this catholic faith teaches one to worship the one God in trinity and the trinity in unity (unum Deum in trinitate, et trinitatem in unitate veneremur), neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance (neque confundentes personas, neque substantiam separantes). It also teaches one to hold that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and human (Dominus noster Jesus Christus Dei Filius, Deus et homo est), who although both God and human is nevertheless not two but only one Christ (qui licet Deus sit et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus). The creed concludes by saying that unless a person will have believed these things faithfully and firmly, there will be no possibility of salvation for him or her (quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit).

Because so many people think of this catholic tradition of Christianity simply as Christianity tout court, they are liable to share this same attitude even in the present day. They are disposed to think that a person who does not believe these things is lost and outside of the faith delivered once for all to the saints (cf. Jude 3). To deny the catholic doctrines of Trinity and incarnation is for them to deny the Christian faith itself. But I have argued in various places that this catholic tradition is not to be identified straightaway with Christianity simpliciter. It rather should be thought of as a particular, contingent, historically conditioned, and in some ways essentially flawed reception of the message of Jesus and his apostles. In this specific respect, I follow in the path of Adolf Harnack and the liberal Protestant tradition more generally.⁵ There is consequently no need for Christian theologians to agree with the catholic tradition in principle. My differences with this tradition principally and most fundamentally have to do with prolegomenal matters regarding theological method and onto-epistemology.

In Orthodoxy and Heresy, I briefly recounted how the concerns and preoccupations of the catholic tradition drifted further and further outside of the realm of human experience into a domain of pure metaphysical speculation simultaneously with the growing pretense to infallible authority on the part of ecclesial hierarchs. The doctrine of the Eucharist provides the purest example of such metaphysical speculation. The bread and wine are said to have been transformed into the body and blood of Christ in such a manner as to be perceptually and experientially indistinguishable from non-transformed bread and wine. With this, a distinction between appearance and being was firmly established in the catholic tradition. Likewise, the inability of this tradition to prove the truth of its doctrines to their dissenters on the basis of its fundamental sources was eventually counteracted by the appeal to purportedly infallible institutional authority, as well as by the assistance of the secular powers in the persecution of heretics. Finally, I argued in that work that the principled concern with notions of orthodoxy and heresy in theology is a distraction that often gets in the way of honest inquiry after the truth, which is the only thing that should matter.

Going further, in Theology of the Manifest I argued that the various dualisms presupposed by the catholic tradition—e.g., nature and supernature, appearance and being, science and revelation, creature and creator, world and God—force it to found its fundamental convictions on a fallacious logic of the inaccessible. To the extent that catholic theology presumes to grasp things that lie beyond the epistemic access of human beings such as they are by nature, it is forced groundlessly and circularly to interpret certain accessible phenomena as signals by which it can indicate to others its possession of its presumed knowledge. Examples of such phenomena include purported miracles and evidences of holiness, the official testimony of ecclesial hierarchs, a particular source’s position or rank within the institution of the church, and so on. At the same time, such interpretation is inevitably groundless because the accessible phenomenon by definition does not stand in any strict relation to the inaccessible one, since otherwise the latter would also be accessible. It is also circular because the particular signals to which this tradition appeals are self-servingly chosen insofar as they have an incidental connection to the opinions it wishes to propagate. In that same book, I also presented an alternative, non-dualist interpretation of various theological loci classici in keeping with the phenomenological principle of the strict correlation of appearance and being.

Finally, in Theological Authority in the Church, I made the case, mostly from the texts of the New Testament itself (Matt 15:1–9; 16:17–19; 23:8–10) but also from certain early patristic sources (Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian), that no one in the messianic community of Jesus called the church has any further theological authority than that of derivatively, fallibly, and in principle reversibly relating and bearing witness to the teachings of Jesus and the works of God in him. No one’s words but those of Jesus and of God can be unconditionally authoritative for Christian theology. This is another way of saying that the traditions of the church are all fallible in principle. Every specific understanding of what Jesus means to teach could be mistaken. I also noted that this thesis has radical anti-dogmatic and anti-metaphysical consequences for the understanding of Christian faith. It means that the essence of faith and thus of the church itself lies in a personal commitment to Jesus as one’s teacher rather than in a well-defined set of doctrinal convictions about this or that contentious issue. One’s interpretations can always be wrong, but one remains a Christian because of the commitment one has at the level of the heart. The attitude of the heart toward Jesus is more fundamental to one’s faith than the interpretation one gives to what one says.

