Evangelicals have long wrestled with the problem of having the doctrine of the Trinity functioning in their lives as an intellectual problem rather than as the confesion of an experienced reality (see previous posts on Bunyan and Watts). This tension has come to expression repeatedly in the devotional life of evangelicals. As I have scanned our history in search of a trinitarian spirituality, one of my favorite discoveries is the experience of American Holiness evangelist Amanda Smith (1837-1915), recorded in her autobiography The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist.

The full text is online, and is well worth reading for a number of reasons. Smith was redeemed out of slavery as a child by her father, a freed man who spent the rest of his life earning money to buy his own family. Amanda Smith had a powerful ministry in the Holiness tradition, and her spiritual emphasis will be familiar to anyone who has read Phoebe Palmer. Smith’s tone of voice is singular and striking. She had several intriguing visionary experiences, rebuked the devil, and preached salvation and sanctification all over.

Without explaining what provoked her, Smith records that she “became greatly exercised about the Trinity.” “I could not seem to understand just how there could exist three distinct persons, and yet one. I thought every day and prayed for light, but didn’t seem to get help. I read the Bible, but no help came.” Smith records the two weeks during which her anxiety mounted and she felt guided toward a definite experience of personal revelation, a kind of intellectual counterpart to the experience of entire sanctification expected by Holiness people in America. Encouraged that “every blessing you get from God is by faith,” Smith asked herself, “if by faith, why not now?”

I turned around and knelt down by an old trunk that stood in the corner of the room, and I told the Lord that I wanted to understand the Trinity, and that I was afraid of fanaticism, and I wanted Him to make it clear to me for His own sake. I don’t know how long I prayed, but O, how my soul was filled with light under the great baptism that came upon me. I came near falling prostrate, but bore up when God revealed Himself so clearly to me, and I have understood it ever since. I can’t just explain it to others, but God made me understand it so I have had no question since. Praise the Lord! Then He showed me three other things…

Smith undeniably had a powerful spiritual experience centered on the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is equally clear that the problem her experience solved for her is the problem of how the doctrine itself can make sense. In a single ineffable moment, a “great baptism,” she leapt the divide between doctrine and life. Perhaps if she had been able to “explain it to others,” her explanation would have laid bare the evangelical sub-structure of trinitarian commitment; perhaps this is what God made her understand to her own intellectual satisfaction. As it stands, however, the implicit advice from Smith’s experience seems to be that troubled believers should likewise “pray through” to clarity and peace over this teaching. That is what you could expect a Holiness preacher to advocate, since that tradition empahsizes acts of total consecration, praying through to a definite experience, instantaneous gifts given by God which take you to another level of spiritual experience. In this case, the experience is comprehension of a hard doctrine.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) is demonstrably a trinitarian, but he felt a tremendous tension over the doctrine. In his time there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was truly scriptural (for a blow-by-blow account of trinitarian fights in English in the seventeenth century, see Philip Dixon’s book Nice and Hot Disputes). Watts was as submissive to scriptural revelation as anyone, but was deeply troubled about what doctrine he was being asked to submit his understanding to:

“Dear and blessed God, hadst thou been pleased, in any one plain scripture, to have informed me which of the different opinions about holy Trinity, among the contending parties of Christians, had been true, thou knowest with how much real satisfaction and joy, my unbiased heart would have opened itself to receive and embrace the divine discovery.”

If only God had shown “plainly, in any single text, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are three real distinct persons” in one divine nature, Watts says, “I had never suffered myself to be bewildered in so many doubts, nor embarrassed with so many strong fears of assenting to the mere inventions of men, instead of divine doctrine; but I should have humbly and immediately accepted thy words, so far as it was possible for me to understand them, as the only rule of my faith.”

Nowhere in his impassioned prayer does Watts give the impression that he is grappling with a mystery of salvation; his angst all stems from the situation of being faced with a doctrine lacking the kind of direct biblical support which would bind it on his conscience as an article of faith, and its sheer intellectual difficulty. “How can such weak creatures ever take in so strange, so difficult, and so abstruse a doctrine as this?”

