This is the second part of my review of the book The Holy Trinity by Carl L. Beckwith, the third volume of the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series published by The Luther Academy of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. This review covers chapters 7-11; my previous review covered chapters 1-6. (See the table of contents.)

In the first part of this book Beckwith says the starting point for understanding the Trinity should not be the creeds of the church of the first four centuries, as true as they are, but rather the Biblical exposition and exegesis that led to those creeds. Beckwith also says it is necessary for this endeavor that we understand the place of reason as a servant of faith rather than its master, the place of God as being above rather than within humanly-constructed categories of existence, and the place of the Old Testament as dependent on the New Testament for its meaning rather than independent from it. Beckwith shows that Luther’s grasp of these truths was a key to the Reformation’s recovery of the biblical God of grace, while modern theology’s devaluation of the Trinity, and its creation of a God of human ethics in its place (even if it sometimes still goes under the name of the Trinity), is a result of its move away from them.

After laying that groundwork in Part One Beckwith demonstrates in Part Two of his book that the triune identity of God comes from the Scriptures. He proceeds by first looking at the Old Testament. There God reveals his name to be YHWH (usually spelled “Yahweh” in English—ancient Hebrew had no vowels), which is taken to mean “I am” because of Exodus 3:13-15; and God also says He is one (Deut. 6:4), a statement that of course leads us to the question of why we should now be referring to him as triune and calling Him the Trinity. The answer, expounded in detail in Part Two, is that both the Old and New Testaments present the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as sharing equally in the identity of YHWH, the one true God of Israel. Beckwith writes:

“The plural identity of the one true God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is neither a Gentile, pagan corruption of biblical monotheism nor the result of years of development away from early Jewish commitments on monotheism. The apostles were devout Jews who embraced a strict monotheism that included Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the unique identity of the one God of Israel. The New Testament consistently points us to the law and the prophets, to the Old Testament, to understand rightly the identity of Christ as the Son of God, the one sent by the Father, who in turn, with the Father, sends the Holy Spirit as promised by the prophets. The conviction of the apostles is that the triune identity of God is known according to the Scriptures, the Old Testament.” (pp. 132-133)

In regard to monotheism Beckwith further notes that “whatever constitutes biblical monotheism must be derived from the witness of Scripture itself and not from the lingering assumptions of what we think it must mean. The term should serve only as a placeholder to mark out the unique identity of God according to the Scriptures” (p. 134). He quotes Christopher Seitz in explanation of this:

“The pressure toward accounting for the eternal life of God as ‘Trinitarian’ emerges because of the character of claims made about God in the scriptures of Israel, to which one frequently assigns the term ‘monotheistic.’ The problem here is that the term ‘monotheism,’ when used in reference to the Old Testament, is nothing but a placeholder serving to rule out some obvious alernatives (Israel did not worship multiple gods in a pantheon) but in itself it is imprecise. At issue is the kind of monotheism said to mark the life of God with his people Israel.”

That is, as others have also observed, statements like “God is one” don’t refer to the inner nature of God but have an external reference: in spite of the belief of other nations in many other gods besides YHWH, in reality God is singular in number. YHWH is the only God.

In looking at the Old Testament Beckwith gives a lot of attention to its theophanies—appearances of God to man. Beckwith points out that in spite of Scripture’s explicit pronouncement that no one can see YHWH and live (Exodus 33:20), Scripture also clearly records that some have seen YHWH in a visible form and yet have not died. For example in Genesis 32:24-30, Jacob wrestles all night with a man and afterward declares “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” There are also similar cases involving a figure called “the Angel of YHWH.” Seeing him is regarded as seeing God himself, and yet people live to tell about it. Manoah, the father of Samson, is an example of this in Judges 13:2-23. There are several other examples of the same kind of thing where the visible appearance of YHWH is designated as the Angel of YHWH, the Name of YHWH, the Glory of YHWH, or the Word of YHWH. Quoting Charles Gieschen, Beckwith asks “If one cannot see YHWH and live, and yet people are seeing YHWH and not dying, then who is this visible image of YHWH that is being seen?” (p. 141). He goes on:

“The difficulty with these theophanies rests not with determining the identity of the one seen or encountered by Hagar, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the rest. That point is made evident based on their reactions and a careful reading of the text. The difficulty has more to do with the fact that these texts make a distinction between the visible form of YHWH, who in some sense stands apart from the unseen YHWH, and yet at the same time both belong to the unique identity of YHWH. They are distinct but inseperable, two and yet one. The Old Tesament shows no interest in resolving how we should understand this plurality within the unique identity of YHWH, the one true God of Israel. Rather than expressing angst over this question, the New Testament with remarkable consistency assigns these various appearances to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Word made flesh (John 1:14), the one who has come in the Father’s Name (John 5:43), a Name the Father will glorify (John 12:28) with the Glory the Son had with the Father before the world began (John 17:5).” (p. 142)

Beckwith takes a careful look at each of the above ways YHWH revealed himself to his people in the Old Testament—the Angel of YHWH, the Name of YHWH, the Glory of YHWH, and the Word of YHWH. He concludes the section with these words:

