Am I a trinitarian or a unitarian? Not if I can help it…

I am writing this in hope of offering some encouragement to Liam, who is planning to go to university in September to study theology but is worried that he may be wasting his time.

Liam is caught on the horns of a classic dilemma and at risk of falling torn and bruised between them. One horn is the traditional trinitarian understanding of the relation of Jesus to the Father; the other is a historical reading of the New Testament that constructs its christology in quite different terms.

What’s at stake is not just a view of Jesus, it’s the credibility of the faith altogether: “If I came to the conclusion the Bible teaches Unitarianism…, I think I’d have to conclude Christianity is false because of this huge error that’s swept through Christianity.”

I’m not going to pretend that I can back up every statement here, or even that I’m in every respect right. It’s an incomplete and not very well organised summary of how I have been thinking about the problem.

I am confident about the interpretation of most of the New Testament material with the exception of John’s Gospel. In any case, the more important question is whether the undeniable discrepancy between theology and historical interpretation must count as evidence for the falsity of “Christianity.” Liam was surprised to read that I am a Christian and even more surprised to learn that I deny being a Unitarian. Well, I surprise myself sometimes. But this is as much about the why and how of belief as about the what.

So let’s give it a go…

1. “Trinitarian” and “Unitarian” are not biblical categories. They both presuppose post-biblical contexts of theological development and debate. I don’t want to be labelled a “Unitarian” anymore than a “Trinitarian”—or in relation to another debate, a “Preterist”—because the terminology and associated mindsets keep us stuck in the past, forever reworking tired and outdated controversies.

2. There is no “incarnation” in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus is identified with Israel and with suffering Israel in particular, not with YHWH. His conception by the Holy Spirit was a sign that something big was happening on the stage of Israel’s history. He performs miracles because he has been given the authority to do so.

3. John tells us that the creative word or wisdom of God became flesh at the moment of Jesus’ baptism, when things really got moving. This must be understood in dynamic, not ontological terms, but we can see how it facilitated the development of a classical christology.

4. John seems at times to be mining some rather esoteric Jewish-apocalyptic seams in order to shape a divergent christology in response to fierce mainstream Jewish opposition. I doubt he foresaw trinitarian orthodoxy, but he came up with a perspective on Jesus that proved highly suggestive for the Greek Fathers, whether or not they actually understood him correctly. You have to wonder how Christian theology would have developed—if at all—without John’s Gospel to begin to shift the focus from the relation of Jesus to the future to the relation of Jesus to the Father.

5. I do not think that Paul believed in the heavenly pre-existence of Jesus, but I do think he held the view, with others, that the wisdom of God found unique eschatological traction, under the extreme historical conditions of first century Judaism, in the paradoxical career of Jesus.

6. If Old Testament YHWH language, etc., is applied to Jesus, it is not because he is identified with YHWH. The biblical God, known to Israel as YHWH, operates in two spheres—the creational and the political. He entirely reserves the right to act in the creational sphere for himself, but he may choose to delegate the authority to judge and rule in the political sphere to Israel’s king, who is the Son of God. The central confession of the New Testament is that God has raised Jesus from the dead, seated him at his right hand in accordance with royal ideology, and has given him an unparalleled and unrivalled authority to rule over his people and over the surrounding nations throughout the coming ages.

7. That the early believers did obeisance to and prayed to the heavenly Jesus does not mean that he was understood to be God. The early apostles had a lively and realistic sense of the presence of the recently crucified Lord in heaven, worthy of the sort of “worship” that would be accorded to any divine ruler, accessible to those who called on his name.

8. There are indications in the New Testament that the very early churches occasionally reached for divine categories in order to situate Jesus among—or above—divine rulers in the ancient world. This may be the case with Thomas’ declaration, “My lord and my god” (Jn. 20:28) and the attribution of a royal psalm to Jesus in which the Davidic king is acclaimed as “god” (Heb. 1:8). I would recommend Michael Bird’s Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World in this connection, though we don’t see eye to eye on everything.

9. I do not think that Jesus is anywhere named as “God” in the New Testament.

• Another good reason to think that Paul does not say that Israel’s Messiah is “God over all” in Romans 9:5
• What was Paul thinking when he wrote “Christ… the one being over all, God, blessed for the ages” (Rom. 9:5)?
• Does Paul say that Jesus is God in Romans 9:5?
• Is Jesus called “God” in Titus 2:13?

10. New Testament christology is thoroughly apocalyptic, oriented towards certain critical future events—principally, the vindication of Jesus following the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the confession of Jesus as Lord by the formerly pagan nations of the Greek-Roman world, his extended rule over those nations, and the final reversion of his delegated authority to the Father when kingdom has become superfluous (1 Cor. 15:24-28).

11. The inclusion of the Spirit is less problematic because “it” is always the Spirit of God. Still, the technical language of trinitarianism adds nothing of value to the overwhelmingly experiential account of the movement of the “breath of God” in the Bible.

12. The New Testament doctrine of the lordship of Jesus at the right hand of the Father is a dynamic belief that engages directly with historical experience. Trinitarianism is not and does not. Traditional theology is synchronic and analytical, the Bible is diachronic and historical—if that distinction makes sense to anyone. Today, we are having to deal with time, change, and history, and theology is ill-suited for the task.

13. The Jewish-Christian narrative lost its explanatory and motivating power rather quickly as the churches settled in the Greek world. The problem of eschatology with which the Jewish-Christian movement wrestled became a problem of rationalist metaphysics as the Greek Fathers went about the business of constructing a plausible hybrid biblical-philosophical worldview. Trinitarian orthodoxy was the best that they could come up with.

14. Trinitarianism is a simple or reductionist account of the relations between Father, Son, and Spirit, designed to transcend the contingencies and vicissitudes of history. Trinitarian relations are eternal, disrupted only by an intervention at an arbitrary moment in time to redeem humanity. Social trinitarianism is no better.

15. Scripture, on the other hand, presents us with a deeply engaged, responsive, dynamic, and narrative model of inner divine relations, best represented perhaps by the busy, dramatic throne scene in Revelation 4-5. Two points to make here. First, this is not a final event, it depicts a climactic but also pivotal moment in the history of YHWH and his people—the inauguration of judgment, first against Jerusalem, then against pagan Rome. Secondly, the Lamb is present only as the one who was slain and who has therefore earned the right to open the seals which will release the conditions for judgment.

16. The Greek Fathers could do nothing useful with this historical-apocalyptic paradigm, so the “Godhead” got rationalised—fair enough. But does the rationalisation still work for us? A lot of intellectual water has passed under the bridge since then. I’m not going to try and plot the shifts in thought here, but I take the view that history has brought us to a point where the Greek solution no longer does what it was originally designed to do.

17. This is an oversimplification, but here’s roughly how I see the development of the story of the people of God.

• Israel existed in the land as a priestly people for the creator God in the midst of the nations. The exile demonstrated the inherent weakness and instability of the arrangement but also exposed the potential for transformation to come about through failure and suffering.
• Through Jesus, YHWH resolved the crisis faced by first century Israel in the land and then went a step further by annexing the nations of the Greek-Roman world. This was marked by the acclamation of an improbable Jewish “messiah” as Lord and King, by which the living God worshipped by the Jews was glorified. The church became a new priestly “caste” for the empire, replacing the old pagan priesthoods. Orthodox theology provided the intellectual frame for a comprehensive new “Christian” worldview.
• This kingdom or rule over the formerly hostile oikoumenē or “empire” took the historical form of European Christendom and lasted for fifteen hundred years, or so. It began to disintegrate in the eighteenth century, leaving a legacy of global Christianity. It has been progressively replaced by a rational humanism, and the relic of the Christendom church in the West is having to work hard to re-imagine its place in the world.
• A new account of inner divine relations will depend, first, on the recovery of a robust sense of God as creator of the universe as we know it and of his interest in this planet at the dawn of the Anthropocene; and secondly, on the retelling of the story of the troubled relationship between God and his priestly people throughout history. Get those right and the inner relations may sort themselves out quite easily.
• I wonder, for example, speculating idly, whether the public dethronement of Jesus with the end of Christendom could be construed positively as a sign of the eventual handing back of the kingdom to the Father, inasmuch as we are shifting from a nationalist-kingdom paradigm to a global-creation paradigm. Hmm….

18. Classical trinitarianism was a constructive accommodation of the apocalyptic narrative that undergirds the New Testament to the monotheisms of the Greek world. I do not regard it as a mistake but as a necessary historical development, and to the extent that we are still working through this, I might describe myself as a residual trinitarian. I have no reason to disown the tradition because it is our history. Perhaps “post-classical-trinitarian-wondering-what-comes-next” works better, I don’t know.

19. We are alerted to the fact, however, that the need to rationalise and accommodate has not gone away. We may feel alienated from the worldview and intellectual presuppositions of the patristic period, but it’s also not an option to reinstate the apocalyptic worldview of the early Jewish-Christian movement, with its core hope of overthrowing the dominant pagan culture.

20. The ascension-exaltation of Jesus, which is arguably the central tenet of New Testament teaching, places him in intimate proximity to the Father in heaven and makes him an agent of divine purpose (in certain respects—see #5 above) for the rest of time. How do we make sense of that in the epochal crisis that we are going through, as the intellectual ground shifts violently beneath our feet? To my way of thinking, we are in urgent need of a general “theology” that reconnects with history. Neither trinitarianism nor unitarianism, in their historic forms, has the capacity to do that. Preterism is not interested in history beyond the first century. The biblical narrative certainly models the dynamic engagement of the living God with his people over time, interpreted by the prophets, but it did not see the modern era coming; it does not tell our story for us.

So, Liam, I would say that this is a very good time for a believer to be studying theology. Just keep in mind that old things are passing away and new things are emerging.