Midrash Tehillim, the set of medieval rabbinic comments on the Psalms, sometimes delivers powerful and illuminating insights into the Psalms. Other times, it delivers powerful and illuminating insights into something else altogether –other parts of scripture, apparently unrelated except maybe by one verbal parallel. The rabbis knew how to do commentary on literal meaning, but this midrash tradition is about something else, like exploring “the seventy aspects” of each text. To say it midrashically: R. Moses of Kobryn said, “In each generation at least one man is given the means to understand the Zohar; but not even one man in a generation is capable of understanding Midrash, it being closed up and sealed … until the coming of Messiah.”

I turned to the Midrash Tehillim today for stimulation in understanding Psalm 28. I was expecting maybe some cross-referencing fun from verse 9, “Oh save your people and bless your heritage! Be their shepherd and carry them forever.” Either “heritage” or “shepherd” would be rich word studies, and just doing a concordance-drill for important occurrrences of those terms would be illuminating.

Instead I found frogs.

And here’s how they got into Psalm 28:

Hop to verse 3. It says, “Do not drag me off with the wicked.”

Hop to the root word in “drag me off” (be’alunu).

Hop to Isaiah 26:13, where the same root apparently also occurs in “other lords besides you have ruled over us.”

Hop to the rest of Isaiah 26:13, which goes on (in some translation), “even without thee we make mention of thy name alone.” That means, even when God did not do miracles of deliverance, his people were ready to die for the honoring of his name.

Hop to what that makes you think of: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego talking back to King Nebuchadnezzar: “Our God is able to deliver us; he will deliver us… and if not, be it known unto thee, we shall not serve thy gods.” So Nebuchadnezzar getteth sore wroth and stoketh the oven times seven.

Hop to: An imaginative extension of the story, the three young men throw themselves into the furnace. Why would they do such a thing?

Hop to: Exodus 8:3, “The river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into… thine ovens, and into thy dough.”

When is dough next to an oven? When the oven is hot. Oven, hot, get it? And I quote:

Accordingly this verse proves that frogs came and threw themselves into ovens in order to hallow the name of the Holy One, blessed be He. And how did the Holy One, blessed be He, reward the frogs? All other frogs in Egypt died, as is said The frogs died out of the houses, out of the courts, and out of the fields (Ex. 8:9), but the frogs which went into the ovens to fulfill the decree of the Holy One, blessed be He, did not die, because they were willing to be burnt. And so the frogs sprang up alive out of the ovens and went back into the river, for it is said They alone shall remain in the river (Ex. 8:7)

The Midrash Tehillim goes in a couple of other directions from here, including offering alternative explanations of what the three young men were thinking when they leapt into the fire. I know it’s crazy stuff. As far as I can tell, Messiah has come and we still can’t do much with some of the Midrash. But even here with the frogs, there’s some take-away value. I can think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego when reading this prayer. That helps me get a handle on the two-part structure of Psalm 28, which begins with a plea that God not be deaf to the speaker’s prayer (a point the Midrash does get to by way of Isaiah). I can connect it with the collective note struck suddenly in verse 9, “shepherd your people.” As usual, the Midrash is not exactly commentary, and a serious student would be sure to do some grammatical-historical work as the first order of business. But if your goal is to spend the day thinking about God and his ways, using Psalm 28 as your hopping-off point, the frogs don’t hurt.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) believed in the Trinity, and referred to the doctrine throughout his writings. But he devoted only one extended meditation to it, a piece entitled “Of the TRINITY and a CHRISTIAN,” whose title suggests an interest in something practical and perhaps edifying. The descriptive sub-title specifies that it is about “How a young or shaken Christian should demean himself under the weighty thoughts of the Doctrin of the Trinity.” The problem Bunyan wants to solve for the “young or shaken Christian” is that the Trinity is a difficult doctrine, seeming to contradict reason by proposing that one is three or vice versa. This intellectual conflict could lead the believer to question what is clearly revealed in scripture, which is tantamount to questioning God himself. But Bunyan warns: “It is great lewdness, and also insufferable arrogancy to come to the Word of God, as conceiting already that whatever thou readest must either by thee be understood, or of it self fall to the ground as a sensless error.” The proper response to this hard doctrine is to submit your human judgment to God’s greater wisdom. “But God is wiser than Man, wherefore fear thou him and tremble at his Word, saying still, with godly suspicion of thine own infirmity, what I see not teach thou me, and thou art God only wise; but as for me, I was as a beast before thee.”

