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.

Claude Beaufort Moss (whose birth and death dates I cannot find) was a 20th-century Anglican theologian whose textbook, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: AN INTRODUCTION TO DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, has been frequently reprinted. The good blbliophiles over at Project Canterbury have made it available online for your easy perusal.

I’m nominating this book for Worst Opening Sentences Of A Systematic Theology Book Ever. Here he goes:

What is Theology? It is the science of God and the things of God, just as ornithology is the science of birds. Every science has something already given on which it works. Ornithology assumes that birds exist, and that we know what a bird is. Theology assumes that there is a God, and that it is possible to know Him.

True enough, I suppose, but the similarities make my head swim with the more striking dissimilarities. I think T. F. Torrance might have a few hundred pages of nuance to add to that statement, which, as it stands, just cannot stand.

Moss’s The Christian Faith has plenty of good stuff in it (I mean that!), but I’m posting to bury him, not praise him. I would call the work provincial, but you’d have to understand that Moss would probably take that as a compliment. This is territorial Anglicanism at its finest (?), fending off the twin horrors of “Undenominationalism” and “Roman Fever” with either hand.

Gerald Bray once noted the sad situation that although evangelicals are doctrinally correct on the Trinity, the doctrine “has not played a very central part in their thinking.” Going way back to the period following the Reformation, Bray points out that although refuting Unitarianism was easy enough, evangelical arguments always “smacked more of defensiveness than they did of creativity.” Reliable battle-axes like Charles Hodge kept up doctrinal standards by fending off novelty, but “did little or nothing to inspire evangelical Christians with a deep sense of the importance of trinitarian thinking.” (For these and the quotes that follow, see Bray’s 1998 essay, “Evangelicals Losing Their Way: The Doctrine of the Trinity” published in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1998), 53 65)

Why is this? Bray hazards a diagnosis with many elements, but the first thing he puts his finger on is a blind spot for systematics. Droves of first-rate evangelical scholars have taken their places in academia, but they are mostly deployed in the area of biblical studies, including exegetical studies and Biblical theology. Bray does not speculate on why the division of labor has skewed in this direction. I think the main reason is that evangelicals just love the Bible so much that lots of them end up with PhDs in it. It’s also not hard to find war stories from graduate school, where evangelical students as the embattled minority in academia drifted toward disciplines with neutral, descriptive methodologies (exegesis, biblical theology) rather than disciplines which require a constant encounter with big truth claims and their defense (systematic theology).

Biblical theology sticks close to the concerns of the biblical authors, doing descriptive explorations of what is explicitly thematized by those authors. “Trinity” does not appear in the Bible: a quick check of the concordance shows that the word itself is not there, and a quick mental reconnaissance of biblical topics reveals that nowhere in scripture is the triunity of God the direct focus of an extended argument. So evangelical scholars have, by the nature of their assignments, concentrated on themes like covenant, justification, union with Christ, etc., and few have taken up the properly systematic theological task of teaching on the Trinity.

So far Bray. It occurs to me that the evangelical emphasis on biblical theology to the relative neglect of systematic theology could have two possible effects on the status of trinitarianism in the movement.

Negatively: It could lead us to disengage from the doctrine altogether, leaving it always just over the horizon from our happy home in Bible country, as sublime but featureless as a distant mountain.

Positively: It could lead us to push for more resolutely biblical ways of articulating the doctrine, tethering it to the text of scripture with a thousand new lines of biblical reasoning that bypass the (often needlessly complex) history of interpretation to equip the entire ecumenical church with a clearer vision of the how the doctrine of the Trinity is massively, inherently, consummately a biblical doctrine.

As it turns out, there are many gloomy indicators that we are taking the first way, and only a few glimpses that the second way might yet be a live option for us. One of those hopeful signs is the fact that Derek Tidball, who edits the “Bible Themes” volumes in InterVarsity Press’s The Bible Speaks Today series, has put into that series a volume on The Message of the Trinity. The mere existence of the book means that alongside tidy uniform commentary volumes on Genesis through Revelation, and mixed in with equally uniform studies on creation, prayer, and the cross, there is a treatment of the Trinity as a Bible theme. That matters. It would be a hopeful sign even if the actual book weren’t very good.

But the book itself is in fact good, very good. Author Brian Edgar has put together more than 300 pages of biblical exposition, devoting each of the sixteen chapters to an important passage in Scripture. There is a brief introduction that defends the doctrine as “comprehensible, logical, practical, foundational, essential, structural, and biblical,” and then the remainder of the book is expository work on the selected passages. Edgar’s treatment of each passage is leisurely, opting to include every hook that might hold a sermon, and permitting sub-points to blossom into edifying digressions. Thus he ekes a long and fruitful chapter out of I Corinthians 13:14 (“the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”) by developing expansive word studies on grace, love, and fellowship, not to mention Lord, Christ, and Spirit. I think what he’s trying to do is show preachers that there’s sermonic gold in them trinitarian hills. If I were reviewing the book, I’d find plenty of things to quibble over and worry about. But I’m not reviewing it, I’m just recommending it.

Go get it, and find the Trinity in the Bible, where it is.

Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: “Yahweh is my light,” but then extended differently: “and my salvation… my strength.”

The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King David kneeling before the Lord, pointing dramatically to his eye. This probably means that the Lord is David’s light, by which he perceives. But it may also evoke the beloved verse four, which has a reference to sight:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.

When I study the Psalms, I love to work my way through a responsible historical-grammatical interpretation, which is the foundation and control of any meaning to be found in them. Call me a philistine, but I think word usage and historical setting and author’s intent and unfashionable stuff like that really determines what a text means.

But after that, I also check rabbinic commentary, which uses more oblique methods of mining the text and tends to divert attention from the Psalm itself to the total meaning of scripture, often fancifully. In Psalm 24, for instance, the Midrash Tehillim probably spins the wheel of biblical association and asks, “who called on the Lord as his light? Abraham, when he left Ur. Isaac, when he sought a wife. Jacob, when he saw the ladder as he slept, and wrestled the man in darkness…” etc. Strange linkages, sometimes yielding powerful insight into the Scriptures at large (and less often, into the text at hand).

Then I head for the church fathers, where things get even wilder. On Psalm 27:4, I found a remarkable extended paraphrase by Gerhoch of Reichersberg (1093-1169). Remember, Gerhoch is not trying to explain exactly what is up in Psalm 27:4 in itself: he is trying to preach the central message of the entire Bible starting from this text. He, like a millenium of Christian commentators before him, took the septuagint’s superscription (”of David, when he was anointed”) to be a sign of messianic prophecy: anointed = christed = messiahed. So Gerhoch read the whole Psalm as a prayer by Christ during his earthly ministry, and when he comes to verse four he begins to ponder what “one thing” the Messiah would ask God for. Of course, Gerhoch already knows from the New Testament what “one thing” Christ asked of the Father. At this point I’m going to step aside and just let you see what Gerhohus Magnus comes up with as he imagines that prayer:

“I, in that night in which I was to be betrayed to death, to the end that I might overcome death, desired one thing of the Lord; which I will require, I, the True Unity, by interceding for the unity of them that are Mine even till the consummation of all things. And this was My prayer: Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me. Thus I then asked that one thing from the Lord, when I was about to die for that people; and not for that people only, but that I might gather together in one the sons of God that were scattered abroad. This one thing I then asked, namely, in My death; but I will daily require it in the Sacrament which I have commanded My Priests to offer for My holy Church continually. By My own mouth I desired it once; by the lips of My Priests I still require it continually, as long as My death shall be set forth in the Sacrament of the Altar, until I shall come at the end of the world, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord in peace; all war at an end, all My members completely united to their Head, all the stones banded together in the everlasting building, by the grace of Me, Corner and Top stone, Author and Finisher of Faith.”

What captures Gerhoch’s attention seems to be (1) the idea of unity, centered on the words “one thing,” which he explains both ecclesiologically and eschatologically, (2) the distinction between “desiring” and “requiring” this one thing, which he explains by once-for-all event and sacramental re-enactment, and (3) the house of the Lord, which he conflates intentionally with Jesus as the Cornerstone of the everlasting building, in which the members can join their head, dwelling in peace with their warfare accomplished.

A tour de force! A systematic theology in itself, hung from one verse. Gerhoch never fails to deliver precisely this kind of exposition: a long journey out and away from the text, looping allusively into the central ideas of the Bible and theology, and returning in surprising ways to make contact with the words in front of us. The dangers and gains are easily stated. But I never tire of watching the performance.