Master 270: Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, Part 2

In his contribution to the volume, Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, J. Scott Horrell lays some trinitarian groundwork for doing christology.  In his essay, "The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity," he does more trinitarian theology than christology.  Of course the two are connected, since Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity.  But Horrell's focus is on how we think about God as a whole and his aim is to tighten, in our thinking, the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity.

What do these terms mean: "economic Trinity" and "immanent Trinity"?  These terms come out of the efforts of thoughtful Christians to systematize their understanding of God.  All our information about God comes through His self-revelation.  God reveals Himself through His creation, through His various acts on the scene of human history, and, most clearly, in the sending of the Son and Spirit.  By looking at creation, we can learn some things about God, in something like the way that we learn about an artist by looking at the work she produces.  In the Old Testament, we have a record of God's speaking to and interacting directly with people.  In this case, the recipients are not just inferring things about God but listening to what God has to say about Himself.  They are watching God intervene very intentionally in the world.  Finally, God reveals Himself and His character most fully through sending the Son and the Spirit into the world.

Over the course of His ministry and in the period immediately following His ascension, Jesus' followers came to understand that He was not just another prophet sent from God.  He was, in fact, God in the flesh.  It was in seeking ways to articulate what they learned about God through this that the vocabulary of "Trinity" was developed.  They learned that in order to speak adequately of what God had revealed about Himself, they needed to speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But in seeking to make sense of what they had learned about God, they also faced some challenges.  Jesus was divine, but he was also human.  So how much of what He did, who He was, and what He was like could be traced to His deity as opposed to His humanity?  To what extent could the relationships of the Father and the Holy Spirit to this God-man as they played out in the first century A.D. be used to gain insight into the relationships that existed eternally within the essence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  In order to address these questions, it became useful to distinguish between the 'economic' and 'immanent' Trinity.

We do not use these terms to refer to two distinct Trinities but, if you will, to two different ways of considering the Trinity.  When we consider the Trinity as it was manifested in the particular work (economy) of redemption and salvation as that was played out in human history, we are considering the economic Trinity.  When we consider God as He has existed for all eternity in Himself (immanently)--prior to and independently of His particular redemptive work--then we are considering the immanent Trinity.  One of the big questions for Christian theology is: to what extent does the economic Trinity (the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as manifested in human history particularly through the sending of the Son and Spirit into the world by the Father)--to what extent does the economic Trinity--furnish us with real insight into the immanent Trinity (the nature of God Himself).

Having set up the dialectic in this way, we can imagine two extreme perspectives.  (I don't know whether anyone actually holds these views, but they'll be helpful for us to consider.)  According to the one, God's activities in the world reveal almost nothing about what God, in Himself, is like.  People on this end of the spectrum might speak of "the way in which God has chosen to reveal Himself to humanity", where that implies that His way of revealing Himself (as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) corresponds to (almost) nothing that is actually true of God.  At the other extreme is the view that the revealed (economic) Trinity exhausts all that there is to God in Himself.  Someone on this view might hold that God has no existence apart from or independently of His involvement in human redemptive history.

Horrell defends a tight connection between the economic and immanent Trinity.  He does not identify the two but maintains that the one offers real insight into the other.  He defends a social model of the Trinity and the view that the one God exists eternally as three distinct centers of self-consciousness (persons) who enjoy genuine personal relationships, each mutually indwelling the other.  While affirming that the three persons are wholly equal in nature, he also defends the view that there is an eternal order (roughly, distinction of roles) within the Godhead.

At this point I've had a chance to read a bit on these topics and so (I hope) I'm getting better at using the vocabulary.  But if you're not used to it, don't be surprised if that last paragraph doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  There's definitely some study and work that's needed to get this.  But that's all I'll say on this for now.  If you want to read more, pick up the book.

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God is in this place,

And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.