Chapter 3 - On Being a Trinitarian Christian
Chapter 3
On Being a Trinitarian Christian
At the conclusion of Paul’s second canonical letter to Corinth, he signs off with what begins as a typical grace-benediction: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.” But in this single instance in his preserved letters he elaborates that standard benediction by also invoking, besides the grace of Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The result is his well-known Trinitarian benediction, which, precisely because it is so well-known and often-used, is also so seldom reflected on:
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
This benedictory prayer of Paul’s is my own prayer — and most profound desire — for all of you, as you prepare to leave Regent — classes, friends, the Atrium, Footnotes* [a coffee bar] — and make your way into the marketplace into various forms of Christian service. My concern is that you leave Regent deeply committed to living as truly Trinitarian Christians, not simply in the theological sense of being able to affirm and perhaps even explicate this deepest mystery and most wonderful truth of our faith; but that you internalize, experience, and live out your faith in Trinitarian terms — as those whose whole lives are determined by, and thus lived in light of, the experience of God himself: God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
My own experience with this text stems from a few days last July. As many of you know I have been working on a book on the Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul. I was nearing the end of the long chapter on 2 Corinthians. In a rather perfunctory way, I fear, and frankly in some haste to bring five weeks of writing on this Epistle to conclusion, I dashed off what seemed to be the obvious words that needed to be written about this text and put this part of the task to rest — or so I thought.
But the next morning I was awake very early. A day or two earlier Maudine and I had had conversation with a friend who was in especially deep need. Given the earliness of the hour, and the fact that nothing in my computer was particularly hot, I prepared to spend some extra time in prayer, especially for our friend. It was in that setting that the Spirit joined these two realities — our friend’s need and this text of the day before — in what for me was one of those profoundly life-producing experiences with the living God. Needless to say, this part of the monograph also required a considerable rewriting.
This grace-benediction is so well known that it is easy for us to miss its several remarkable features: first, that Paul elaborates his concluding grace at all — which he does not do anywhere else, either in his earlier or later letters; second, that he does so with this Trinitarian formulation, which appears here in such a presuppositional way — not as something Paul argues for, but as the assumed, basic, experienced reality of Christian life. That it is in fact almost certainly an ad hoc elaboration, and not part of the church’s existing liturgical tradition, seems certain by its third remarkable feature: the order — Christ, God, and Spirit, which can only be explained because Paul began his standard benediction, and then felt compelled to add words about the Father and the Spirit.
What came to me that morning, and obviously it had been percolating for months after working through so many Spirit texts in Paul, was that in many ways this benediction is the most profound theological moment in the Pauline corpus — in two ways:
First, it serves to encapsulate what lies at the very heart of all of Paul’s urgencies — the gospel, with its focus on salvation in Christ, equally available by faith to Gentile and Jew alike. The gospel is Paul’s singular passion, and the gospel has to do with salvation — not simply salvation from sin, in the classical fundamentalist sense, but in the more profound biblical sense of God’s purposes that began with creation and that will be consummated at Christ’s coming — namely creating a people for his name, who will live in close relationship with him and will bear his likeness, and thus be for his glory. This text, therefore, in the form of prayer, encapsulates what is expressly stated in a large number of other passages (e.g., Rom 5:1-11; Gal 4:4-6; Eph 1:3-14), where we are told that God in love determined to create a people for his name, and in love took the initiative to bring it about. The “grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” is what gave concrete expression to that love; through Christ’s suffering and death on behalf of his loved ones God effected salvation for them at one point in our human history. The “fellowship of the Holy Spirit” expresses the ongoing appropriation of that love and grace in the life of the believer and the believing community. This, therefore, is but one of some twenty or twenty-five texts, all of which speak to the heart of Paul’s gospel, and in Trinitarian language — where God’s love lies behind salvation, Christ’s death and resurrection have effected salvation, and the Holy Spirit appropriates salvation to the life of the believer.
Second, this text also serves as our entree into Paul’s theology proper, that is, into his understanding of God himself, which had been so radically affected for him by the twin realities of the death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of the eschatological Spirit. In many ways I am a product of my discipline of New Testament studies, which tends to find this text something of an embarrassment. So much so, that whenever any of us talks about Paul’s understanding of God, and the relationship of God and Christ, we are quick to demur — in the interests of the integrity of our discipline — that Paul was not a “Trinitarian” in the later sense, where the church was concerned — properly so — to work out how the one God could be three and still be one. I grant you that Paul did not wrestle with that ontological question, the question about God’s being as such. But I am prepared to assert that Paul was fully Trinitarian in any meaningful sense of that term — that the one God is Father, Son, and Spirit, and that in dealing with Christ and the Spirit one is dealing with God every bit as much as one is with God the Father. As Karl Barth put it with great insight, “Trinity is the Christian name for God.” And that understanding does not begin in the second or third centuries; it is already found in a most profound way with the Apostle Paul himself. I will contend with my discipline that with this elaboration, by its almost offhanded nature, we have the only legitimate starting point for Pauline theology.