Surely Bunyan strikes the appropriate human posture in the face of God’s wisdom, but we might ask why it is the doctrine of the Trinity in particular which spurs his reflection on humility of mind. Why is it precisely here that we are invited to yield our understanding before the incomprehensibility of God and his secret counsels? The answer must be that for Bunyan the doctrine has turned from a mystery of salvation to a problem of intellectual coherence. It has become an inherited doctrinal problem, to be solved by an attitude of piety, humility, and submission.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was never persuaded that the doctrine of the Trinity had anything to do with the gospel. It is common enough to blame Schleiermacher for his role in marginalizing the doctrine of the Trinity: He famously placed the doctrine at the very end of his work The Christian Faith, making it something of an appendix to the main work. One could make too much of a doctrine’s location in a book, but in the case of a thinker so consummately systematic as Schleiermacher, location does signify a great deal. Since Christianity is “essentially distinguished from other faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth,” Schleiermacher’s theology is entirely centered on that redemption, or rather on the knowledge of that redemption, the contents of the self-consciousness of the redeemed.

“We shall exhaust the whole compass of Christian doctrine if we consider the facts of the religious self-consciousness, first, as they are presupposed by the antithesis expressed in the concept of redemption, and secondly, as they are determined by that antithesis.” To “exhaust the whole compass of Christian doctrine” by analyzing redemption may seem to risk restricting theology to soteriology, but Schleiermacher’s method is expansive enough to include much besides salvation. The Christian consciousness of redemption entails concepts such as God’s holiness, righteousness, love, and wisdom; the opposing negative states of evil and sin; and the transition between them by way of Christ and the church through rebirth and sanctification. These concepts, further, presuppose others: creation and preservation, an original state of human perfection, and the divine attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Even angels and devils can be given a place within the Glaubenslehre, although only provisionally and tentatively, since their alleged operations are so far at the periphery of the Christian consciousness of redemption that angelology “never enters into the sphere of Christian doctrine proper.”

The Trinity, however, could not be admitted to the doctrinal system proper, because it could not be related to the gospel, or in Schleiermacher’s terms, it is not directly implicated in redemption. “It is not an immediate utterance concerning the Christian self-consciousness but only a combination of several such utterances.” Piecing together doctrines to construct more elaborate doctrines was something Schleiermacher regarded with horror, because it led out from the living center of the faith to the arid regions of theologoumena, where dogmaticians do their deadening work. Schleiermacher had long since rejected that approach in his Speeches on Religion: “Among those systematizers there is less than anywhere, a devout watching and listening to discover in their own hearts what they are to describe. They would rather reckon with symbols…” The young Romantic may have grown up to write a big book of doctrine, but he continued his “devout watching and listening,” and never betrayed his basic insight or became one of “those systematizers” content to “reckon with symbols.” Because the Trinity could not be directly connected to redemption, Schleiermacher placed it well outside the life-giving core of the Christian Faith.

In the heading of the section where he finally treated it, Schleiermacher pointed out that the doctrine of the Trinity could not be considered an issue that was “finally settled,” because after all it “did not receive any fresh treatment when the Evangelical [Protestant] Church was set up; and so there must still be in store for it a transformation which will go back to its very beginnings.” Schleiermacher considered it obvious that if the Trinity were implicated in the evangel, the evangelisch awakening of the sixteenth century would have transformed and deepened it as it had everything central to Christian redemption.