“Despite the obvious ambiguity attending most of the texts about the Angel, Name, Glory, and Word of YHWH, they all demonstrate how YHWH, the one true God of Israel, may never be seen and yet has been seen. Further, they show the attentive reader that within the unique identity of YHWH there is plurality. The Angel of YHWH stands apart from YHWH but is YHWH. The same applies to the Name, Glory, and Word. The point is further made that the Word of YHWH and the Glory of YHWH is understood only by the Spirit, who routinely is designated as the Spirit of YHWH or the Spirit of Elohim. When we put together the narrative summary of the Old Testament and the various texts about the seen and unseen YHWH, we unmistakably discover plurality within common identity. We discover that YHWH is triune.” (p. 152)

The theophanies are not the only way that Beckwith demonstrates the plurality within God from the Old Testament. He also shows that the one God of Israel who is the creator and the ruler of the universe, who is the merciful God who delivered Israel from Egypt and brought them into the promised land in spite of their frequent failings, is also the one who will redeem them from sin and be their savior and justifier. He will do this in the latter days by sending his Servant to bear their iniquities (Zechariah 3:8; Isaiah 52:13; Isaiah 53:5-6) and to be both their King and Priest (Zechariah 6:13; Psalm 110). This Servant is prophesied of throughout the Old Testament under several other names—the Son promised to David whose kingdom shall be established and whose throne will be forever (1 Chronicles 17:11-12), the Son born of the Virgin and called Immanuel, God with us (Isaiah 7:14), the Righteous Branch (Jer. 23:5), Messiah (“Christ” in Greek) (Daniel 9:26), and more. The Spirit of YHWH will rest upon this Servant, and this same Spirit will be poured out upon all following the exaltation of the Servant to the right hand of God (Joel 2:28; Ezekiel 39:29; Ps. 110:1). Beckwith comments:

“The pressing question raised by this dogmatic summary is whether the Servant and the Spirit belong to YHWH’s unique identity or if they are agents of His creating and redeeming work. If they are agents or intermediaries, they belong to the angelic host at best. It is at this very point that the question of how the Bible presents its monotheism becomes most pressing and the dogmatic conclusion insisted upon by the New Testament becomes most necessary. A concept of what monotheism must have entailed cannot be brought to bear on the witness of Scripture; rather what constitutes biblical monotheism must be gathered from the witness of Scripture itself.”

He then proceeds to show that Scripture identifies the sole creator of the heavens and the earth variously in different places as YHWH, Elohim, Word, Spirit, Wisdom, and Father. He comments “The only responsible conclusion according to the Scriptures is to confess the correlative and coequal working of Father, Word/Wisdom, and Spirit, and to locate all three—equally and eternally—within the unique identity of YHWH, our Elohim” (p. 158).

After this chapter on the Old Testament Beckwith devotes two chapters to the New Testament, first looking at what he calls its “ordinary language of faith” in regard to the Father and the Son (Chapter 8) and then at its “more robust dogmatic sections” (Chapter 9). The “ordinary language of faith” is that used by the historical narratives of the Gospels and in the greetings and passing comments of the epistles, while the dogmatic sections are those where the New Testament authors explicity address the identity of Christ and his relationsip to the Father. Beckwith shows how both kinds of writing serve to resolve the ambiguity of the Old Testament regarding the plurality within the singular identity of God. That is, how the OT distinction between the YHWH that is seen (under the names Angel, Glory, Name, and Word of YHWH) and the YHWH no man can see—and how the Man, the Servant, and the Righteous One of the OT can be both YHWH and distinct from YHWH—is plainly established in the persons of the Father and the Son. The dogmatic passages addressed and discussed in detail are the prologue of John (John 1:1-14), the New Testament usage of Psalm 110 (quoted by the New Testament more than any other Old Testament text), Hebrews 1-2, Philippians 2:5-11, 1 Corinthians 8:6, and texts throughout the book of Revelation that use titles of God to refer to Christ. Beckwith writes that these texts, like those of Chapter 8, “place Christ at the center of our confession of God’s scriptural identity. We know the Father only through the Son; we know the Son by the Holy Spirit, whom both the Father and the Son send to us” (p. 216).

The last two chapters of Part Two look at the Holy Spirit. Chapter 10 establishes how the Scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments, reveal the deity of the Holy Spirit by attributing works and powers to him that are only ever attributed to God in the rest of the Scriptures. It especially focuses on how the Holy Spirit works in creating and maintaining faith through the means of grace. Chapter 11 is an extensive study of the filioque, the words “and the Son” in the sentence of the Nicene creed that says “And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Though it wasn’t in the original wording of the Nicene Creed, Beckwith shows that it stands, like the Trinity, on the Scriptures. Beckwith comments:

“We end our unit on the scriptural identity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a discussion of the filioque. There is something fitting in that. At the very least the filioque shows us that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are never parted from one another; they not only mutually indwell one another but also make themselves known to us in such a way that our thoughts always move from one person to the other in a never-ending figure eight” (p. 263).

Part Three of Beckwith’s book, which will be covered in the next part of my review, is titled “Dogmatic Reflections of the Church.” It deals at length with the questions that arose in church history over the unique threeness and oneness of God found in the Scriptures, and how and why the post-apostolic Fathers came up with the terminology of the creeds in protecting and defending the Scriptural presentation of God.