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3

THEOLOGY – METHODS AND APPROACHES

A variety of influences since the 1950s has led to the investigation of the New Testament documents to discover in what sense, if at all, their content may be described implicitly or explicitly as "Trinitarian."  The claims of Karl Barth concerning the Holy Trinity as the immediate implication of revelation initially fueled this search.  Other factors such as the charismatic movement, which raised the question of the precise identity of the Holy Spirit, the biblical theology movement (allied to the historical-critical method) within the Roman Catholic Church, and the modern emphasis upon supposed "community" within the Godhead (to foster and justify community action on earth and to counter "individualism") have added further momentum.

In this chapter we shall notice five approaches to the question of the relation of the church doctrine/dogma of the Trinity, which was explained in the last chapter, to the content of the New Testament.

Perhaps the most-used textbook in the 1960s and 1970s on the biblical basis of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was The Trinity

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in the New Testament (1962) by the Englishman, Arthur W. Wainwright.  Its purpose was to trace "the emergence of the problem of the Trinity" in New Testament times.  So chapter 1 is devoted to explaining "the problem of the Trinity."  The problem concerns (1) how the Father and Son could both be God and yet God still be truly one, and (2) whether or not the Spirit is a Person and, if so, then whether God is in some sense threefold rather than twofold.  "It is our task," he wrote, "to investigate whether the New Testament writers themselves were aware of the problem, either in the form of the relationship between Father and Son, or in that of the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit."

Wainwright argues that the problem of the Trinity was in the minds of certain writers of the New Testament and that they made an attempt to answer it.  However, none of their writings was written specifically to deal with it, and the evidence or signs that a writer has faced it are incidental.  Since, in Wainwright’s judgment, there is no systematic answer to the problem aimed at producing a distinct doctrine, he preferred the word "problem" to "doctrine" when speaking of the theological content of the New Testament.  He fully acknowledges that in the second, and even more so in the third, centuries the problem was fully faced and a doctrine was created (e.g., by Tertullian) – a doctrine which was itself subject to development as further thought was given to it.

So Wainwright makes the comment: "Naturally a problem must be clarified before it can be answered.  In the New Testament it is easier to see the first attempts to clarify the problem than the first attempts to answer it.  But an answer begins to emerge and it would be misleading to say that trinitarian theology is entirely post-biblical."²

This beginnings of an answer or doctrine within the New Testament to the "problem" of the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is found, however, not in philosophical, metaphysical discussions of the nature of God, but in declarations and expositions of the creating, saving, and sanctifying work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Wainwright insists that the biblical authors were more interested in the activity than the nature of God. Thus, for example, since they held

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that Christ shared in the divine activities of creator, savior, and judge, they could not wholly avoid thinking about his relation to the Father.

Further, "the problem of the Trinity" cannot be faced without noting the way and content of worship in the apostolic churches.  Clearly all the evidence points to the Father being worshiped through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, or, the Son being worshiped in and by the Holy Spirit.  Wainwright is well aware of the mutual influence of worship upon the development of doctrine and of doctrine upon (and thus influencing the content of) worship both in the period of the New Testament and afterward.

The book is divided into four parts.  In the first part Wainwright briefly looks at the Old Testament and of "plurality in unity" with respect to God.  The second part is the longest and deals with the evidence for the divinity of Christ.  In the third brief part the evidence for the divinity of the Holy Spirit is collected.  Finally, in part four the rise of the trinitarian problem is presented.

At the end of the book, Wainwright summarizes his conclusions.

