The Church
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 61, No. 1 – Fall 2018
Editor: W. Madison Grace II
By Malcolm B. Yarnell III. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016. xi + 260 pages. Hardback, $29.99.
Malcolm Yarnell’s God the Trinity: Biblical Portraits, offers an excellent study on the biblical foundations of the doctrine of the Trinity, one that is conducted with significant interaction with historical theology. Yarnell, research professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (and, full disclosure, my close colleague), maintains that the Bible definitely affirms God’s triune nature, but that only those with eyes to see will discern this. Modern interpreters trained by an Enlightenment hermeneutic often miss seeing God’s triune nature in Scripture primarily because they approach the text with interpretive methods that are alien to the text itself. By contrast, those steeped in the Scripture’s own communicative “idiom”—like the church fathers and other “pre-modern” exegetes both reformation and contemporary—have consistently underscored God’s Trinitarian nature. The structure of Yarnell’s study is consistent with what he understands to be this biblical idiom. Scripture is not a human document to be subjected to modern methods of historical-critical analysis; it is divine revelation which paints for us various portraits of God and his interactions with the world. Subsequently, Yarnell, like an art connoisseur, chooses eight of these portraits, displays them, and then offers rich comment and theological reflection.
Throughout God the Trinity Yarnell notes the inadequacies of modern (i.e. Enlightenment) interpretive strategies for understanding Scripture and how these thwart a robust Trinitarian theology. Modern exegesis underscores the historical-critical method, scientific analysis, and is dominated by mathematical and experiential claims. From the outset, these methods avoid considerations related to God’s nature or being, concepts which today are deemed off-limits because of their metaphysical and/or Greek implications. In short, modern exegesis is inherently anti-Trinitarian and anti-Hellenistic (93, following Francis Watson). It is thus no surprise, Yarnell notes, to see some current evangelical interpreters make statements intimating that the doctrine of the Trinity is not revealed in Scripture even though it might contain the raw materials for such a doctrine (10–11).
Yarnell wants to counter these trends: “The Trinity is definitely revealed in the New Testament and, for those with sensitive enough ears, across both testaments” (11). The key to this hearing lies in broadening one’s approach to interpreting the Scriptures. Yarnell does not wish to discard the historical-critical method altogether; he seeks to employ it in a chastened and limited manner (11) alongside of other “pre-critical” interpretive methods (86) that have appeared throughout the Christian tradition: typology, personalism, and theologia to name a few. Collectively, these approaches affirm that God does reveal his nature to a limited degree primarily through his acts (18, 99–100).
The structure of Yarnell’s gallery of texts is easy to discern. His initial portraits, Matthew 28:19–20, and 2 Corinthians 13:16, are placed first because these texts relate to the Christian’s first encounter with the Triune God, namely, through gospel proclamation and baptism (the Great Commission passage), and through the church’s ongoing encounter of grace in its discipleship (the closing of 2 Corinthians). His next portrait, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–6), considers the Old Testament’s portrait of God in an effort to demonstrate the continuity between the one God of the Old Testament, the Christological monotheism of the New Testament, and the Trinitarian monotheism of the early church fathers. From there, Yarnell spends three chapters in the Gospel of John ( John 1:18, 16:14–15, 17:21–22) where he explores the contours of John’s rich immanent Trinitarian theology. These chapters lie at the heart of Yarnell’s project as they represent an extensive exploration on the divine nature. The final two portraits address God’s Trinitarian activity in the world (Ephesians 1:3–14) and the Trinitarian features related to his future coming (Revelation 5:6). Taken together, God the Trinity invites Christians to a refined way of seeing God’s triune glory throughout the art gallery of the Christian canon.
Yarnell’s Trinitarian theology deftly draws from multiple traditions throughout the history of the church, a feature which comprises one of the book’s great strengths. God the Trinity is not written by a Cappadocian or Augustinian specialist; neither is it the product of a specialist in biblical studies or philosophical theology. As a theologian, Yarnell is well read in each of these fields and integrates them nicely into a coherent Trinitarianism that is biblical, Baptist, and supportive of the church’s mission.
Several points are worthy of note. First, his study favors the Cappadocian or Eastern approach to the Trinity over Augustine’s since, he contends, the former does a better job at avoiding modalism, Unitarianism, and a blurring of the divine persons (83–84, 167). He thus is generally critical of the Augustinian doctrine of filioque (154) while affirming numerous Eastern theological themes related to Trinity, specifically the doctrines of deification and theosis (though understood in an evangelical way; “deification by grace, not by nature,” 51).
Second, Yarnell is somewhat critical of the Trinitarianism articulated by the reformed tradition, a point that appears to derive from his preference for Eastern Trinitarianism over Western. B.B. Warfield is specifically singled out numerous times for criticism for the way he prioritizes the divine essence (9) and minimizes the subnumeration within the ontological Trinity (147, see also 157n, and 175). Warfield, however, should not be treated as the standard bearer for the reformed view on the Trinity for the simple reason that the reformed tradition admits a variety of views on the doctrine (a point Yarnell would no doubt agree). Yarnell’s study would have benefitted from greater interaction with the broader swath of the reformed tradition on the Trinity, including such writers as Bartholomew Keckermann, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards.
Third, Yarnell creatively repackages and incorporates elements of modern scholarship to bolster his Biblicist Trinitarianism. He affirms the basic vision of Karl Rahner’s famous axiom, but with important qualifications: “The economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity truly but not exhaustively” (173). This allows him to affirm a continuity between the economic and immanent Trinity without threatening divine transcendence and the priority of the immanent Trinity in our theological reflection. From this he correctly challenges the tendency, demonstrated by some in the complementarian-egalitarian debate, to allow theological anthropology to drive Trinitarian theology (172). He also incorporates aspects of Richard Bauckham’s understanding of the “Christological monotheism” found in the New Testament as a healthy counter-balance to the way modern interpreters accentuate the differences between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New (71–74, 83).
Systematic theologians, biblical scholars, historical theologians, as well as serious students of Scripture will find God the Trinity stimulating, accessible, and rich with theological wisdom. I highly recommend it.
