The Same God Who Works All Things

Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology

Adonis Vidu

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780802874436
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467461993
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Classical Trinitarianism holds that every action of Trinity in the world is inseparable. That is, the divine persons are equally active in every operation. But then, in what way did the Father create the world through Christ? How can only the Son be incarnate, die, and be resurrected? Why does Christ have to ascend before the Spirit may come? These and many other questions pose serious objections to the doctrine of inseparable operations.
In the first book-length treatment of this doctrine, Adonis Vidu takes up these questions and offers a conceptual and dogmatic analysis of this essential axiom, engaging with recent and historical objections. Taking aim at a common "soft" interpretation of the inseparability rule, according to which the divine persons merely cooperate and work in concert with one another, Vidu argues for the retrieval of "hard inseparability," which emphasizes the unity of divine action, primarily drawing from the patristic and medieval traditions.
Having probed the biblical foundations of the rule and recounted the story of its emergence in nascent Trinitarianism and its neglect in modern theology, Vidu builds a constructive case for its retrieval. The rule is then tested precisely on the battlegrounds that were thought to have witnessed its defeat: the doctrines of creation, incarnation, atonement, ascension, and the indwelling of the Spirit. What emerges is a constructive account of theology in which the recovery of this dogmatic rule shines fresh light on ancient doctrines.

CHAPTER 1

A Biblical Theology of Inseparable Operations

The fundamental questions of a biblical theology of inseparable operations concern, first, the manner of the participation of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the agency of the one God, and second, the relation between the agency of the incarnate Son and the Holy Spirit. This first chapter treats each of these questions. As articulated by tradition, the doctrine of inseparable operations holds that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share the divine agency of the one God. But what kind of singularity characterizes this one God? Before attempting to analyze conceptually the coherence of the doctrine, its origins in biblical monotheism have to be elucidated. The kind of unity that Trinitarian agency possesses must ultimately derive from the kind of unity characteristic of the biblical God.

THE NATURE OF JEWISH MONOTHEISM

A generation ago the nature of Jewish monotheism was not a burning research question. Scholars investigating the origins of Trinitarian theology were primarily asking whether it could be shown that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were originally described with language appropriate only to the God of the Old Testament. The question remained whether Jesus and the Spirit were somehow included in the identity of this one God of Israel. It was assumed at the outset that Jewish monotheism was of a strict kind. This assumption is no longer universally shared today. This makes a significant difference to our investigation. The kind of divine unity into which Jesus and the Spirit are included by New Testament writers determines the nature of their agency.

Two claims recently made about the nature of Jewish monotheism bear directly on our topic. First, attention has been properly called to the practical nature of Jewish monotheism. In contrast to an Enlightenment preoccupation with divinity in the abstract,¹ Jewish monotheism is concerned fundamentally with God as he relates to Israel. N. T. Wright helpfully distinguishes between an inward-looking monotheism, focused on an analysis of the one God, and an outward-looking monotheism, stressing the relation between the one God and the world.² He goes on to summarize the nature of Second Temple monotheism thus:

Monotheism of the second-Temple Jewish kind, as we saw, was the belief not so much that there was one supernatural being rather than many, or that this God was a single and indivisible entity, but that the one true God was the creator of the world, supreme over all other orders of being, that he would be judge of all, and that in between creation and final putting-to-rights he had a single purpose which arched its way over the multiple smaller stories of creation and, not least, of Israel.³

It is important, however, not to make too much of this distinction and suppose that Second Temple Jewish monotheism makes no theoretical claims about the unity of God. A number of writers have been suggesting that monotheism is fundamentally a matter of whom to worship, and less a matter of how many possible objects of worship there are. Thomas McCall, for instance, writes that “monotheism is not primarily concerned with integers, or with questions of how many tropes of divinity there are; it is centered on exclusive allegiance to the only Creator and Ruler.”⁴ Reframing the question along praxiological, as opposed to propositional lines, McCall’s monotheism is more permissive: “While there is no precedent in Second Temple monotheism for the inclusion of more than one ‘personal’ agent in the worship that rightly belongs to YHWH, neither is there anything that prohibits it.”⁵

