It is with eagerness and delight that Christian readers turn their attention to the triune God’s self-revelation in Scripture. We take in the whole book from the beginning to the end, and rise from our reading filled with knowledge of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We finish the book, close it, and say to ourselves something like, “the God who created the world and rescues sinners, as self-reported in this book, is the Trinity.” And then we dive back in for more.
But faith makes that true confession of God’s identity after having taken in the meaning of the entire book, from Genesis to Revelation. As the long text unscrolls, certain elements grow in clarity and definiteness; a number of things left unspecified in the opening pages are developed, ramified, specified, and worked out. One of the most important things that grows in clarity over the course of the volume is the personal distinctions in which God exists. The personal distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are among those things that are, as medieval expositors liked to say, latent in the Old Testament but patent in the New.[1] And these personal distinctions are at the heart of the Christian doctrine of God: they are not minor details!
If we were focusing on the history narrated by Scripture, we would call this movement progressive revelation. We would say that God revealed a certain amount, or with a certain level of clarity, in the time of Abraham, and then more in the time of Moses, and then most of all in the apostolic era with the incarnate presence of the Son and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. But we could also take that historical progression as a given, and move on to considering the Bible as a single book now in existence between two covers, and ask about the reader’s experience with such a book. That’s where I’m taking up the conversation, partly because it’s the best way to engage Peter Leithart’s opening essay, “Triune Creator.”
The best way of appreciating what Leithart’s essay offers is to take it as an informed and motivated rereading of Genesis 1, a rereading carried out by somebody who has already read straight through the whole book to Revelation (on which he in fact wrote a commentary). As a Christian rereader, Leithart has encountered Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Gospels and Acts, and has learned from their actions and their words precisely who they are as emissaries from the Father, as persons in the eternal life of the one God. He has seen the whole movement of Biblical thought converge in these two personal presences who fulfill all the ways of God with us and us with God. And then he has gone back to the opening pages to start through the book again, abundantly informed about how it all turns out, and remembering all that was said about these three persons.
When it comes to truly great texts, rereading is even better than mere reading. Here is an illustration. Going through Jane Austen’s Emma the first time is wonderful: the narrator introduces us immediately to “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition.” But rereading those opening lines after having experienced the entire text, we know by long experience just what kind of cleverness Emma is possessed of, and what tension it introduces into her comfortable home and happy disposition. The very word “clever” practically shimmers off the page for the informed rereader, who can easily call to mind any number of instances from later behavior and dialogue that fill out the word with its proper, determinate, complex meaning. In fact, for rereaders looking to illustrate Emma’s cleverness, there is such an embarrassment of riches at hand that decisions must be made about which ones to invoke and which to ignore. The rereading is an enriched encounter by which the whole of the book impinges on the first page. The reader learned a lot on the way through the pages of the novel; the rereader alone is in a position to bring all of that to bear on the opening lines, seeing the whole in the parts and the parts in the whole.
I suppose the application to “Triune Creator” is obvious. Leithart announces that “the rudiments of Trinitarian doctrine can be found in the notion of a Creator God, most especially as expressed in the opening verses of Genesis,” and then ingeniously tries out all sorts of interpretive gambits on those opening words. Personally, I profited most from the argument that the name Elohim is a kind of shorthand for “god of gods,” or superlatively God. But there was also much to gain from the meditation on word and breath both being present in the act of speaking creation. Leithart is surely right to appeal to the numerous later (!) occurrences of ruach to buttress the fuller sense of what this first occurrence of the word should suggest (I can never forgive the expositor who offered the translation “a god-awful wind,” though I have done the next best thing by forgetting who it was). On the other hand, I was less convinced by the suggestion that in the narration of God’s creative acts, “the ‘elohim who makes and the ‘elohim who evaluates are somehow distinct.” Identifying distinct speakers here certainly would give the technique of prosopological exegesis a run for its money, but I fear it might also run into its old problem of dividing person from person too sharply.[2] It is hard to discern the undividedness of the Trinity’s outward works in the show and tell of these ‘elohim.
It may seem unfair to simply list Leithart’s various interpretive gambits and then rank them according to personal preference as if this were a matter of taste, but the main thing I want to draw attention to is their copiousness. Leithart has a lot of ideas about how the triune God of all Scripture may be lurking here in these first words. He tries them all; different gambits will be more persuasive to different readers. And I say this in an effort to praise the essay, not to bury it. Motivated rereading is a noble interpretive exercise. It enacts the delight of the ideal reader presupposed by the profound style of Scripture itself. It’s also an excellent research technique, a kind of literary analogy to the scientific process of projecting hypothesis onto a phenomenon and seeking their confirmation. It can be a road to validity in interpretation, when exercised along with some principles of discrimination.
Let me push the Emma illustration one step further, though, by inquiring into the mind of the maker. While Emma’s rereader has gained the ability to see far more deeply into the first page than the first-time reader could, Emma’s author must surely see the end from the beginning. (I am assuming the unavailability to us of the editorial process by which Austen moved the text from draft through revisions to final form; such things are too high to look into; let us treat them apophatically as hidden away and think only of the text as given.) If anybody ever understood all that the first page meant or would come to mean, it must be Jane Austen. We might take deeper rereadings as a way of approaching nearer and nearer to the mind of the author, with the goal of seeing the fullness of the novel in the few lines of the first page. I don’t know what they call that in Austen studies, but in Bible reading Peter Leithart has called it Deep Exegesis.
So, is Emma Woodhouse’s manifold cleverness manifest on the first page of Emma? Yes and no. Yes, because the full meaning of her page-one cleverness, rightly interpreted, simply must be the same thing as the full-book cleverness. It can’t be some other cleverness; Austen never teaches a merely unclever Emma. But no, the manifold cleverness is not manifest on that first page, because the first page has its work cut out for it in being the beginning. It is neither the ending nor the fullness, but the opening. Even the skilled rereader has to reread the beginning as the beginning, noting the open and not-yet-specified character of what is said by way of introduction.
If I have worries about the hermeneutical maneuvers of “Triune Creator,” they do not have to do with the exercise of creativity, the force of analogous reasoning, the powers of association on display. Most Bible readers are in constant danger of finding far too little in Scripture; the community needs to maintain some space for the Leithartian practitioner who risks finding too much. No, my worries (and I do have some) are about the impression given by the exercise of finding the Trinity on the first page of the book. I worry about setting readers up with the expectation that Genesis actually teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. The result, it seems to me, is that they will be disappointed at the meagerness and ambiguity of what they find there. I also worry about readers who are hoping to be shown the grounds of the church’s confession of the Trinity, and are confronted with a congeries of plural verbs, serial elohim, and divine breath. If they expect foundations, they will again have to admit that these phenomena are not the kind of thing on which one can build.
My own recommendation in these matters is, in the order of catechesis, to start with what is clearest. The distinction of persons in God is decisively revealed in the mode of fulfillment, when the Son and Spirit are sent to carry out salvation. Looking back from this revelation, we can confess that the distinction could also be perceived in advance, but in the mode of promise and expectation: triunity at first only adumbrated, but then manifested. This approach, which is based on the temporal structure of the biblical concept of mystery, has several advantages. It aligns with the patristic mode of interpretation in which multiple texts were pressed together to bring out their full doctrinal importance.[3] Along with rereading, trinitarian theology functions by co-reading, or reading Genesis 1 alongside John 1, Colossians 1, and so on. I can imagine an objection here: It might be fine for Irenaeus and modern theologians to co-read Genesis 1 alongside John 1, but surely John wasn’t co-reading anything. Wasn’t John himself simply reading Genesis 1 when he wrote John 1? No; John was co-reading Genesis 1 alongside his personal encounter with “that which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes.” The apostles were rereading Genesis in light of what biblical scholars used to call, in somewhat chilly language, the Christ-event. That personal event was not text, but he did come into the world and exegete the Father authoritatively.
In my own teaching on the Trinity in the Old Testament, I tend to press the word “adumbration” as hard as I can, and strategically reserve the word “revelation” for what occurs in the coming of Christ and the Spirit. It’s a stingy move, and requires assertive policing of language. I have to make sure students don’t generalize unduly and start thinking that God is only made known in a vague or shadowy way in the Old Testament. There’s nothing vague or abstract about Elohim in Genesis 1 or the LORD God in Genesis 2! But the trinitarian distinctions are not clearly set forth; that is the information not yet revealed until the fullness of time makes it fitting. I confess some of these linguistic difficulties because I was oddly encouraged by Peter Leithart’s own struggles to capture the same dynamic. Leithart writes things like, “Paul states openly what the Shema declared in a veiled manner,” and “we see proto-Trinitarian traces fully unveiled in the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit.” Evidently, this is a hard subject to talk about, doing justice to what can be seen in the Old Testament while also acknowledging the greater clarity of the New.