The problem of the Trinity was being raised and answered in the New Testament.  It arose because of the development of Christian experience, worship, and thought.  It was rooted in experience, for men were conscious of the power of the Spirit and the presence and Lordship of the risen Christ.  It was rooted in worship, because men worshipped in the Spirit, offered their prayers to God the Father through Christ, and sometimes worshipped Christ himself.  It was rooted in thought, because the writers tackled first the Christological problem, and then, at any rate in the Fourth Gospel, the threefold problem.  The whole matter was based on the life and resurrection of Jesus himself, who received the Spirit during his earthly life and imparted the Spirit to others after his resurrection.³

He believes that his investigations show that a biblical doctrine of God can begin with an account of the names and titles of

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the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit along with their divine functions and mutual relations.  However, he recognizes that such an account of the Three in One or the Three as One cannot be summarized in any pithy formula.  Thus, whatever doctrine of the Trinity there is in the Scripture, it is neither complete nor definitive but it is nevertheless present and real.  This means that the later, developed church doctrine of the Holy Trinity can be seen as a continuation of that search for precision in the doctrine of God, which began in the New Testament.

So for Wainwright, the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity is more the completion of rather than the first principle of the theological system.

Dr. Lampe, once Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and the final editor of the Patristic Greek Lexicon, concludes his book God as Spirit (1977) with these words:

I believe in the Divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in the sense that the one God, the Creator and Savior Spirit, revealed himself and acted decisively for us in Jesus.  I believe in the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, in the sense that the same one God, the Creator and Savior Spirit, is here and now not far from every one of us; for in him we live and move, in him we have our being, in us, if we consent to know and trust him, he will create the Christlike harvest: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self control.⁴

This sounds attractive. However, in terms of the classic orthodoxy of the patristic period, Lampe must be judged as a unitarian and an adoptionist.  First of all, he believes that God is one Person, not three, and that the Spirit is simply the unipersonal God.  That is, the Father is the Spirit and the Spirit is the Father in his activity toward, and within, the world. In the second place, he believes that Jesus is simply a man in whom God as Spirit was uniquely and incomparably active.  Thus he denies that Jesus was preexistent before his human birth and insists that talk of incarnation is just mythology.

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Lampe is able to come to this conclusion because of the way he interprets the New Testament.  He does not deny that there is evidence within the documents that the early Christians believed in the personal preexistence of Jesus as well as in his continued "post-existence" as the resurrected and ascended Lord, who will come again.  However, he follows the extreme wing of form criticism in modern biblical scholarship and attributes this belief and related ones to mistaken judgments made within the early church concerning the real identity of Jesus of Nazareth.  In fact, Lampe uses his great scholarship to show the part that the concepts of preexistence and post-existence played in the attempts by the church in its earliest days to give expression to its memories and experience of Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, he concludes that these attempts were all based on a colossal, initial error!

What the early church ought to have realized and taught, he suggests, was that God is Spirit and that everything that is vital and good in Christianity can be adequately understood and experienced within this belief.  "I believe," writes Lampe, "that the Trinitarian model is in the end less satisfactory for the articulation of our basic Christian experience than the unifying concept of God as Spirit."⁵

So for Lampe the doctrine of the Trinity is not essential to the Christian Faith, and what he attractively presents is a modern expression of the old liberal theology of the nineteenth century.

Dr. C.F.D. Moule was the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and a colleague of Dr. Lampe.  His views on whether or not the New Testament contains a doctrine of plurality within the unity of God are found in his book, The Holy Spirit (1978), and in an article, "The New Testament and the Doctrine of the Trinity," published in The Expository Times.

As is clear in his important study, The Origin of Christology (1977), Moule has a very high estimate of Jesus Christ.  In fact, as the two studies mentioned above demonstrate, he holds that the New Testament points to a relation between God (the Father) and Christ such as suggests that (in later Nicene terms) the

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homoousios rightly reflects the implications of New Testament experience.

Moule brings our attention to what he considers to be the two primary and impressive "pointers" to the deity of Jesus Christ.  "The first is the fact that, in the greetings of the Pauline epistles, God and Christ are brought into a single formula," and he adds that, "It requires an effort of imagination to grasp the enormity that this must have seemed to a non-Christian Jew."  In these greetings formulae, God and Christ together are actually the origin of divine blessings to Christians.

The second is "the fact that Paul seems to experience Christ as any theist reckons to understand God – that is, as personal but as more than an individual: as more than a person."⁷  Moule has in mind the incorporative formulae – "in Christ" and "in the Lord"– which point to this "more than a person" and "more than an individual" dimension, and thus to preexistence and to the deity of the Son before space and time.