In all these ways, then, I have until now put forth a number of arguments against the foundational theological-methodological and onto-epistemological presuppositions of the catholic tradition. Because this prolegomenal discussion about the relationship between catholicism and Christian theology has already taken place at length elsewhere, I feel the freedom in the present work to put such questions to the side and to address the substantive doctrinal problems of Trinity and incarnation, matters of perennial interest to Christians from the earliest days of the religion, without showing a preoccupation with the catholic notions of orthodoxy and heresy or excessive deference toward the tradition of the church. In this sense, the object of this book is to propose a post-catholic theological understanding of Trinity and incarnation.

1.1 Summary of the Argument

It is worth noting from the start that although it does interact with the claims of theologians from throughout history and in the present day, this book nevertheless does not strive to present a detailed historical survey of the development of the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation. Other persons have already done that very capably. Neither is it concerned to address everything that has ever been said about these issues. Its purpose is rather more focused than that. The goal is to establish the possibility of a post-catholic understanding of Trinity and incarnation in the light of the perceived logical tensions of the catholic theological framework. To this end its argument is very direct and linear. First it makes the case that the verbal formulas of the doctrines of Trinity (one οὐσία in three ὑποστάσεις) and incarnation (one ὑπόστασις/πρόσωπον in two οὐσίαι/φύσεις) apparently cannot be interpreted in an intelligible and coherent manner in keeping with the doctrine of God taken for granted in the catholic tradition. This would mean that the total complex of ideas constituting catholic theology is incoherent, so that something or other must be rejected from within it. Then the book proposes an alternative, post-catholic understanding of God and of the relationship between Jesus and his Father as presented in the New Testament. The discussion thus has both a critical and a constructive side.

On the critical side, chapter 2 presents an interpretation of the catholic doctrine of God through the lens of Robert Sokolowski’s notion of the Christian distinction between God and the world. This doctrine consists in the ideas of divine transcendence, creatio ex nihilo, and divine simplicity. An argument for this understanding of God can be offered by drawing from Thomas Aquinas’s treatment in De Ente et Essentia. This argument strives to show that God must be understood as something that possesses existence in an original rather than derivative manner and that he therefore cannot be conceived of as any particular kind of thing. The doctrine of divine simplicity is understood as a way of making sense of these claims. Chapters 3 and 4 then argue that this catholic doctrine of God makes it exceptionally difficult if not impossible to present an intelligible and coherent interpretation of the verbal formulas of one οὐσία in three ὑποστάσεις (Trinity) and one ὑπόστασις/πρόσωπον in two οὐσίαι/φύσεις (incarnation). The principal argument to be made in this respect raises the question of how οὐσία is supposed to relate to ὑπόστασις. There are apparently four logical possibilities: the οὐσία could be prior to, or coeval with and distinct from, or identical in some way with, or posterior to ὑπόστασις. Yet none of these logical possibilities makes for an interpretation of the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation that is acceptable on catholic theological terms.

The catholic doctrine of God is thus arguably inconsistent with the dogmas of Trinity and incarnation. Granting the success of this line of argument, it follows that something or other from the total complex of ideas constitutive of the catholic theological tradition must be rejected. This is what opens the door for the constructive, post-catholic proposals of the subsequent chapters.

On the constructive side, chapter 5 argues for an alternative to the catholic doctrine of God which it calls qualified monism. This view asserts that finite particular things are modifications of God’s being which he brings about by acting upon himself. Finite beings relate to God like accident to substance. It thus rejects the catholic ideas of God’s transcendence, creatio ex nihilo, and divine simplicity. An argument is given that the doctrine of divine simplicity undermines the meaningfulness of scriptural language regarding God’s personal relation to the world. The qualified monistic conception of God is both compatible with the conclusions of Thomas’s argument from De Ente et Essentia (given in chapter 2) and does not raise the problems of divine simplicity. It also allows one to formulate a revisionist, post-catholic understanding of the Trinity, according to which God is Reality Itself constantly encountered in three modes: as the World-Whole, as the particular Object, and as absolute Life. Chapter 6 then argues for an understanding of Jesus’s relation to God the Father that does not interpret the Son in a dyophysite way as a single person in two natures. Jesus is rather the human being whom God specially empowers and authorizes by his Spirit to accomplish the task of the salvation of the world and to be the privileged mediator between himself and all other beings. Because the relationship between Jesus and God his Father as presented in the New Testament is the ultimate basis for the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, this sixth chapter will be the longest of all, constituting in this way the climax of the entire discussion.

