Trinity without Hierarchy

The book edited by Scott Harrower and myself, Trinity without Hierarchy: Reclaiming Nicene Orthodoxy in Evangelical Theology is NOW available.

You can read the TOC, preface, and introduction here.

There are some cracker-lacking essays in this collection.

Here’s my conclusion to the introduction.

The debate about the Trinity within North American evangelicalism has certainly ratcheted up in the last 18 months.[1] It has become increasingly clear to many that a hierarchical account of the Trinity with a semi-subordinationist christology is not biblical nor orthodox.[2] In this book, we add our own voices to the discussion as to what it means to be truly Trinitarian, to make Nicea normative for doctrine and practice, and to be overwhelming orthodox and catholic by conviction when it comes to speaking about God. It is the conclusion of the editors, and by implication of the contributors too, that what evangelicals believe – or should believe – is a Trinity without tiers of authority or gradations of glory and majesty. The apostolic and evangelical faith is to confess one God and three equal persons, distinguished by relationships of origin, not by degrees of authority and glory.

[1] See Kevin Giles, The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017) and Logos Mobile, TH361, “Perspectives on the Trinity: Eternal Generation and Subordination in Tension,” Faithlife Corporation, 2017.

[2] See Fred Sanders &Scott Swain (eds.), Retrieving Eternal Generation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).