With these words — words of prayer, I am quick to point out, which are always addressed to God — we begin to penetrate a bit into Paul’s understanding of God, namely that to be Christian one must finally understand God in a Trinitarian way. Paul’s understanding always begins with the Old Testament, which is thoroughly presuppositional for him. Whatever else may be said of God in the Old Testament, God’s relationship with his people is primarily predicated on his love for them (Deut 7:7-8). This is what marks off the living God from all that is idolatrous surrounding Israel. What characterizes that love preeminently is his hesed (covenant love), which is usually translated “mercy” in the Septuagint. What Paul had come to see is that God’s covenant love, so full of compassion and grace, has found its singularly concrete historical expression in the death and resurrection of Christ, which is expressed most powerfully in Paul in the familiar passage from Romans 5:1-5. And these are not mere words of ours. The certain evidence of God’s love is that in Christ God himself became present “to reconcile the world unto himself” (2 Cor 5:20), and that that “love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
But that is not all, and this is where our Trinitarian understanding of God tends to break down. Through the gift of his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living God, God himself has now become present in the new creation as an abiding, empowering presence — so that what most characterizes the Holy Spirit is koinonia, a word that primarily means “participation in,” or “fellowship with.” This is how the living God not only brings us into an intimate and abiding relationship with himself, as the God of all grace, but also causes us to participate in all the benefits of that grace and salvation, indwelling us in the present by his own presence, guaranteeing our final eschatological glory.
Well, none of this is new to you. Whence my wonder that morning last July? Two things, both of which have to do with the Spirit. First, the Spirit that morning somehow helped me get past the mere factness of it all. These theological realities have been with me for life; and I have often been overawed by them. But somehow that morning I realized how little my friend — who also knows those realities, and got A’s on papers in New Testament and theology — had truly internalized and appropriated them as the fundamental realities of her life. How I prayed for her — and pray now for you — that you may know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit, not simply as Christian truths, mere concepts that mark off the Christian faith from all others, but as the most truly profound and singular realities of the universe. So that all of life is lived out of this ultimate predicate of our existence — that God loves us, sinners all, and that we know that because Holy Week, culminating in Easter, and Pentecost are not simply yearly moments in the church’s calendar, but are the fundamental realities of all human life.
But second, over the months, all kinds of Spirit texts were having their impact on me, and especially those in 2 Corinthians: such as 3:3-18, where the life-giving Spirit brings fulfillment to the old covenant — in the most remarkable way of all. As those who have had the veils removed from both our hearts and especially our faces, we by the Spirit not only behold God’s own glory, seen in the face of Jesus Christ himself, but by the Spirit are also being transformed into that same likeness — from one measure of glory to another. Such texts were gripping my own soul. Here is the ultimate sharing in the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit, we are brought face to face with the living God and by the Spirit transformed into his likeness.
What came into clear focus, and experienced as reality that morning, is that I, and all believers like me, must forever be done with thinking of the Spirit in impersonal terms — as though the Spirit were an “it,” some influence sent out from God, but short of being God, very God. For the meaning of the phrase “fellowship of the Holy Spirit,” you see, does not so much refer to the Christian fellowship created by the Holy Spirit — as true and profound as that reality also is. Oh no, koinonia has to do with sharing in something, an actual participation in it. The Spirit is God’s gift of the New Covenant whereby the covenantal promises of God’s abiding and empowering presence in the lives of his people are being fulfilled.
And I began to think of my own Pentecostal heritage, and how we have depersonalized the Spirit — not in our theology itself, mind you, but in our ways of thinking and talking about the Spirit. Our speech is what betrays us. With us the Spirit is depersonalized into an empowering experience. We are empowered by the experience, but not by the empowering presence of God himself. And then I thought of my lifelong existence in evangelical circles — where the Spirit is kept safely in the creed and the liturgy. He is personal, well enough. We would be unorthodox to think otherwise. But for many, he is anything but God’s empowering presence. Our images are biblical, but they are also impersonal. He is wind, fire, water — comes to us as influence, or whatever. But he is not the one in whom and by whom we are sharing in the very love and grace and life of God himself. And I do not mean in some mystical way. Our problem is that the language of Father and Son evoke personal images; but Spirit evokes that which is intangible, not quite real, because incorporeal. Paul’s prayer, on the other hand, is that they might know the grace of Christ, the visible historical expression of the love of God, because as people of the Spirit they live in constant, empowering fellowship with God himself. This is how the loving God and the gracious Lord Jesus Christ are now present with us.