Because of these "pointers" and other evidence, Moule is ready to state that there is "a conception of God as differentiated unity, as unity in plurality – unity in at least duality."  He has no doubt that as a minimum there is a binitarian conception of God in the New Testament. However, he is unable to take the further step and claim that there is a trinitarian conception of God in the New Testament.  "What is not clear," he writes, "is that the Spirit is distinguishable from God [the Father] in the way in which Christ is distinguishable from both God and the Spirit."⁸  He accepts that the New Testament furnishes evidence that Christians described their experience of God in "triple terms," but he doubts whether these statements actually point to "an eternal threefold differentiation within the Deity" in the same way as the experience of Christ points to an eternal, binitarian dialogue therein.

At the end of chapter 4 of The Holy Spirit, Moule writes: "When Spirit is the mode of God’s presence in the hearts and minds of his people, then there is a good case for personal language [with respect to the Spirit].  But this still does not force upon us a third eternal ‘Person’ (in the technical sense) within the Unity [of God]."  Then in the final lines of the same chapter he wrote:

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Christian experience led to the recognition of at least two distinguishable "modes" of God’s presence with men: the "mode," namely, in which Christ was experienced as Mediator, and Christians incorporated in him; and the "mode" in which the Holy Spirit was found in and among Christians, interpreting Christ and creating his likeness in them.  It is thus intelligible that the Church came to speak of God as eternally Father, Son and Spirit.  But threefoldness is, perhaps, less vital to a Christian conception of God than the eternal twofoldness of Father and Son.⁹

For Moule, it is sufficient to say that the Spirit is the presence of the personal God.  And like Lampe, he is somewhat impatient of the later ecclesiastical distinctions in the formulation of the dogma of the Holy Trinity.

So Moule does not see the doctrine of the Trinity as either the first principle of, or the completion of the Christian theological system.  He belongs to that movement of "modern" biblical theology which interprets the New Testament without reference to the way it was understood in the second, third, and fourth centuries of the Christian era.¹⁰

Royce C. Gruenler (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) is an evangelical biblical scholar and the author of The Trinity in the Gospel of John (1986).  One of his aims is to present what he has discovered in John’s Gospel concerning the living God.  He calls this the "social nature" of God, "the divine Community," "the divine Household," "the Triune Community," and the "Triune Society."  However, he admits that, before studying this Gospel afresh, he has been impressed by the emphasis upon the social nature of reality in process philosophy and theology, as well as by the exposition of the social nature of God by Leonard Hodgson in The Doctrine of the Trinity.

With respect to methodology, he admits the influence of Michael Polanyi (see his Personal Knowledge, 1964) and writes:

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I have used an exegetical approach that owes a considerable debt to the critical analysis intention of persons, particularly in regard to the disclosures of their intention in speech and action.  What I have tried to do is to look and see and listen and try to understand what Jesus is doing and saying in the Gospel of John, and what he is intending to convey to his audience in regard to his relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with the new community comprised of his followers.  This exegetical approach aims to be primarily descriptive of the speech, actions, and intentions of Jesus in the fourth Gospel, with a view to understanding what he is saying about the divine Community and the new community of believers.¹¹

Though he uses the word "community" in virtually every page of his book, Gruenler never defends the choice of this word to describe the Holy Trinity.  He simply assumes (along with a growing chorus of modern writers) that it is appropriate and meaningful. Therefore, he proceeds with this explanation:

As a historian and exegete with Christian convictions, I find that noteworthy and distinguishing characteristics of the Triune Community emerge in Jesus’ dialogues, and that an exegesis of the dialogues brings a new understanding of the social nature of God and the way in which New Testament life and ethics are grounded in the nature of the divine Triunity.  Reflecting the divine Household, the household of the church is to demonstrate God’s social nature and hospitality and being there at the disposal of others.

And he continues by claiming:

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In his exegesis of specific passages, Gruenler notes how mutual loving, generosity, glorification, equality, availability, disposability, and deference "characterize the divine Family in the Gospel as a whole."

Perhaps the most appropriate judgment on this book is to say that it claims too much and is not sufficiently careful in the use of social analogies for God.  While the German word, gemeinschaft (meaning either corporate fellowship or community or both) is a word which perhaps may be used of the Holy Trinity, the American word "community" does not have the richness of meaning of the German word. In order not to cause confusion, it is better to use "communion of Persons" when speaking of the Holy Trinity.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (Calvin Theological Seminary) is an evangelical systematic theologian, whose doctoral thesis at Princeton in 1982 was on the "social analogy of the Trinity."  An important essay by him, "Social Trinity and Tritheism," appears in a collection of essays entitled, Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement (1989).  As the title suggests, it is a defense of the social analogy of the Trinity against the charge of tritheism.

After considering the New Testament evidence, claims Plantinga, "a person who extrapolated theologically from Hebrews, Paul and John would naturally develop a social theory of the Trinity."  Therefore, he proposes such a theory.

The Holy Trinity is a divine, transcendent society or community of three fully personal and fully divine entities: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit or Paraclete.  These three are wonderfully unified by their common divinity, that is, by the possession by each [one of them] of the whole generic divine essence – including, for instance, the properties of everlastingness and of sublimely great knowledge, love and glory.  The persons are also unified by their joint redemptive purpose, revelation, and work.  Their knowledge and love are directed not only to their creatures, but also primordially and archetypally to each other. The Father loves the Son and the Son [loves] the Father.

And to this he adds the following comment:

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Extrapolating beyond explicit New Testament teaching, let us say that the Father and Son love the Spirit and the Spirit [loves] the Father and Son. The Trinity is thus a zestful, wondrous community of divine light, love, joy, mutuality and verve.¹³

We may also note that Dr. Plantinga uses the word person of each of the Three and tells us that he uses it "in a rich sense," by which he means that each of the Three is "a distinct center of consciousness."  Yet he vigorously denies that this means belief in three "autonomous persons" or in three "independent persons."

Though Plantinga is more careful in his use of words and analogies concerning the living God than is Gruenler, he also allows his imagination to be overactive when he speaks of God as "a zestful, wondrous community."  However, both writers are aware of the differences between the Barthian approach and the "Social Analogy" school of such recent writers as Leonard Hodgson and, while adopting the general approach of the latter, are also influenced by the former.

Anthony Kelly is a Roman Catholic who has written The Trinity of Love: A Theology of the Christian God (1989).  His method of reading the New Testament for Trinitarian doctrine is found in his chapter, "The Scriptural Foundations," where he presents four ways in which the books of the New Testament actually provide data for a doctrine of the Trinity, which he recognizes to be (in a full sense) an achievement of the post-apostolic church.  We shall notice each of these ways.

By rhetoric Kelly means the creative effort of the writers of the New Testament (and of their fellow Christians in the church) to express in words their experience of God in Christ.  "The awareness of momentous events provokes a search for the right words in a kind of verbal celebration of the transformation that has occurred, and to give it enduring public meaning.  The wording

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of the ‘New’ reality that has taken place in Christ is a complex linguistic event."¹⁴

The early Christians were aware not only of believing in Jesus Christ as the Lord but also of being "in Christ" as they "walked in the Spirit."  They looked to him as the resurrected Lord and they experienced life and fellowship in "his Body."  They learned to read the Hebrew Scriptures in terms of this Lord Jesus Christ, who had fulfilled the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms.  So they spoke of Jesus in the terms available to them from the Scriptures – he is the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Son of God, the Messiah, and so on.  Further, they knew that Jesus as Lord is intimately related to Yahweh, the God of Israel, and to the Spirit of Yahweh, who dwells in the church.

