Christian Worship
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 66, No. 1 - Fall 2023
Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Matthew Barrett. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021, 364 pp., $20.99.
Since the original 2016 flare up within evangelical circles over whether the Son is subordinate to the Father in their ad intra relations, what began as primarily an online debate has shifted to publication form. Within this context, Matthew Barrett’s recent Simply Trinity seeks to reorient contemporaries to the Great Tradition’s formulation of pro-Nicene theology while demonstrating that social trinitarian “revivals” in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are distortions that move away from orthodoxy. Specifically, what makes Barrett’s work provocative is the indictment that certain evangelicals have unwittingly drifted into social trinitarianism through their advocacy of complementarianism, specifically in the Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) doctrines of Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware.
Methodologically, Barrett returns to the Church Fathers, comparing their formulations against modern social trinitarianism, and then returns to Scripture (38-39). As the title suggests, Barrett’s purpose is that “the real Trinity stands up. It is time the church comes face-to-face with the God who is simply Trinity. Unadulterated. Uncorrupted. Unmanipulated. I have written this book to wake us up…” (32). Through analogy to the 1990s Dream Team, Barrett assembles his own team representative of the “greats of the Great Tradition” to bolster his argument: Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine of Hippo, the Cappadocian Fathers, Anselm of Canterbury, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Turretin, John Owen, and John Gill (33–35).
“Part 1: How Did we Drift Away?” returns to the Arian controversy that led to the Trinitarian Nicene formulation and later clarification at Constantinople in 381. Barrett stresses that the fathers affirmed homouousion because of the prior commitment to eternal generation, making Jesus a Son by nature in eternity, not by grace temporally after the Father (49-52). Moreover, if what binds each mode of subsistence is the one simple divine essence, what distinguishes each person from each other are only eternal relations of origin: unbegotten, eternally begotten, and spiration (57–61). The God of the Christian Faith is Simply Trinity.
In comparison to the Great Tradition, Barrett claims that beginning with Rahner’s axiom, Trinity and society became intertwined in the twentieth century. “Rahner’s Rule gave modern theologians the opportunity to rethink everything, and most importantly, to close the gap between Creature and creature… God is as God does… God becomes Trinity when he acts like one in history” (77). With this gap closed, the Trinity has since been used as a paradigm for socialist communities (Jürgen Moltmann), for church and society (Miroslav Volf), as liberation program (Leonardo Boff), as well as to support complementarian theology (Grudem and Ware) (77–93). This so-called revival is in fact a departure which distorts the Triune God into becoming a means for other ends instead of being an end in himself (92).
“Part 2: How Do we Find Our Way Home?” begins with a critique of Rahner, arguing that the immanent cannot be conflated into the economic, but rather God’s opera ad extra reveals the opera ad intra, yet not entirely (118-119). Failing to get the order right (moving from God’s transcendence to the Son’s incarnate mission) inappropriately projects aspects of economy onto immanency (123). Concerning the divine essence, the doctrine of divine simplicity is required to affirm that all that is in God is present in each divine person, protecting from modalism, tritheism, social trinitarianism as well as Arianism (137, 145–54). Chapters 6-7 argue for the doctrine of eternal generation through reliance on John Gill and certain biblical evidence (the names “Father” and “Son,” monogenēs as “only-begotten” in John 1:4, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9, and images that point to the Son as Radiance, Image, Wisdom, and Ancient of Days).
With this groundwork laid, the reader must wait until chapter 8 for a full-throated assessment of EFS. Several charges are laid: (1) “EFSers” have radicalized their position further by recently affirming eternal generation, and yet “embedding subordination deeper within the eternal, immanent identity of God…” (225); (2) EFS is novel and should be categorized alongside other social trinitarian models; (3) EFS flirts with tritheism, Sabellianism and subordinationism; (4) EFS makes the initiative for the incarnation pointless, since the Son must obey out of necessity, not grace (249); and (5) finally, EFS prioritizes worship to the Father over the Son (257–59).
The remaining chapters explain how the Spirit’s eternal spiration corresponds to his economic work of being sent by the Father and the Son as breath, gift, and love (Ch. 9). Moreover, the one Divine Lord works inseparably in his work of creation, salvation, and adoption according to each person’s divine appropriation (Ch. 10).
On the one hand, Simply Trinity is challenging to classify as either a popular or academic level work. While its subject material is clearly abstract in its ontological focus, Barrett’s usage of the 1990s Dream Team, A Christmas Carol, life in California, and the Delorean from Back to the Future attempt to bring the discussion down to earth to engage the popular level reader (also through blurbs, charts, and a helpful glossary to orient oneself to technical terminology).
On the other hand, perhaps a work that defies categorization, but which enters into the depths of the current Trinitarian debate while remaining accessible is exactly what modern evangelicals need, especially pastors, leaders, and scholars whose complementarianism has been impacted by EFS. These readers need to be confronted with how such an anti-Nicene approach distorts the Trinity for the sake of gender relations and has come dangerously close to several heresies, undermined the grace of the incarnation by making the Divine Son’s condescension necessary, and prioritized the glory of the Father over and against that of the Son and the Spirit. Barrett accomplishes this confrontation precisely in chapter 8, which is worth the price of the book.
As a gentle critique, this reviewer will seek elsewhere for a more thorough argument in favor of the filioque (Latin “and the Son.” Augustine’s doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit was thereby inserted later into the Western version of the Nicene Creed). After spending considerable time arguing against reading the economic back onto the immanent Trinity inappropriately, Barrett builds his case for the filioque not on texts that obviously speak of ad intra relations but only on those that speak of the economy of sending (266–72). This is not to deny the filioque, but to observe that the exegetical foundation in this case is not as strong. In the divide between East and West, perhaps it would be better to affirm with scholars like Malcolm Yarnell that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and through the Son.1 Nevertheless, the clarity of Barrett’s presentation of the Great Tradition’s Pro-Nicene Trinitarianism in contradistinction to modern social Trinitarianism in all its forms is a much-needed confrontation for modern evangelicalism.
- Malcolm B. Yarnell III, Who is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville: B&H, 2019), 89. ↩︎