There are many lessons to learn from Schleiermacher, who ranks among the greatest minds ever to take up Christian theology. Genius though he was, his work is most instructive as a cautionary tale, and it is certainly so here in his treatment of the Trinity.

Where Schleiermacher was right: If the doctrine of the Trinity is not an immediate implication of redemption, it should be set aside (perhaps quietly and respectfully, but decisively).

Where Schleiermacher was wrong: Judging that the Trinity is not an immediate implication of redemption.

The task: To articulate the doctrine of the Trinity as internally connected to the gospel.

I keep hearing that “Protestants” are by definition people who “protest,” that is, people defined by their disagreement with something, their dissent, their rejection of something. It is, in other words, considered a term of negation.

Now, I don’t make much of this, but it seems to me like a bit of bogus etymology. “Protest” might be the nearest cognate in modern english, but it’s silly to take that as a clue to the word’s origin –sort of like finding “dance” in the word “concordance” and deciding they’re related; or “sacrilege” means putting religion in a sac; or that “validate” is from valid + date = “at the right time;” or “excruciate” means to take off of a cross, etc. But I digress.

The word seems to come from pro + testari, to testify forth, or to hold forth a position on something. To assert, to maintain, to proclaim solemnly or state formally.

The early example that always sticks in my mind is from the poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674), whose poem “To Anthea, who may command him anything” begins:

BID me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant to be;
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.

and ends:

Thou art my life, my love my heart,
The very eyes of me:
And hast command of every part
To live and die for thee.

Herrick is not offering to protest (in our sense) or negate anything. Mr. “Gather Ye Rosebuds” has something positive in mind here. In another poem Herrick makes a “protestation” that he will return to Julia. I’m not sure why he’s pitching woo at Julia and Anthea both, but that’s another story anyway. Rumor is that Herrick taught his favorite pig to drink from a tankard, and once cussed out his congregation (yes, he was a preacher) for not paying attention to a sermon, which he proceeded to throw at them. But again, I digress.

So I protest against this bogus etymology, and I maintain that “Protestant” means something a lot closer to a cool old word like “confessional,” as in “having a message and sticking with it.”

A theological performance well worth the price of admission is watching the mature Karl Barth (1886-1968), trying to sort out the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, or the relative continuity and discontinuity between the covenants. In Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, in par. 69, the sub-section on Jesus as “the light of life,” Barth is describing the prophetic office of Christ and comparing it to the prophetic witness of the Old Testament.

Barth lists “four points at which the prophecy of the life of Jesus Christ clearly breaks through and transcends the Old Testament concept of a prophet” (p. 49):

1. Christ doesn’t become a prophet or acquire the office; he is essentially prophetic.
2. He is of Israel and to Israel, but he also addresses all humanity, the nations, the world as such.
3. He carries out reconciliation itself, and therefore is a prophet on the basis of “enacted reconciliation.”
4. The prophets are messengers between God and man, but Christ is a mediator, “the One who is both Yahweh and the Israelite.”

Barth concludes that “we do not have in the life of any of the Old Testament prophets a true type or adequate prefiguration of the prophecy of Jesus Christ” (52). But, he goes on, this is only true of individual prophets, and we are “missing the wood for the trees” if we focus on individual prophets rather than on “the glory of the history of Isael in its totality and interconnexion as planned, initiated, controlled and determined by Yahweh according to the witness of the prophets” (53). We should not fail to notice that the entire prophetic office in the history of Israel does in fact push hard against these four restrictions:

1. The history of Israel speaks prophetically for itself; it does not need a special prophetic interpretation to be imposed on it from outside. God speaks through the events, which are eloquent and radiant, so when the “thus saith the Lord” comes along, it articulates what is already there. Individual prophets may receive their offices after the fact, but the history of Israel is as inherently prophetic as the messiah.