The vocabulary of the Hebrew Scriptures was not sufficient to do justice to the full reality of the New Covenant.  So the early Christians began to express what we may call a trinitarian consciousness through the use of triadic formulations.  In coming into words within the New Testament in a variety of places and forms of the triad of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was the natural expression of a Faith which could not remain within the terms of the Shema – "the Lord our God is one Lord and you shall love the Lord your God" (Deut. 6:4-5).  The most familiar of these triadic expressions is "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ [the Son], and the love of God [the Father] and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit" (2 Cor. 13:14), but this is only one amongst many.

The rhetoric is also to be seen in what Kelly calls "iconic" and "schematic" forms.  By "iconic" he means such pictorial incidents as the baptism of Jesus (where the Father speaks, the Holy Spirit descends, and the Son hears and receives – Mark 1:9ff), and the conception of Jesus (where the Father sends the archangel and the Holy Spirit and where the eternal Son descends and unites to himself human nature in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit – Luke 1:32-35).

By "schematic" he means the general construction of major sections of Pauline letters (e.g., Rom. and Eph.), where there is the movement of salvation from the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, and where there is the movement of response to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. More particu-

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larly, he means the content of the Gospel of John, where we read so often of the Father and the Son and of the communion between them; further, we read in the same text of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father at the request of the Son as the second Paraclete (see particularly John 16:12-16).

Learning from the modern school of theology called "narrative theology," Kelly asserts that the biblical narrative contains three stories or three versions of one story. Obviously, it is the story of the people of God, the old and new Israel, and of their history and experiences through space and time.  It is the story of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, Mary, Peter, Paul, and many others.

Yet the "inner criterion for the meaningfulness of this narrative, the whole reason for its telling, is that it deals with the activity and character of the one, true God."¹⁵  The history of God’s people lives from the "biography of God."  And this God is the God who creates the world and then he elects, loves, and cares for his people.  To them he sent his only Son, who lived, died, and rose from the dead and ascended into heaven for them.  To them he sent his Spirit, who indwells them and guides them and leads them into all truth.

Apart from being a good story, the narrative becomes to those who read it as believers (united in the Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus) a personal communication.  In fact, Christians are wholly involved in this story because they are brought into union with the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.  The story, which is ultimately the story of the Holy Trinity, becomes their story.  They are involved in the divine autobiography.

Kelly refers to the name of "the Father, Son and Holy Spirit" as being three biblical symbols, which are correlated in a dramatic interplay in the New Testament.  He writes:

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Father/Son symbolism is most clearly correlated. It discloses a communion of life, mutual knowledge, common will and reciprocal revelation as the Son reveals the Father and as the Father acclaims the Son and draws all to him.  The Father and the Son, in different but related ways, give the Spirit.  And the Spirit inspires new relationships to each of them. In this dynamic interplay of the symbols of God, the one relational and communitarian divine mystery is evoked.¹⁶

And he makes the point that this interplay of symbols occurs in the proclamation and embodiment of the reign of God by Jesus Christ.  "The God of Jesus, the God who works in him, is intent on the healing and liberation of human beings."¹⁷  So the religious imagination is challenged by the symbolism of a non-patriarchalist Father, by a Son who calls him "Abba," and by a Holy Spirit who destroys Satan’s power.

Kelly believes that there are three interrelated levels of experience brought to expression in the New Testament – that of the early church, that of the disciples who were the primary witnesses to the Resurrection and, most mysteriously, the experience of Jesus himself.

(1) To expound the experience of the early church, Kelly makes use of the much quoted definition from Clifford Geertz of religious existence, which is:

A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men, by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.¹⁸

So (a) the system of symbols is "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit"; (b) the moods and motivations are the cumulative sense of the "new" – the Incarnation, the Gift of the Spirit; (c) the conceptions of existence are the revealed plans of the Father whose will it is to bring all things to their fulfillment in Christ

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Jesus; and (d) the aura of factuality is the conviction that the Father has been truly revealed by the Son and made known in the Spirit.

The experience of the church within this sense of religious existence is first of all in terms of "Spirit."  There is a profound consciousness of new life and of new relationships – to the Father, to Jesus Christ, to the fellowship of Christians, and so on.  Then there is a vital sense of mission inspired and guided by the Spirit – as portrayed in the Book of Acts.

