Three-self Trinity theories have a serious problem and a serious perk

Theologically speaking, there has been a trend spanning more than a century toward a "social" concept of the Trinity within the church, be that Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical (although patchy), and even Orthodox. What this means is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are understood as three literal persons, in a way we would understand personhood from our own everyday experience. Each has a first-person perspective, a will, a uniqueness, all covered in an unsearchable love and submission in the most perfect of social communities. Dr. Stephen Holmes is quite vocal about the problems with such an approach, which sometimes favours distinction over a united Godhead of precisely 1. Today I will try to describe a paradox I notice within the social-Trinitarian "move".

First, I have a silly illustration to try to show how the social Trinity vision is inappropriate to the Biblical presentation of God and Christ.

You want to talk to your Heavenly Father about something. Can you ask Christ or the Holy Spirit to leave the room? Impossible. We are connected to the Father uniquely through his Son: on this all Christians should be on a similar page. We can't have a private conversation with our heavenly Father and say, please, Jesus, I'm ever so sorry, but would you mind just stepping out for a few minutes while I share something on my heart with Father? He can fill you in later if necessary...

There is a very deep connection that social Trinitarian offerings need to explain more fully, if their "divine persons" can truly be understood like persons as you or I understand personhood. Can you think of any human parallel where a son has a deep connection with his Father while having to communicate via an older brother (I know that this 'via' could and should be discussed at much more length)? Nope, that kind of intermediary would usually add distance, not closeness. So inseparability of Father and Son should be an issue for diehard social Trinitarians, because you cannot ask Jesus to leave the room. Some antitrinitarian Unitarians would also likely be tested by this line of reasoning, but John's gospel in particular, I think, requires it.

Now I don't yet re-believe in some kind of divine "essence" or "substance", and I do not think it likely that I ever will on general grounds, because I don't think things have essences. My table does not have "tableness". My phone does not have "smartphoneness" or "Huaweiness". My table is a table because it has properties that speakers of English can agree fit the item. My phone is also clearly a Huawei smartphone. Even humans, I would argue, do not have a human essence per se. We are humans. By saying "we are human" rather than "we are humans", we hint at a distinction that has had implications for Christology in the past - distant past, but not 1st-century past. This kind of language is fine, but you need to realise what underpins it. Scientists examining a newly discovered bug in the rainforest would not exclaim: "it is spider!" They would say: it is a spider! Creatures only tend to lose their articles when truly we talk of their meat! 

Divine isolation is ruled out through relationship (which would be the only possible avenue for developing substance/essence theories as far as I can tell). If I'm right about Thomas' declaration (see my post on this interpretation here), then Thomas is not speaking of Jesus in isolation from his (their) Father. He sees the Father in Jesus. Those who presuppose the existence of some kind of divine substance might be less inclined to notice this, for they hunt for passages that speak of Jesus in apparent isolation from the Father, and say: look, Jesus is God! 

So here I see here a paradoxical perk in some strands of social Trinitarian thinking, because while this kind of deep mutual indwelling is underemphasised in ST's ideas of independent persons, the social-relationship model also downplays the need for any true or literal divine substance.

The authority of the Bible - where on Earth can we say it comes from?

I have started to interact a little with blogger and doctoral student Barnabus Aspray, who contributes to two theological blogs. On the less academic one (Every-day theology), Barney posts pretty clearly some of the different options for ascribing authority to the Bible, with some good visual illustrations.

Barney kindly sent me a few of the source articles that informed his post and thinking on this issue, especially by Robert Jenson. Any of you who have gone through my paper Trinitarian Interpretations will know that we have already seen in short Jenson's offerings to contemporary discussions of Trinitarian theology (and that I actually succeeded in misspelling his name there! Whoops).

Here is my response to Barney on the first paper, entitled On the Problems of Scriptural Authority, Sage, 1977:

Good in pointing out the inadequacy of attempts at legitimising the authority of the Bible (in-errancy, inspiration, ...), although for me your blog post was probably more at my level and a little clearer for that reason!

I can say this:
Despite his acknowledgement of the diversity of definitions of "the gospel", Jenson likes to boil down to a common denominator of what the gospel might in fact be: Jesus is risen. I probably did not fully grasp his point he developed around page 242 on this, but he seems to make quite a point of this particular formulation throughout the essay, linking it even to liturgy. I really enjoyed the " standing in the corner " argument and am still pondering its applicability in other areas; it certainly has a lot of appeal. [see later post on the corner standing argument]

Here though, I believe Jenson overlooks the NT emphasis, which is not that Jesus is simply risen, but that Jesus was in fact raised by God, which is difficult to account for given "We cannot get behind the apostles to the gospel...they are our last resort" (p238). Based on the Scriptural account, I believe early liturgical (and even earlier story) forms would have centred around "raised by God" more than "is risen". But because I have not fully understood Jenson's point, this may not challenge what he is communicating too greatly. On p243, he hints at this a little when he states "The theology of the church has always been plural and presumably always will be". I got the sense though that some of that plurality is under-emphasized or lost in the closing pages of the article at the (usual, and for me somewhat frustratingly) expense of Father and Spirit. Mediation theology seems at a very low ebb (see also liberation on p250).

The most meaningful sentence for the authority of the Bible came on p249:
- the Bible is essential to the church's life of proclamation and prayer in several very different ways which together are its authority.

I see here the most important point of collective identity. Since the Bible is a key contributor - through much interpretation - to the very identity of the group to which believers belong (as local church and global Church and historical Church members), then we source the authority indeed in the church to which the believers belong.

P245 Brilliant quote: " what I hear the text is saying is indeed all I have to work with ; but recognition of the text's authority is recognition that the text may be saying something other than I hear and that it is my job to keep listening. "
Amen.

P246, what a great saying: conceptual slippage! Historical critical method seems both essential but also makes the texts "fall silent". [...]

As I have openly acknowledged, let me say again, I didn't get it all. These are just some comments on what I thought I grasped :)

Here ends the response to Barney, although we are now a couple more emails into the exchange. I am challenging him a little on my low level perspective to reconsider (although he has already considered at quite some depth it would appear) this great and desertic chasm that he perceives between the goals of critical historical methods and biblical application of those discoveries today.