God’s empowering presence — that is what “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” means. God’s empowering presence: That the Spirit is the way God has come to us in the present age, to be with us, to indwell us — both corporately and individually — to fellowship with us, and to empower us for life in the present as we await the consummation. By the Spirit our lives are invaded by the living God himself. God himself is present in and among us. This, too, is an Old Testament theme that for Paul finds fulfillment in Christ and the Spirit.
The theme begins in Genesis, in the Garden; the first result of the Fall was that the man and woman “hid themselves from the presence of God.” The presence of God is the key to our understanding the book of Exodus, and the awesome events of Sinai. God was present on the Mount, first in the bush that burned but was not consumed, later in great and awesome displays of power, so that Israel could not go near. But Moses was brought up to the Mount to be in the presence of God. There he received not only the Book of the Covenant, but the directions for building the Tabernacle, by which God’s presence was to leave the Mount, as it were, and accompany Israel. God’s presence among them — this was to mark off God’s people from the rest. But between the giving of the pattern for the Tabernacle, and its construction, there is the story of the debacle — Israel’s eating and playing in the presence of a golden calf. The whole point of chapters 32-34 is God’s readiness to wipe them out and start over. “You take them up,” God says to Moses; “my presence will not go with them.” “No,” Moses prays, “if your Presence does not go with us, don’t take us up from here, for how else will anyone know that we are your people, and that you are pleased with us, if your Presence does not go with us?” And God relents, and reveals himself to Moses in the awesome words of 34:6-7: “Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty.” Exodus then concludes with the construction of the Tabernacle, and the descent of God’s glory — the evidence of his presence among them.
Later, in Solomon’s Temple, where Exodus 40 is repeated, God’s glory comes down again — God is now present with Israel in the Temple on Mount Zion. But there is continual failure in Israel, so finally Jeremiah prophesies that God will one day make a new covenant with his people, with Torah written on their hearts, which Ezekiel then picks up in terms of the Spirit. “I will put my Spirit within them,” says the Lord through Ezekiel. “I will make breath (my Spirit) come into you and you shall come to life,” he says to the dry bones. “Prophesy to the breath,” God says to Ezekiel, “prophesy to the Spirit.” “So I prophesied,” says Ezekiel, “as he commanded me, and the Spirit entered into them, and they came to life — a vast army.”
This, then, is what Paul understands by the gift of the eschatological Spirit. The Spirit of promise, he calls him, i.e., the promised Holy Spirit — the gift of God’s own empowering presence. Thus, he pleads with the Corinthians, first corporately, then individually, “Do you not know that you, the church in Corinth, are God’s temple in Corinth, and you are that because God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” “Do you not know,” he pleads later in the context of their sexual sin, “that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, who dwells within you?” And again, in 2 Corinthians, to some who are still flirting with idolatry, he urges, using all of this rich imagery: “What fellowship is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people.... I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.’”
“Since we have these promises, dear friends,” Paul concludes, “let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates flesh and Spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.” We ourselves, both individually and corporately, are the location of God’s presence — by his Spirit. God himself — in the person of the Spirit — in-dwells us for fellowship with him, ... and for life and service, as we are continually being transformed into God’s own likeness by the indwelling Spirit.
And finally. The Spirit is not only God himself, present with us in fulfillment of his promises, but he is also an empowering presence — empowering us not only for gifts of building up the body as we worship in his presence, and for signs and wonders as part of that building up the body, but also for ministry and service in the world, and especially in Paul — for living in and boasting in our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, even in the midst of — dare I say it in Paul’s way — especially in the midst of weaknesses of all kinds. The grace of Christ is sufficient for us in the midst of suffering, conforming us to Christ’s death even as we know the power of his resurrection — and all of this because we are the heirs of God through the new covenant as the result of God’s unfailing love, demonstrated by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and realized by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Thus I pray for you, my dear graduating friends — earnestly, lovingly, and with great hope — first in the prayer with which Paul concludes his argument in Romans: and then in the words of tonight’s text:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.