2. “The history of Israel in its totality and interconnexion is universal prophecy,” through which God is speaking to all humanity and the world as such.

3. No single prophet “can speak on the basis of the accomplished reconciliation and the present kingdom of God” (60). This is the main thing that has me pondering this passage, by the way, so I will develop it at greater length than the other points. The total prophetic history of Israel does have a lot to say about the “conflict and contradiction” of the strained covenant and the need for reconciliation. Just think of the prophets calling on heaven and earth to take the witness stand in the covenant lawsuit Yahweh is carrying out against Israel, a lawsuit which takes on the trappings of a declaration of war or a heartbreaking divorce procedure. But it says all of this against a greater background, which is the grace of the covenant. Of this grace “it speaks synthetically, not analytically, and therefore unequivocally.” Barth says that the prophetic history of Israel does not just look forward to a future reconciliation, but declares “the presence of the glory of God and the salvation of men, of judgments executed and promises realised” (61). Under the dialectics of disruption and rejection, there is “a deeply concealed but very real positive continuum,” a “present grace unreservedly lavished by God and unreservedly experienced and known as uch by the people and the men of this people.”

An accomplished reconciliation undergirding OT prophecy? As I read this, I was aware of objections I wanted to vent, but I had to admit that a point in Barth’s favor is that this argument would enable a more muscular reading of the Old Testament than relegating every bit of its spirituality to a “someday messiah the prince will come” category. And that, by the way, is what’s at stake in Barth’s third point: he is finding the “already” under the “not yet” of the Old Covenant.

No sooner had I begun to anticipate a better reading of the OT (running a few Psalms in my head, scanning for the “already” under the “not yet”), than I turned the page to find the Barthian small print, so often a sign of some exegetical spadework. And there it is: Psalms 143-150 are too jubilant to be hidden under the bushel of the not yet. You can’t make that much noise as an incidental musical flourish in a fundamentally melancholy performance. “We misunderstand the Old Testament if we do not realise that this element of praise or doxology is the basic note” (62). And here I quote a block:

But it is first the basic note, not of the Old Testament, but of the history perceived by the Old Testament witnesses. The sign under which, or the bracket within which, this history takes place is the enthronement of Yahweh, which according to a new conjecture was perhaps celebrated every year, but which took place from all eternity, takes place continually in new demonstrations of His power and goodness, and is the event of the ultimate future. Hence this history takes place always under His government exercised from Sinai, from Sion and from heaven. It always redounds to the magnifying of His glory and, however hiddenly, to the salvation of men. This is what is revealed by this history, and it is to this revelation that all parts of the Old Testament respond. (62)

The fine print goes on, wonderfully, to account for all the “palpable fulfilments” experienced in the OT, from Isaac’s wealth to Psalm 119’s love of the Torah to “the happy restoration with which the Book of Job finally comes to a restful conclusion.” These all represent –only represent– the grace, presence, and gift of the fulfilled covenant (”I shall be your God and you shall be my people”). And as an aside, Barth notes that this is the identical substantia foederis that Calvin perceived bridging OT and NT, the character of the gracious God sharing his life with his people.

4. No single prophet is a mediator, but is the history of Israel mediatorial? Barth says that it is, in that it is “a sequence of events in which God and man are together,” and is the little local history which is the key to universal history. The history of Israel witnessed in the OT is, for Barth, in a kind of space between God and world history. In fact, what Barth says here on pages 63-65 is so dense that I’m just going to skip it so I don’t forget what I’m learning from point 3.

I don’t know specifically what “recent conjecture” in OT scholarship Barth is referring to in the section quoted above. No doubt something readily available in Psalms scholarship from midcentury, about ritual enactment and the sitz-im-leben of enthronement Psalms. But my attention is caught by the idea that underlying the phenomena of the OT is the event –or perhaps “event,” super-event, primal event– of God’s enthronement. Just on the literary level, it gives the throne-vision of the Apocalypse a lot more traction on the preceding 65 books. Theologically, it indicates that John knew or saw something we should all learn or see or be pointed to from every page of scripture: the one who sits on the throne, and the lamb.