This is therefore the argument to be made over the span of the next five chapters of this book. It proceeds in basically four steps. First, it presents an argument for the catholic doctrine of God. Second, it argues that the catholic dogmas of Trinity and incarnation cannot be formulated consistently with that doctrine of God principally because of the problem of determining the relation that obtains between οὐσία and ὑπόστασις. Third, it argues against the catholic doctrine of God and in favor of an alternative view called qualified monism that is consistent with the argument given in chapter 2 and which allows for a revisionist, post-catholic understanding of the Trinity. Fourth and finally, it argues for a reconsideration of Jesus’s relationship to God through his empowerment by God’s Spirit as presented in the New Testament in the light of the revised conception of God’s nature. This is the dialectic to be followed in the pages below.

It should be mentioned at the outset that post-catholic theology does not necessarily reject the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation very broadly understood. It is rather post-catholic because it interprets them in a different way in light of the perceived problems afflicting the catholic scheme as a whole. A post-catholic doctrine of the Trinity accepts that God is experienced in a triple manner, just as a post-catholic doctrine of the incarnation accepts that Jesus is both human and divine in some sense.⁶ But the triple manner of the experience of God has to do with transcendental structures of ordinary lived experience, and the divinity of the human person Jesus is a matter of God’s action upon him through the Spirit. This is the post-catholic difference.

How do the present work’s proposals relate to the history of theology? As for the qualified monistic conception of God to be argued for in chapter 5, it has some significant precedence in the teaching of Huldrych Zwingli. This will be shown through a close reading of his doctrine of God in certain important texts, namely Commentary on True and False Religion and his treatise On the Providence of God. As for the positive Christological proposal of chapter 6, one can call it a species of Spirit Christology.⁷ As Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen defines the term, this refers to a Christology that tries to explain the unique presence and efficacy of the divine in Jesus Christ with reference to the Spirit of God.⁸ The case will be made that such a way of thinking about things is truer to the presentation one finds in the New Testament in addition to being free of the logical and theoretical problems of the catholic notion of incarnation.

The discussion in the chapters to follow will be principally philosophical-theological in nature, although it will also be at times church-historical, at times biblical-exegetical in accordance with the demands of the subject matter. In this way, one could say that the present book strives to be a work of constructive philosophical theology in the sense of Kärkkäinen: a philosophical theology that engages systematically with other disciplines in the pursuit of a coherent vision of things.⁹ It is also intended as a further contribution to an ongoing effort toward the systematic development of an immanent, post-catholic statement of the Christian faith, a project that I began with my dissertation and advanced in the works mentioned just earlier, namely: Orthodoxy and Heresy; Theology of the Manifest; and Theological Authority in the Church. But whereas those books dealt with prolegomenal matters of theological method, onto-epistemology, and ecclesiology, the present work is principally concerned with understanding God and Jesus and their relation to one another.

1.2 The Value of This Book

It would also be well to say something about why a book like this one could be valuable. In a word, its potential value consists in the fact that it is offering what is not presently found anywhere else: (1) a critical discussion of the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation from a perspective outside of the general boundaries of the catholic theological tradition, together with (2) a systematic case for an alternative scheme. In this way, it promises to make a unique and valuable contribution to a field of inquiry that is flourishing as never before, yet in which the discussion has been decidedly one-sided.