Methodist theologian William Burt Pope may indicate the best approach when he frames the subject in terms of holism: the whole Trinity is revealed in the whole Scripture. “No word in the ancient records is to be studied as standing alone, but according to the analogy of faith, which is no other than the one truth that reigns in the organic whole of Scripture.”[4] That overarching unity of the entire canon, taken as one comprehensive, inwardly complex revelation, is the proper starting point for asking about the individual parts of Scripture. It especially establishes the right angle of approach for reading the earliest portions of Scripture with the goal of knowing the triune God in their very words.
“Scripture never teaches a merely-mono theism,” says Leithart, not even in its opening pages. It is true that any interpreter who reads Genesis 1 and takes them to entail a denial of trinitarian distinctions is improperly reading the Bible. But I don’t think we can say the same about interpreters who read Genesis 1 and say that they can only discern some kind of surprisingly rich divine fullness there, but who stop short of being able to perceive truly personal distinctions among precisely three persons. Leithart’s insistence that Scripture is not teaching “merely-mon theism” counts against dogmatic antitrinitarianism, but not against the shadowy and intentionally mysterious opening pages of a book whose overall meaning, taken as a whole, is that the God who is creator is the God who is triune.
Fred Sanders is professor of theology in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University.
[1] Blatant would be a better English rhyme with latent, and is a much more common word in modern English than patent. But it’s not a good translation of the medieval formula.
[2] Recall that the technique of prosopological exegesis can also be used to argue for Nestorian conclusions, as if dividing human person from divine person; the interpretive technique needs to be governed by higher considerations.
[3] See the account given in Stephen O. Presley, The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1-3 in Irenaeus of Lyons (Brill, 2015).
[4] Pope, Compendium of Theology I:260
It is with eagerness and delight that Christian readers turn their attention to the triune God’s self-revelation in Scripture. We take in the whole book from the beginning to the end, and rise from our reading filled with knowledge of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We finish the book, close it, and say to ourselves something like, “the God who created the world and rescues sinners, as self-reported in this book, is the Trinity.” And then we dive back in for more.
But faith makes that true confession of God’s identity after having taken in the meaning of the entire book, from Genesis to Revelation. As the long text unscrolls, certain elements grow in clarity and definiteness; a number of things left unspecified in the opening pages are developed, ramified, specified, and worked out. One of the most important things that grows in clarity over the course of the volume is the personal distinctions in which God exists. The personal distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are among those things that are, as medieval expositors liked to say, latent in the Old Testament but patent in the New.[1] And these personal distinctions are at the heart of the Christian doctrine of God: they are not minor details!
If we were focusing on the history narrated by Scripture, we would call this movement progressive revelation. We would say that God revealed a certain amount, or with a certain level of clarity, in the time of Abraham, and then more in the time of Moses, and then most of all in the apostolic era with the incarnate presence of the Son and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. But we could also take that historical progression as a given, and move on to considering the Bible as a single book now in existence between two covers, and ask about the reader’s experience with such a book. That’s where I’m taking up the conversation, partly because it’s the best way to engage Peter Leithart’s opening essay, “Triune Creator.”
The best way of appreciating what Leithart’s essay offers is to take it as an informed and motivated rereading of Genesis 1, a rereading carried out by somebody who has already read straight through the whole book to Revelation (on which he in fact wrote a commentary). As a Christian rereader, Leithart has encountered Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Gospels and Acts, and has learned from their actions and their words precisely who they are as emissaries from the Father, as persons in the eternal life of the one God. He has seen the whole movement of Biblical thought converge in these two personal presences who fulfill all the ways of God with us and us with God. And then he has gone back to the opening pages to start through the book again, abundantly informed about how it all turns out, and remembering all that was said about these three persons.
When it comes to truly great texts, rereading is even better than mere reading. Here is an illustration. Going through Jane Austen’s Emma the first time is wonderful: the narrator introduces us immediately to “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition.” But rereading those opening lines after having experienced the entire text, we know by long experience just what kind of cleverness Emma is possessed of, and what tension it introduces into her comfortable home and happy disposition. The very word “clever” practically shimmers off the page for the informed rereader, who can easily call to mind any number of instances from later behavior and dialogue that fill out the word with its proper, determinate, complex meaning. In fact, for rereaders looking to illustrate Emma’s cleverness, there is such an embarrassment of riches at hand that decisions must be made about which ones to invoke and which to ignore. The rereading is an enriched encounter by which the whole of the book impinges on the first page. The reader learned a lot on the way through the pages of the novel; the rereader alone is in a position to bring all of that to bear on the opening lines, seeing the whole in the parts and the parts in the whole.
I suppose the application to “Triune Creator” is obvious. Leithart announces that “the rudiments of Trinitarian doctrine can be found in the notion of a Creator God, most especially as expressed in the opening verses of Genesis,” and then ingeniously tries out all sorts of interpretive gambits on those opening words. Personally, I profited most from the argument that the name Elohim is a kind of shorthand for “god of gods,” or superlatively God. But there was also much to gain from the meditation on word and breath both being present in the act of speaking creation. Leithart is surely right to appeal to the numerous later (!) occurrences of ruach to buttress the fuller sense of what this first occurrence of the word should suggest (I can never forgive the expositor who offered the translation “a god-awful wind,” though I have done the next best thing by forgetting who it was). On the other hand, I was less convinced by the suggestion that in the narration of God’s creative acts, “the ‘elohim who makes and the ‘elohim who evaluates are somehow distinct.” Identifying distinct speakers here certainly would give the technique of prosopological exegesis a run for its money, but I fear it might also run into its old problem of dividing person from person too sharply.[2] It is hard to discern the undividedness of the Trinity’s outward works in the show and tell of these ‘elohim.
It may seem unfair to simply list Leithart’s various interpretive gambits and then rank them according to personal preference as if this were a matter of taste, but the main thing I want to draw attention to is their copiousness. Leithart has a lot of ideas about how the triune God of all Scripture may be lurking here in these first words. He tries them all; different gambits will be more persuasive to different readers. And I say this in an effort to praise the essay, not to bury it. Motivated rereading is a noble interpretive exercise. It enacts the delight of the ideal reader presupposed by the profound style of Scripture itself. It’s also an excellent research technique, a kind of literary analogy to the scientific process of projecting hypothesis onto a phenomenon and seeking their confirmation. It can be a road to validity in interpretation, when exercised along with some principles of discrimination.
Let me push the Emma illustration one step further, though, by inquiring into the mind of the maker. While Emma’s rereader has gained the ability to see far more deeply into the first page than the first-time reader could, Emma’s author must surely see the end from the beginning. (I am assuming the unavailability to us of the editorial process by which Austen moved the text from draft through revisions to final form; such things are too high to look into; let us treat them apophatically as hidden away and think only of the text as given.) If anybody ever understood all that the first page meant or would come to mean, it must be Jane Austen. We might take deeper rereadings as a way of approaching nearer and nearer to the mind of the author, with the goal of seeing the fullness of the novel in the few lines of the first page. I don’t know what they call that in Austen studies, but in Bible reading Peter Leithart has called it Deep Exegesis.
So, is Emma Woodhouse’s manifold cleverness manifest on the first page of Emma? Yes and no. Yes, because the full meaning of her page-one cleverness, rightly interpreted, simply must be the same thing as the full-book cleverness. It can’t be some other cleverness; Austen never teaches a merely unclever Emma. But no, the manifold cleverness is not manifest on that first page, because the first page has its work cut out for it in being the beginning. It is neither the ending nor the fullness, but the opening. Even the skilled rereader has to reread the beginning as the beginning, noting the open and not-yet-specified character of what is said by way of introduction.
If I have worries about the hermeneutical maneuvers of “Triune Creator,” they do not have to do with the exercise of creativity, the force of analogous reasoning, the powers of association on display. Most Bible readers are in constant danger of finding far too little in Scripture; the community needs to maintain some space for the Leithartian practitioner who risks finding too much. No, my worries (and I do have some) are about the impression given by the exercise of finding the Trinity on the first page of the book. I worry about setting readers up with the expectation that Genesis actually teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. The result, it seems to me, is that they will be disappointed at the meagerness and ambiguity of what they find there. I also worry about readers who are hoping to be shown the grounds of the church’s confession of the Trinity, and are confronted with a congeries of plural verbs, serial elohim, and divine breath. If they expect foundations, they will again have to admit that these phenomena are not the kind of thing on which one can build.
