Stephen Holmes transcript

Trinitarian Action & Inseparable Operations

"One very broad answer in terms of what I think we are doing with the doctrine of the trinity, in terms of exegesis, you know there's this question that Fred touched on this morning, "is this doctrine biblical?", and Fred's answer was "yes it is if we take big enough chunks of the bible... I'm not sure that I fully agree with Fred there, I think in terms of the technically developed doctrine, I am not sure that you can get to certain bits of it just by doing exegesis, rather I think the way you get to it is by facing up to apparent contradictions in the biblical texts and trying to imagine the sorts of things that must be true, particularly about the divine life, in order for those apparent contradictions to not be contradictions for both texts to be true." 

53'00 PRAYER ON JESUS LIPS : "it seems to me that prayer is necessarily a human action, and so when we hear a prayer on Jesus' lips, we have to say well this is a specifically human action. The dyothelite interpretation of those passages which was declared orthodox: The clash of the wills here is not the clash between the Son and the Father because the son and the father have one will. It is the clash of the human will of Jesus with the single divine will. That is not what you get if you said I just want to exegete this text, but i do think it is a reasonable claim to say that if actually we try to make sense of the entire witness of scripture, to the being of the incarnate son, that you are going to need to say something quite like this eventually down the line and do things with that text that are not on the surface, in order to be able to confess its truth alongside the truth of other texts rather rather than picking which texts we believe and which texts we don't.”