The dogmas of the Trinity and incarnation took center stage in the philosophical-theological discussions of the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, things were not always so. Karl Rahner had famously lamented that, in his time at least, toward the middle of the previous century,

despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere monotheists. We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.¹⁰

Yet this state of affairs most certainly did not remain unchanged, as Kärkkäinen has recounted, citing theologian after contemporary theologian on the importance of trinitarian doctrine.¹¹ Fred Sanders in the present day argues that the doctrine of the Trinity (and, by implication, the corresponding doctrine of incarnation) is essentially constitutive of Christian life.¹² Peculiarly enough, many of these same theologians will say these things even as they deny that there are any clear or unambiguous statements of trinitarian doctrine in scripture. Sanders himself provides an example of this.¹³ The discussion will return to this point later. But despite making this concession, it remains the case that many persons writing on this topic do not consider avowedly non- or post-catholic perspectives in very much detail—unless it is to dismiss them as having been declared heretical, as Carl Braaten does.¹⁴

A significant number of philosophers, theologians, and philosophical theologians have dedicated their energies to developing and interpreting the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation and the whole of Christian faith in the light of them. This project has been especially important to thinkers working in the analytic tradition, although one also finds non-analytics making proposals of their own. Among those who have made substantial contributions are Marilyn McCord Adams,¹⁵ James Anderson,¹⁶ Jeffrey Brower,¹⁷ Raymond Brown,¹⁸ William Lane Craig,¹⁹ Oliver Crisp,²⁰ Richard Cross,²¹ Stephen Davis,²² Steven Duby,²³ William Hasker,²⁴ Peter van Inwagen,²⁵ Robert Jenson,²⁶ Brian Leftow,²⁷ Andrew Loke,²⁸ Thomas McCall,²⁹ Ian McFarland,³⁰ Jürgen Moltmann,³¹ Gerald O’Collins,³² Timothy Pawl,³³ Cornelius Plantinga,³⁴ Michael Rea,³⁵ Robert Sokolowski,³⁶ Richard Swinburne,³⁷ Kathryn Tanner,³⁸ Miroslav Volf,³⁹ Keith Ward,⁴⁰ Thomas Joseph White,⁴¹ Scott Williams,⁴² and John Zizioulas.⁴³

It would seem that the most significant and impactful contributions to this discussion have come from persons who are committed to the truth of these dogmas in some way or other. Since the long-gone days of John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God⁴⁴ and John Hick’s The Myth of God Incarnate⁴⁵ together with the debates that these books caused in the sixties, seventies, and eighties of the previous century, it is not easy to name academic monographs in philosophical theology published in the last forty years dedicated to arguing against the pairing of the catholic doctrine of God with the catholic dogmas of Trinity and incarnation and in favor of an alternative, non- or post-catholic Christian understanding. The theological scene is quite different now. Works like Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God⁴⁶ or Marcus Borg’s Jesus,⁴⁷ even if thematically relevant, are historical and not strictly philosophical-theological treatments of the question. Carter Heyward’s Speaking of Jesus presents a low Christology, but it is a rather old book and does not interact with the most recent research.⁴⁸ Thomas Gaston has argued that dynamic monarchianism represents a very early traditional understanding of Christ’s relationship to God in Christian tradition, but this particular book of his is self-published.⁴⁹ Dale Tuggy remains the chief thorn in the side of contemporary anglophone Trinity- and incarnation-theorists working in analytic philosophical theology, and very much of the argumentation of the present work owes a debt to his arguments and inspiration, but he has not yet published a book defending his own points of view in great detail.⁵⁰

Many of the above-listed authors will appeal to a recent trend in New Testament studies according to which there is a high Christology in even the earliest Christian sources.⁵¹ Representatives of this movement include Richard Bauckham,⁵² Michael Bird,⁵³ Simon Gathercole,⁵⁴ Sigurd Grindheim,⁵⁵ Larry Hurtado,⁵⁶ and Chris Tilling.⁵⁷ Some theologians such as White⁵⁸ who make use of these scholars’ works are concerned to show that there was an ontological and even proto-Nicene notion of Christ’s two natures even in the earliest age of Christian history. There are of course other scholars—such as David Brondos,⁵⁹ Geoffrey Lampe,⁶⁰ and Paul Newman⁶¹—who prefer to understand the Christology of the New Testament using different terms to the metaphysical categories of later Nicene theology. They maintain that Jesus is the human Son of God who is specially empowered by God’s Spirit for the fulfillment of his task of the salvation of the world. Son of God is understood as a kind of theo-political title.⁶² It designates God’s human vicegerent. But still other theologians like Myk Habets⁶³ will not accept a Spirit Christology of this kind unless it is paired with explicitly Nicene and Chalcedonian interpretations of the catholic dogmas of the Trinity and incarnation. And there are also a number of younger scholars committed in one way or another to the catholic orthodoxy, such as Beau Branson,⁶⁴ D. Glen Butner Jr.,⁶⁵ R. B. Jamieson,⁶⁶ Chad McIntosh,⁶⁷ Joshua Sijuwade,⁶⁸ Brandon Smith,⁶⁹ and Jordan Wood,⁷⁰ who are taking up the task of making sense of Trinity and incarnation and finding a basis for them in scripture in their own ways and by their preferred methodologies.

