Book Notice: Scott Swain on The God of the Gospel

Scott R. Swain

The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology
Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2013.
Available at Amazon.com

The legacy of Karl Barth’s is how to correlate God’s immanent being within-himself with God’s action as narrated in the event of the gospel. Or, as Scott Swain asks, what is “the relationship between God’s being and God’s self-determination, between Trinity and election, between God’s unfolding character and Gods’ unfolding covenant that reaches its climax in the gospel of Jesus Christ” (14)? In this book, Swain sympathetically but critically evaluates Lutheran ecumenical theologian Robert Jenson’s trinitarian theology, then springboards off Bruce McCormack’s post-Barthian approach towards a traditional (though hardly uninformed) Reformed proposal for marrying God’s being with the economy of salvation. Jenson himself moves from the biblical identification of God to the metaphysical implications leading to a narrative reading of trinitarian ontology, but also a reconfiguration of things like the Son’s pre-existence. Swain, in turn, believes that the answer lies on gauging three dimensions, namely, (1) the relationship between God’s being and his self-determination to become our Father; (2) the relationship between God’s being and his self-determination to become of of us in the incarnation; and (3) the relationship God’s being and self-determination to perfect us in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. If I’m reading Swain rightly (I’m open to correction), he also helps to clarify how a sublapsarian view can be seen as a corollary of the pactum salutis. He writes: “The eternal act of self-determination whereby teh Father wills to be our Father thus includes his appointment of the Son to be the Mediator between God and humanity, an appointment which belongs to what Reformed dogmatics calls the pactum salutis. In this pactum, the Son as Son affirms the Father’s eternal self-determination as well as his own role in that eternal self-determination. In this sense, the Son too is the electing God. The Son’s act of self-determination takes historical form of his filial obedience to the Father’s counsel and appointment”  (165-66). A  good interaction with Barth, Jenson, and McCormack on the Trinity, a welcomed discussion which attempts to qualification the correlation between the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity.