A pastiche from
different reviews of Wesley Hill’s Paul and
the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2015).
“The historically trained New Testament scholar will today
proceed with the task of interpretation without wasting a minute on the
suspicion that the Trinitarian confessions of later centuries might be rooted
in the New Testament itself, and that the Trinitarian creeds might continue to
function as valuable hermeneutical signposts for a modern understanding.” (Ulrich
Mauser, cited here)
“Wesley, in contrast, thinks that Trinitarian categories can
be hugely illuminating when it comes to Paul’s thought about God. In
particular, the concept of relations between the divine persons needs to be brought
into the discussion.” (Andrew
Wilson) He “argues that by consciously avoiding trinitarian categories in
an effort to be “historical” in their interpretation of Paul in his Jewish
context, scholars have been working with one hand tied behind their backs.” (Derek
Rishmawy)
“Instead of beginning with the question of how divine is
Jesus,” the question that has preoccupied Pauline scholarship, employing the two (separate) categories of monotheism
and Christology, “Hill wants to start with asking
questions concerning relations. His thesis is that Paul cannot talk about one
of the persons of the Godhead without mentioning, or identifying them by, their
relationship to one or more of the other persons.” (Jonathan
J. Routley)
Andrew
Wilson again: “After a lengthy introduction...in chapter 2, Wesley shows
how a number of texts (Rom 4:24; 8:11; Gal 1:1) do
much more than defining who Jesus is in relation to God; they define who God is
in relation to Jesus...
The next two chapters tackle three crucial texts (Phil 2:6-11; 1 Cor 8:4-6; 15:24-28)
of which it is frequently argued that, as well as sharing divine identity,
Jesus is somehow subordinated to God, such that the unique status of God is not
compromised. In response, Wesley argues (a) that this way of putting things assumes
that the identity of God is something Paul conceived of independently of Jesus,
which is not the case; (b) that the exalted language used of Jesus indicates
that he is not just God-like, but “shown to belong within what makes YHWH
unique”; (c) that differentiation and even subordination also appear in some
texts; (d) that, taken together, Paul thinks in terms of an “asymmetrical
mutuality” between the divine persons; and that (e) only the Trinitarian
strategy of redoublement can make sense of this:
As we have seen, classic (both “Eastern” and “Western”) Trinitarian formulations regularly emphasised the need to speak of God “twice over”, describing the three “persons” or hypostases as irreducibly distinct and at the same time describing the three as one in essence or will or power ... such a “redoubled” discourse makes possibly an understanding of what might be called asymmetrical mutuality between God and Jesus, whereby God is not who God is as “father” without Jesus and Jesus is not who he is as the raised and exalted one without God.
As Derrick
Peterson explains, “In addition to the idea of mutual reciprocity and identity,
a second Trinitarian element Hill is wont to use throughout his argument, is the
idea of “redoublement.” This is a term coined in the late 1960’s by Ghislain Lafont,
and used more recently and in an extensive way by Thomistic scholar Gilles Emery
and his student, Matthew Levering—but the concept described by the term is present
in the tradition from very early on. The basic sense of redoublement is: there must
be a twofold description of God to describe both the three irreducible persons,
and also their essential unity. As Lewis Ayres puts it: “we must describe the same
ground twice over.” [Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 260.] To collapse these descriptions into a single frame of reference
is to endanger the biblical character of either aspect.”
“With the fathers like Athanasius, medievals such as Aquinas, and even recent relational theologies, Hill argues we need to understand that the identities of Father, Son, and Spirit are mutually-defining in the texts in such a way that both unity and differentiation is accounted for.” (Derek Rishmawy)
“In a move that parallels, complements, and possibly
clarifies our retrieval of redoublement, [Francis] Watson draws on the
affirmation that Christ has two natures, both a human and divine one. The Son
has eternally always been the Son of the Father, equal in power, glory, beauty,
and divine authority. And yet, at a particular point in time he assumed–added
to himself–a human nature that has not always sat on the throne of heaven, but
has walked in humility and weakness as a peasant in the 1st Century. This
union, the person of the Godman, the Mediator, according to Watson, is the
subject of these texts speaking of the exaltation of Christ. [Rom. 1:3-4; Phil. 2:9]” (Derek
Rishmawy)
“Finally he turns to the Spirit, looking at 1 Corinthians
12:3, Galatians
4:4-7 and 2 Corinthians 3:17.” (Andrew
Wilson) “Hill seeks to show that the Holy Spirit is also identified by His
relations both to God and to Jesus. He argues that the Spirit’s identity is
most often traced back to God and Jesus rather than the other way around, but
then offers Rom. 1:3-4
and 8:11 as two prominent
passages demonstrating the reverse.” (Jonathan
J. Routley)