If this is granted as an adequately representative (although admittedly not exhaustive) picture of the current state of things, the present work stands out as what could be a unique and valuable contribution to this ongoing discussion. With the exception of the second edition of John Hick’s The Metaphor of God Incarnate, itself already nearly two decades old,⁷¹ there is apparently no academic monograph published in the last half-century that both (1) addresses the most recent philosophical-theological research on the catholic doctrines of Trinity and incarnation from a critical perspective beyond the boundaries of the catholic tradition itself and (2) offers a systematic presentation of an alternative scheme to the catholic doctrine of God. This book therefore offers precisely what is missing, what is not readily found anywhere else, what has not already been discussed a hundred times over in the recent literature. Such a work does not presently exist in one volume, but it would seem that the time is right for it.

1.3 The Possible Reception of This Book

The vast majority of authors who write on the topic of Trinity and incarnation these days are preoccupied with considerations of orthodoxy and heresy as a result of their commitment to the catholic tradition of Christian theology. These preoccupations presuppose a different theological-methodological perspective to the one from which the present work is offered. In the opinion of the present author, if theology is to be a genuine λόγος in the sense uncovered by Martin Heidegger, i.e., a discipline of reasoned discourse that strives to make a thing manifest and intelligible beginning from that thing itself,⁷² then it must principally be concerned with the truth of what it says. Wolfhart Pannenberg also argued this point some time ago.⁷³ But whereas orthodoxy and heresy are a matter of the relation one idea bears to other ideas officially endorsed or forbidden by some particular community, truth is a relation between what is thought or said about a thing and that thing itself.⁷⁴ As Aristotle put the point, truth is a matter of saying of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not (Metaphysics 1011b25).⁷⁵ It is a matter of thinking and speaking about things as they are. Frances Young writes that the traditional formulations of christology, so far from enshrining revealed truth, are themselves the product of witness and confession in a particular historical environment.⁷⁶ Something similar can be said of the traditional trinitarian formulas as well. The truth of these formulas does not depend on whether they are orthodox or heretical, which is a question of their relation to the official commitments of some theological tradition, but rather on whether they are adequate to the things themselves that they are trying to describe. Thus, as far as the present author is concerned, preoccupations with orthodoxy or heresy should be considered a distraction at best. The only thing that matters for theological inquiry is the truth, this relation of adequacy that obtains between what is said about a thing and that thing itself.

Admittedly, some of the arguments of this book will likely not convince those readers for whom a well-defined notion of catholic orthodoxy is for whatever reason an a priori non-negotiable commitment. Yet this is not in itself a defect in the argument of the present work. No argument can be judged defective simply because it fails to convince those who are not open to its conclusion as a matter of principle. The case has already been made elsewhere that there is no more basis for adopting such an attitude of unconditional deference to the orthodoxy of the fifth century than there was for Jesus to obey the traditions of the elders regarding ritual handwashing (Matt 15:1–9).⁷⁷ It suffices for present purposes that a genuinely strong and truthful case be made in the pages that follow. Whether or not it convinces others is another matter altogether. At the very least, the present work can be understood as a much-needed counterpoint in what for half a century now has been a rather one-sided conversation in recent philosophical theology. It tries to bring things into balance somewhat by arguing against the popular view in favor of the less popular. And committed proponents of the catholic understanding of things may nevertheless find the present work valuable for the sake of clarifying and sharpening their own interpretations and presentations of the catholic doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, notwithstanding their principled rejection of its theses.

1

. Pelikan, Christian Tradition, vol.

1

.

2

. Hanson, Search for the Christian Doctrine of God.

3

. Kelly, Athanasian Creed,

1

–

2

. See also Kelly, Early Christian Creeds. Athanasius did not write this creed, nor is it exactly representative of his theology.

4

. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom,

2

:

66

–

71

.

5

. Harnack, What Is Christianity?

6

. Cf. Fairbairn, Grace and Christology, ix.

7

. Kärkkäinen, Christ and Reconciliation,

196

–

209

.

8

. Kärkkäinen, Christ and Reconciliation,

197

.

9

. Kärkkäinen, Christ and Reconciliation,

1

–

33

.

10

. Rahner, Trinity,

10

–

11

.

11

. Kärkkäinen, Trinity, xi–xiii.

12

. Sanders, Triune God; Deep Things of God; Fountain of Salvation.

13

. Sanders, Triune God,

219

.

14

. Braaten, Who Is Jesus?,

64

–

67

.

15

. Adams, Christ and Horrors.

16

. Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology.

17

. Brower and Rea, Material Constitution and the Trinity.

18

. Brown, Introduction to New Testament Christology.

19

. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, ch.

31

.

20

. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity; God Incarnate; Word Enfleshed; Analyzing Doctrine.

21

. Cross, The Incarnation.

22

. Davis, Christian Philosophical Theology; Davis and Yang, Introduction to Christian Philosophical Theology.

23

. Duby, Jesus and the God of Classical Theism.

24

. Hasker, Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God.

25

. Inwagen, And Yet There Are Not Three Gods.

26

. Jenson, Triune Identity; Systematic Theology.

27

. Leftow, A Latin Trinity.

28

. Loke, Origin of Divine Christology.

29

. McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism?; Analytic Christology and the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament; The Trinity.

30

. McFarland, Word Made Flesh.

31

. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom. Highly sympathetic to Moltmann are Plantinga, Thompson, and Lundberg, Introduction to Christian Theology.

32

. O’Collins, Christology.

33

. Pawl, Defense of Conciliar Christology; Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology; Incarnation; The Incarnation.

34

. Plantinga Jr., Social Trinitarianism and Tritheism.

35

. Rea, The Trinity.

36

. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason. See also the essays in Sokolowski, Christian Faith and Human Understanding.

37

. Swinburne, The Christian God; Was Jesus God?

38

. Tanner, Christ the Key.

39

. Volf, After Our Likeness.

40

. Ward, Christ and the Cosmos.

41

. White, Incarnate Lord; Trinity.

42

. Williams, Unity of Action; Discovery of the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s Trinitarian Theology.

43

. Zizioulas, Being as Communion.

44

. Robinson, Honest to God.

45

. Hick, ed., Myth of God Incarnate.

46

. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God.

47

. Borg, Jesus; Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship.

48

. Heyward, Speaking of Christ.

49

. Gaston, Dynamic Monarchianism. As of the writing of this footnote, it seems that a second edition, with a foreword written by Dale Tuggy, will be published by Theophilus Press in

2023

.

50

. Some representative works include Tuggy, The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing; On Bauckham’s Bargain; Metaphysics and Logic of the Trinity; Trinity.

51

. Crisp, God Incarnate,

23

–

25

; cf. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity,

164

–

66

.

52

. Bauckham, God Crucified; Jesus and the God of Israel.

53

. Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son; Bird et al., How God Became Jesus; Bird and Harrower, eds., Trinity without Hierarchy.

54

. Gathercole, Preexistent Son.

55

. Grindheim, God’s Equal; Christology in the Synoptic Gospels.

56

. Hurtado, One God, One Lord; Lord Jesus Christ.

57

. Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology.

58

. White, Incarnate Lord,

1

–

21

.

59

. Brondos, Paul on the Cross; Redeeming the Gospel.

60

. Lampe, God as Spirit.

61

. Newman, A Spirit Christology.

62

. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity,

216

–

19

.

63

. Habets, Anointed Son.

64

. Branson, Ahistoricity in Analytic Theology; No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity; One God, the Father.

65

. Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics.

66

. Jamieson, Paradox of Sonship.

67

. McIntosh, God of the Groups.

68

. Sijuwade, Monarchical Trinitarianism.

69

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