Adolphe Monod (1802 - 1856), delivered a sermon on the Trinity from his sickbed as he came within the month of his death. His text was Romans 8:12-17, and two most arresting paragraphs for me are these:

Holy Scripture is wise, even in its silence. You would look in vain therein for the word Trinity, to express the doctrine concerning which I have it on my heart, if God gives me strength, to speak a few words to you. Why? Because this word the Trinity would present to our minds the idea of something speculative, while the biblical doctrine, which human theology later and very appropriately called by the name of “Trinity,” is most practical and most tender, because it is the very expression of that love which is in God, whether in His relations with humanity, or whether in the inner relationship which God has with Himself.

The relation of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to man corresponds to a relationship in God between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the love which is poured out to save us is the expression of that love which has dwelt eternally in the bosom of God. Ah! the doctrine then becomes for us so touching and profound! There we find the basis of the Gospel, and those who reject it as a speculative and purely theological doctrine have therefore never understood the least thing about it; it is the strength of our hearts, it is the joy of our souls, it is the life of our life, it is the very foundation of revealed truth.

Here is something which I suspect I have said before. But when John Henry Newman (1801-1890) says something, it always sounds a lot better than when anybody else says it. I found it on the last page of Andrew Louth’s odd little book Discerning the Mystery (1983), and Louth’s footnote places it in Newman’s Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached Before the University of Oxford (London, 1843), pages 335-6. I print it here without comment, and may say more about it later.

Though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as illustrated and (as I may say) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as “the Word was God” or “the Only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father,” or “the Word was made flesh,” or “the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,” are not a mere letter which we may handle by the rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined, according to its measure, in the believing mind. For though the development of an idea is a deduction of proposition from proposition, these propositions are ever formed in and round the idea itself (so to speak), and are in fact one and all only aspects of it. Moreover, this will account both for the mode of arguing from particular texts or single words of Scipture, practised by the early Fathers, and for their fearless decision in practising it; for the great Object of Faith on which they lived both enabled them to appropriate to itself particular passages of Scripture, and became a safeguard against heretical deductions from them. Also, it will account for the charge of weak reasoning, commonly brought against those Fathers; for never do we seem so illogical to others, as when we are arguing under the continual influence of impressions to which they are insensible.

Baptist theologian John Gill (1697 - 1771), in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity, has an especially clear presentation of human salvation as grounded in the eternal God. This is a topic I have been trying to learn more about by studying Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679), but right now I find that Goodwin’s writing gives off too much light and glory for me to comprehend all of what I read there. Gill is a first-class theologian, but a little closer to my level. He also quotes Goodwin a lot, especially on this topic which is so central to Goodwin’s thought, marking Gill as a fellow student of Goodwin, but a few grades ahead of me. So I copy out here some key passages from Gill’s argument on this subject, and promise to have another try at Goodwin later.

We are in Book II: Of the Acts and Works of God, and have gone through discussions “Of the Internal Acts of God, and of his Decrees in general,” and then a discussion of election and rejection. This bring us to section 4, “Of the Eternal Union of the Elect of God Unto Him.”

“So Early”

“The union of God’s elect unto him, their adoption by him, justification before him, and acceptance with him, being eternal, internal, and immanent acts in God; I know not where better to place them, and take them into consideration, than next to the decrees of God, and particularly the decree of election; since as that flows from the love of God, and is in Christ from everlasting, there must of course be an union to him so early; and since predestination to the adoption of children, and acceptance in the beloved, are parts and branches of it (Eph. 1:4,5,6), they must be of the same date.”

As always when reading Gill, you must have a high tolerance for all things Calvinist. More on that below; for now, just don’t let your glee or dismay about that distract you. Track his argument from the greatness and God-ness of salvation to its “early” placement in the acts of God. Note also how he immediately makes a hierarchy of what is the source and the broadest term (union), and what are “parts and branches” of it (predestining to adoption, acceptance in the beloved). These things, or this comprehensive union and its parts, are “eternal, internal, immanent acts in God.”