In the second place the experience of the church is being addressed and spoken to "through the Son" (Heb. 1:2).  In many various ways Yahweh-Elohim spoke in time past but now, they knew, he spoke in a vitally new way through his Son.

Thirdly, there is the experience of knowing God intimately, yet in reverence, as the Father of Jesus Christ and praying, "Abba."

Therefore, says Kelly, the early church had the vivid impression of God being with us in the Son, within us in the Spirit, and all-embracingly around and above us as the Father.

(2) To expound the experience of God in Jesus of the first disciples, who were with Jesus before and after his death and resurrection, Kelly makes use of a psychological reconstruction by Sebastian Moore in his book, The Fire and the Rose Are One.  Kelly approves Moore’s attempt to indicate an approach "to a grassroots derivation of the Trinity," and quotes these lines:

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connection" as it undergoes the transformation of the encounter with the risen Jesus.¹⁹

Kelly holds that though such an interpretation is evocative rather than textually analytical, it does seem a reasonable account of what was going on in and with the disciples.

(3) The experience of Jesus himself is the most difficult of all to identify.  However, it seems reasonably clear from the Gospel records that he was conscious of a unique and exclusive communion with the Father, whom he called "my Father."  Further, it also seems clear that he was conscious of being possessed and indwelt, also in an unique and exclusive way, by the Spirit of the Lord.  Kelly quotes with approval the words of James D.C. Dunn.

Jesus thought of himself as God’s Son and as anointed by the eschatological Spirit, because in prayer he experienced God as Father, and in ministry, he experienced the power to heal which he could only understand as the power of the end-time and as inspiration to proclaim a message which he could only understand as the gospel of the end-time.²⁰

So the doctrine of the Trinity is "the conceptual unfolding of Jesus’ conscious identity and of the mystery enacted through him."

It is of interest to compare the way Kelly proceeds with the way Roman Catholic theologians proceeded before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).  For example, books on the doctrine of the Trinity by Joseph Pohle (1919) and Felix Klein (1940) see the doctrine delivered in propositional form within the New Testament books.  In fact, the doctrine is seen as a part of the immediate deposit of faith. Between Klein and Pohle on the one hand, and Kelly (and modern Catholics) on the other, is the adoption of the historical-critical method by Roman Catholic scholars.  Therefore, the New Testament is now most usually interpreted as supplying data for the development of the doctrine by the church after the apostolic period.

Each of the positions summarized above is found today in a similar or related form either in the teaching or in the liturgies of

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the various denominations.  The basically conservative position represented by Wainwright, that the New Testament contains the recognition, if not the developed doctrine, of God as Holy Trinity, continues to be held by those who have a high regard for the authority of the New Testament.  For example, the Baptist scholar, Ralph P. Martin, writes that "the doctrine of the Trinity is only embryonic in the New Testament literature" and that the New Testament "reflecting Christian experience gained in worship, provides the raw materials for the later dogma."²¹  In contrast, Lampe’s presentation of the unitarian doctrine that God is Spirit, together with the rejection of the full authority of the New Testament and the preexistence of Christ, is becoming increasingly common in the large liberal denominations, sometimes expressing itself as modalism or deism or even pantheism/panentheism.

Moule’s view that binitarianism is clearly taught but that trinitarianism is not clearly (if at all) presented in the New Testament, probably is the view of not a few scholarly as well as pious folk.  Certainly it is easy to appreciate such a position (which is essentially conservative) if the New Testament is interpreted without reference to the development of doctrine in the early church.  In chapter 6 we shall make use of an important study of the origins of binitarianism in the New Testament by Larry W. Hurtado – One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Christian Monotheism (1988).

The doctrine of the social Trinity seems to be gaining acceptance in the liberal Protestant denominations as well as in the Roman Catholic Church.  However, it is usually in a less traditional form than presented by Gruenler and Plantinga.  Its growing popularity has to do with its usefulness in providing a model for community on earth.  Therefore, it can be adapted by feminist, liberationist, political, as well as conservative activists to commend one or another version of human community as based on the way God actually exists as God (or the threefold way God is experienced by people on earth).  One attractive presentation of this from a feminist perspective is Catherine M. LaCugna, God for Us (1992).