My own recommendation in these matters is, in the order of catechesis, to start with what is clearest. The distinction of persons in God is decisively revealed in the mode of fulfillment, when the Son and Spirit are sent to carry out salvation. Looking back from this revelation, we can confess that the distinction could also be perceived in advance, but in the mode of promise and expectation: triunity at first only adumbrated, but then manifested. This approach, which is based on the temporal structure of the biblical concept of mystery, has several advantages. It aligns with the patristic mode of interpretation in which multiple texts were pressed together to bring out their full doctrinal importance.[3] Along with rereading, trinitarian theology functions by co-reading, or reading Genesis 1 alongside John 1, Colossians 1, and so on. I can imagine an objection here: It might be fine for Irenaeus and modern theologians to co-read Genesis 1 alongside John 1, but surely John wasn’t co-reading anything. Wasn’t John himself simply reading Genesis 1 when he wrote John 1? No; John was co-reading Genesis 1 alongside his personal encounter with “that which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes.” The apostles were rereading Genesis in light of what biblical scholars used to call, in somewhat chilly language, the Christ-event. That personal event was not text, but he did come into the world and exegete the Father authoritatively.
In my own teaching on the Trinity in the Old Testament, I tend to press the word “adumbration” as hard as I can, and strategically reserve the word “revelation” for what occurs in the coming of Christ and the Spirit. It’s a stingy move, and requires assertive policing of language. I have to make sure students don’t generalize unduly and start thinking that God is only made known in a vague or shadowy way in the Old Testament. There’s nothing vague or abstract about Elohim in Genesis 1 or the LORD God in Genesis 2! But the trinitarian distinctions are not clearly set forth; that is the information not yet revealed until the fullness of time makes it fitting. I confess some of these linguistic difficulties because I was oddly encouraged by Peter Leithart’s own struggles to capture the same dynamic. Leithart writes things like, “Paul states openly what the Shema declared in a veiled manner,” and “we see proto-Trinitarian traces fully unveiled in the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit.” Evidently, this is a hard subject to talk about, doing justice to what can be seen in the Old Testament while also acknowledging the greater clarity of the New.
Methodist theologian William Burt Pope may indicate the best approach when he frames the subject in terms of holism: the whole Trinity is revealed in the whole Scripture. “No word in the ancient records is to be studied as standing alone, but according to the analogy of faith, which is no other than the one truth that reigns in the organic whole of Scripture.”[4] That overarching unity of the entire canon, taken as one comprehensive, inwardly complex revelation, is the proper starting point for asking about the individual parts of Scripture. It especially establishes the right angle of approach for reading the earliest portions of Scripture with the goal of knowing the triune God in their very words.
“Scripture never teaches a merely-mono theism,” says Leithart, not even in its opening pages. It is true that any interpreter who reads Genesis 1 and takes them to entail a denial of trinitarian distinctions is improperly reading the Bible. But I don’t think we can say the same about interpreters who read Genesis 1 and say that they can only discern some kind of surprisingly rich divine fullness there, but who stop short of being able to perceive truly personal distinctions among precisely three persons. Leithart’s insistence that Scripture is not teaching “merely-mon theism” counts against dogmatic antitrinitarianism, but not against the shadowy and intentionally mysterious opening pages of a book whose overall meaning, taken as a whole, is that the God who is creator is the God who is triune.
Fred Sanders is professor of theology in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University.
[1] Blatant would be a better English rhyme with latent, and is a much more common word in modern English than patent. But it’s not a good translation of the medieval formula.
[2] Recall that the technique of prosopological exegesis can also be used to argue for Nestorian conclusions, as if dividing human person from divine person; the interpretive technique needs to be governed by higher considerations.
[3] See the account given in Stephen O. Presley, The Intertextual Reception of Genesis 1-3 in Irenaeus of Lyons (Brill, 2015).
[4] Pope, Compendium of Theology I:260
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