Time-Acts and Our Secret Being
Gill immediately declares that he is not considering “any time-acts of union,” such as
(1)the incarnation with its uniting of human nature to the Son of God, or of
(2) regeneration which grafts us into the vine as sharers in its life, or of
(3) our being found united to Christ in death, to live with him forever.

These are all “time-acts of union,” and referring to the second (regeneration) especially, Gill says it is “our open being in Christ, in consequence of a secret being in him from everlasting by electing grace (see Rom. 16:7, II Cor 5:17 and 12:2)”

From these open and temporal acts, Gill turns to our union with God “as it is in its original, and as an eternal immanent act in God,” which he then describes as “no other than the going forth of his heart in love” which is “of a cementing and uniting nature.”

“In virtue of this, the people of God become a part of himself, a near, dear, and tender part, even as the apple of his eye; have a place in his heart, are engraven on the palms of his hands, and ever on his thoughts; the desires and affections of his soul are always towards them, and he is ever devising and forming schemes for their welfare.”

What I am trying to capture here is the way salvation is connected to the “eternal, internal, and immanent” life of God. In some way, salvation belongs in the life of God, not as a constitutive element of what it takes to be God, but as an act of God which never was not. Affirming this immanence of salvation to God, without obliterating divine freedom and gratuity, is part of the theological pathos of living with a high view of salvation and of God and of their interconnection.

There is a certain wisdom in this Reformed tradition, which thinks such gigantic thoughts about the scope and reach of salvation. Gill has a reputation for being a bit of a hyper-Calvinist, and one part of the evidence usually offered is the line of argument I am considering now. Immediately after chapter 4’s treatment of our union with God as eternal, Gill goes on to chapter 5: “Of Other Eternal and Immanent Acts in God, Particularly Adoption and Justification.” Aha. This notion of the “eternal justification” of the elect proved to be very controversial, even among Calvinists: F. Turretin disagreed (as Gill notes), and Spurgeon, though deferential toward Gill, thinks it best to affirm eternal election but to keep other realities of salvation (justification, adoption) as closely linked to an effectual call in history as possible, or in Gill’s terms to keep them as “time-acts of union.” Spurgeon admits that there are some elements of salvation which are so intimate to both God and to us that it is “difficult to say whether they were done in eternity or whether they were done in time.” To sort the problem out in at least a preliminary way, Spurgeon opts for a distinction, saying these things “were virtually done in eternity,” but are “actually passed upon us, in our proper persons, consciences, and experiences, in time.”

I have no interest in sorting out who’s a hyper-Calvinist: that term may mean “a Calvinist who denies that you should preach the gospel to all” –which Gill certainly was not– or it might mean “anyone who is more thoroughly Calvinist than I am comfortable with” –which Gill certainly was. It’s easy to be more Calvinist than I’m comfortable with, because I’m Wesleyan. But Gill was the kind of Calvinist who made other Calvinists nervous.

From all of that I avert my eyes for the time being. What I find fascinating is this question, tossed back and forth by Gill and Spurgeon: how much of salvation should we say is eternally true in God, belonging to his very heart from all time, as part of the conversation about our redemption which was never not taking place among Father, Son, and Spirit? And how much of it should be firmly, insistently located on the timeline of our finite experience, where the Word and Spirit meet us on our way?

I maintain high hopes that Goodwin will yet be my teacher on this. But Gill is instructive precisely as the thinker who went maximal on the question of how much belongs in God’s eternal, internal, immanent actions. If (with Turretin) you back off from Gill’s mark, or (with Spurgeon) you hold Gill’s view as a scriptural possibility about which you cannot be dogmatic, you can at least learn a lot from watch Gill charge out there and stake a claim on the frontier. I do believe he went there for the right reason: to make much of grace and say big things about salvation.