The position developed by Kelly represents the view of many Roman Catholics who hold to the development of doctrine

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in the church.  In the New Testament are the various seeds and themes which, it is held, will develop under the guidance of the Lord of the church into fully developed doctrines/dogmas.  With reference to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the seeds and themes of the New Testament reached their dogmatic expression in the Creeds of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople and in later conciliar statements.

So we see that among scholars who are prepared to state that they are Trinitarians and that the confession of God as the Unity in Trinity/Trinity in Unity is fundamental to the Christian religion there is no clear agreement as to whether or not there is a formal doctrine of God as the Holy Trinity, that is, a threefold plurality in unity, anywhere in the New Testament.  Some claim that there is such a doctrine therein, even though it is undeveloped and embryonic, lacking the intellectual clarity of the later church doctrine of three hypostaseis in one ousia (three persons in one substance).  Others are ready to admit that there is an awareness by the apostolic writers of the problem that God is a plurality in unity – be it a binitarian or a trinitarian unity – and that this problem surfaces at specific points (e.g., the baptism of Jesus) and in various ways (e.g., in liturgical formulae).  Yet others see no plurality in the unity of God at all: they see only a fuller revelation of the identity and character of the one, true God given through Jesus Christ and in/by the Holy Spirit.

In the light of this situation, it is necessary for me to be clear concerning my use of terminology when I am presenting my own interpretation rather than citing those of others.  When I write of the doctrine or the dogma of the Trinity I am thinking specifically of the formal statements by the church of the Fathers: in particular, I am thinking of the teaching within the Creeds – the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) and the later Athanasian Creed (Quicunque Vult).  In these cases there is formal doctrine, which is precise and which is stated so as to exclude alternative but erroneous possibilities (e.g., that of Arianism).

I do not believe that there is a precise or formal doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament materials.  At the same time, I do think that the whole of the New Testament bears witness – mostly implicitly but sometimes explicitly – to the plurality within unity of the one true God, Yahweh-Elohim.  So I can say

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with Arthur Wainwright that the writers of the New Testament were aware of the problem of the Trinity and were moving toward a doctrine of the same; but, the word "problem" does not seem an appropriate term to describe this gracious and uplifting theme in the minds of the writers.  I can also comfortably join George Tavard and speak of the "vision of the Trinity" (the title of his book): at least the word "vision" indicates that the writers were aware of more than they were able, ready, or desirous of expressing in words.

My own preference is to speak of the writers of the New Testament as having a "sense" or "conviction" or "consciousness" of a wonderful and mysterious plurality within the unity of God.  This spiritual knowledge of God, the Father, through his Son, and in/by his Spirit, surfaces and is expressed in a variety of ways in their writings.  This is because it is embedded in their Christian experience and is expressed in their corporate worship and personal piety.  However, they did not explore or develop their convictions concerning the plurality within unity in a full, intellectual sense.  Their concentration and emphasis were to declare and to explain the Gospel of God (the Father) concerning his Son (Jesus Christ) as they were guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit.  So they provide much information about the eternal God, Yahweh-Elohim, as he is turned toward the world in the work of creation, redemption, and sanctification.  In particular they speak much of Jesus of Nazareth as the One in whom God is revealed and active.  That is, within the statement of this divine activity and energy, they speak of the relations of the Father and the Son, the Son and the Father, the Father and the Spirit, the Son and the Spirit.  Yet, while experience of God is the experience of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, there is no formal doctrine of Yahweh-Elohim as a Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.

The Hebrew Bible (thus also the Septuagint and the Old Testament) bears witness to Yahweh-Elohim, Creator, Redeemer, and Judge.  In Part Two it will be our task to pay attention to this witness and to see how the mysterious plurality within the unique unity of this living God is made known to Christian readers.  We shall experience the results of believing that "the New is in the Old concealed, the Old is by the New revealed."

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