Kevin Giles and The Eternal Generation of the Son

Thanks to IVP, there is an excerpt available of Kevin Giles’ new book The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (see here).

This is a fun topic and Kevin Giles is one of the key protagonists for a particular view on christological subordination and divine ontology. Together with my former colleague Robert Shillaker, we’ve engaged Kevin Giles on the subject of intra-triune relationships, subordination, and the gender debate in a couple of articles in Trinity Journal a few years back. See a report of the debate here. My main contentions are: (1) Equality in being and subordination in role are, generally, right; however, I think we should follow Pannenberg in referring to the Son’s “obedient self-distinction from the Father,” rather than refer to “subordination” since this can get Arian if you don’t qualify it properly; and (2) I think everyone who is trying to use the Trinity to bankroll their view of gender and ministry is messing with the Trinity for the wrong reasons and should refrain from doing so, i.e., keep the Trinity out of your gender wars.

Any ways, Giles’ excerpt includes a discussion on theological method and he takes a dig (mostly rightly I think) against a strictly biblicist approach to theological method.

What do people think of this quote from Giles’ book:

I conclude from these observations that no doctrine immediately springs from the pages of Scripture. Every doctrine is inferred by Scripture, but ultimately it represents a theological affirmation predicated on a synthetic apprehension of what is given in Scripture. In other words, doctrines are not merely the systematizing of whatScripture explicitly says. Determining the correct theological c0nclusion to draw from Scripture must always be the fruit of long andhard prayerful reflection on Scripture, undertaken while listening at-tentively to other theologians. It is a collective enterprise.