I had a great time last week at the 2014 Los Angeles Theology Conference. I am already looking forward to next year’s conference on the atonement. The theme this year was the Trinity. Each of the papers I heard was very interesting, and the conference as a whole provided a kind of “state of the union” update on all things Trinitarian for me. Since I’ve not been keeping up with conversations about the Trinity in contemporary theology very much, it was a good orientation to the general state of things. I was especially interested to discern that there seems to…

I’ve pushed my German test back a bit, which will allow me to learn the language better, and also creates some cushion in my schedule now, which is greatly needed here at the end of an exhausting summer. I’ve said yes to too many book reviews and other projects, and I underestimated how busy the summer would be with our trips, staff and volunteer transition, and so on. So I am going to take the next few weeks until classes start on September 30th to really practice Sabbath rest and gear up for another year – year 2 of PhD…

I’ve been reading my second book in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series, Kostenberger and Swain’s Father, Son, and Spirit: The Trinity and John’s Gospel (series #24, IVP, 2008). Ever since reading Robert Letham’s comment in The Holy Trinity that Trinitarianism in the gospel of John is an area that has been neglected in the scholarship, I’ve wanted to do a study on this, and I’ve also been meaning to read another NSBT book – so when I saw this book I knew it would be one to read carefully.  Though the whole book is great, I especially appreciated…

I used to struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity because of a feeling of arbitrariness – why 3?  If God has existed from eternity past in a plurality of persons, why not 30 persons in the Godhead, or 300?  How can what is most basic and before all else be one thing and not another? But recently it popped into my head: why 1, either?  I had been thinking of a uni-personal God as the “normal” way for God to be, and a tri-personal God as an aberration from that.  But why is 1 more “normal” than 3 in…

I’ve finished Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity (or at least the parts of it I wanted to read), and I have to say its a fantastic book.  Some thoughts: 1) One of the best things about studying the doctrine of the Trinity, in my opinion, is that it forces you to engage with the whole Christian tradition, both East and West – not just Protestantism, or Protestantism + a select few Roman Catholics.  Letham does a great job at this.  He traces the development of the Trinity in the West through Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, Anselm, and…

The past few weeks I’ve been chipping away at Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (P+R, 2004).  Its a fantastic book.  Letham’s historical overview of the development of the doctrine of Trinity is especially good.  He shows how different emphases in the East and West have led toward different challenges.  In the West, starting with Augustine and furthered with Aquinas, the emphasis has been on the one divine essence, with the three persons calling for explanation.  The recurrent danger has been modalism.  In the East, starting with the Cappadocian Fathers and furthered with John of…

John Webster on how the doctrine of Trinity saves us from a merely negative, functional definition of divine aseity: “Aseity is not to be defined merely in negative terms, as the mere absence of origination or dependence upon an external cause. If this is allowed to happen, then a subordinate characteristic of aseity (God’s ‘not being from another’) comes to eclipse its primary meaning (God’s ‘being in and from himself’)…. Aseity is not merely the quality of being (in contrast to contingent reality) underived: it is the eternal lively plenitude of the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten,…