This leads us to the second recent claim about the nature of Jewish monotheism. A number of writers have been steadily dismantling the received narrative of a unique God, articulating a porous notion of divinity. The view is not entirely new, having been first articulated by Wilhelm Bousset in his 1903 Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter. Bousset had held that in the postexilic period Jews became interested in all kinds of intermediary beings on account of a growing sense of divine transcendence. In his wake we now recognize a certain Jewish comfort with all kinds of celestial beings of quasi-divine status. This is indeed a helpful development, clarifying that monotheism does not entail an unpopulated heaven occupied by a single supernatural being.

Many of these beings serve in all kinds of mediating roles. Larry Hurtado, for instance, distinguishes between different kinds of mediators: personified divine attributes such as Word and Wisdom; exalted patriarchs such as Enoch and Moses; supreme angels such as Michael.⁶ P. G. Davis, in turn, classifies these beings along different “patterns of mediation”: past mediators, such as Abraham and David, forming what he calls a “legacy pattern”; present mediators such as Gabriel, forming an “intervention pattern”; and future mediators, such as Elijah or the Son of Man, forming a so-called “consummation pattern.”⁷

The existence as such of these mediators is certainly not problematic for the standard picture of strict Jewish monotheism—though it poses questions about the unique mediating role of Jesus Christ. However, a number of authors have suggested that their roles seriously challenge the standard picture. According to Aubrey Johnson, God must not be conceived as an Enlightenment isolated individual but “as possessing an indefinable extension of the Personality which enables Him to exercise a mysterious influence upon mankind.”⁸ He identifies various “extensions” of the divine personality: the Word (Isa 55:10–11); the Name of God (Num 6:22–27; Pss 20; 54); the Ark of the Covenant (Num 10:35–36; 1 Sam 4:5–8; 6:20). Each of these “mediators” seem to be identified with YHWH himself. Moreover, Johnson argues that there is an “oscillation” between the One and the Many in the manner in which the Scriptures refer to God.⁹ He finds further evidence for this in the mysterious figure of the Angel of YHWH, who is “frequently indistinguishable from Yahweh Himself” (cf. Gen 12:4; 16; Judg 6:11–24), but also the three angels who appear to Abraham by the terebinths of Mamre (Gen 18). This “is but another aspect of that oscillation as between the individual and the corporate unit within the conception of God.”¹⁰

In his The Open Heaven: A Study of the Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity, Christopher Rowland, an important scholar of the origins of Christianity, asserts the possibility of a distinction within the very identity of God within Jewish theology, between what we may call the primordial or transcendent God and an appearance of God in human form. In Genesis 18 and 32 we find “an angelic being who in some sense was regarded as communicating the appearance of God himself and who sometimes appeared in the form of a man.”¹¹ Rowland sees a connection between this anthropomorphic deity and Ezekiel 1:26 and 8:2, but also Daniel 7:13. With H. L. Balz, he identifies “two divine figures” in Daniel 7, but he thinks that such a separation already takes place between Ezekiel 1:26 and 8:2. “What has happened [in Ezekiel] is not so much the splitting up of divine functions among various angelic figures but the separation of the form of God from the divine throne-chariot to act as a quasi-angelic mediator.”¹² He continues, “The similarity which exists between Ezekiel 8:2 and Daniel 7:13 lies in the fact that both verses refer to heavenly figures and speak of them in quasi-divine terms.”¹³ By the time we get to Daniel 10:5, something significant has already happened: “What we have here is the beginning of a hypostatic development similar to that connected with divine attributes like God’s word and wisdom.”¹⁴

Both Johnson and Rowland suspect that such distinctions, oscillations, and ambiguities in the reference to God and his agency indicate that Jewish monotheism is a lot more nuanced than traditionally it was supposed. Already there are developments that ascribe quasi-divine functions to angels (Rowland) or imagine the divine personality as extensible to various angels, humans, objects, or groups. Not only is God understood to employ various intermediaries, but these also appear to bear the divine name, to be addressed as God, to be at least revered, if not outright worshipped. Are these nuances sufficient to suggest that Jewish monotheism is indeed much less strict than commonly assumed?

Crispin Fletcher-Louis’s Jesus Monotheism makes precisely such a case. He continues to build the case against a strict Jewish monotheism of the Second Temple period, adding at least one other intermediary being who seems to straddle the border between divine and nondivine. In the Similitudes of Enoch, “Adam carries or expresses the divine identity in a way that warrants the angelic worship of him. But in all the diverse witnesses to the story there is no suggestion that Adam should be included in the creative work of God.”¹⁵ This means, for Fletcher-Louis, that the distinction between divine and nondivine is not exactly coterminous with the distinction between Creator and creature. Adam can be divine without also being Creator. That is possible because, according to this author, God “shared his identity or nature with others.”¹⁶

Fletcher-Louis builds his case on much the same range of intermediary beings who seem to be in some way treated as quasi-divine. Instead of a clear Creator-creature distinction, he finds God extending his identity to all other kinds of beings. But on what basis can Fletcher make such a significant metaphysical claim? It appears that the key concept for him is presence. He points to God’s presence on earth, in a temple, in the ark, and elsewhere as a demonstration of this extensive identity. We need to reject, he insists, a “decidedly modern notion of identity,”¹⁷ such as the one Richard Bauckham works with, as we shall see momentarily, that “God is a discrete, impermeable, Cartesian self.”¹⁸ The primary sources, in his opinion, point to another model: “that God is willing and able to share himself and (something of) his identity with a few specifically chosen entities.”¹⁹

In other words, it is fundamentally mistaken to define God’s identity over and against creation and creatures in an oppositional way. According to this definition, God is defined as whatever caused the entirety of contingent reality. Such a way of individuating God, Fletcher-Louis claims, omits the very presence of God within creation. Such a presence is not oppositional and it “miss[es] the shape of the Bible’s own way of thinking. To simplify matters grossly: The Temple consists of concentric zones of holiness and there is no one ‘line’ dividing God, who resides in the holy of holies, from the world outside.”²⁰

Only such a view of identity ensures divine freedom, it is further claimed: “It is precisely because he is absolutely distinguished from, different in kind to, the rest of reality, and free from all external constraint, that God is able to enter into and take on the nature and identity of that reality, even on occasion, taking that reality up into his very own self…. This is the ‘fluidity’ of divine being that makes the gods what they are.”²¹ Now, “any sharing or delegation of divine being and nature comes at the gracious initiative of this one God; it is not forced upon him by the already-determined rules of the divine hierarchy.”²²

James McGrath agrees that the evidence suggests “‘bluriness’ … as to whether a figure was intrinsic to the divine identity or separate and subordinate hereto.”²³ His conclusion:

It is thus possible that Jews, like others in this period, believed that the highest God created all things and was the source of a hierarchy of being which has its origins in him and which proceeds from him through the Logos, angels, humans and various other forms of life and existence.²⁴

This has clear implications for the agency of these beings. “The result is that the agent can not only carry out divine functions but also be depicted in divine language, sit on God’s throne or alongside God, and even bear the divine name.”²⁵ This implies a very fluid border between the Creator and creature.²⁶

The implications of the conclusions of Fletcher-Louis, McGrath, and Rowland for the topic of Trinitarian agency are considerable. If ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Biblical Theology of Inseparable Operations
• 2. The Rise and Decline of Inseparable Operations
• 3. Unity and Distinction in Divine Action
• 4. Creation and Trinitarian Mediation
• 5. The Incarnation of the Son Alone
• 6. Christology and Trinitarian Agency
• 7. Atonement
• 8. Ascension and Pentecost
• 9. The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit as Love
• Conclusion
• Bibliography